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Apple's Smart Home Hub Now 'Postponed' Due to Delayed Siri Features

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Apple has pushed back the launch of its rumored smart home hub due to delayed Siri features, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

iOS-18-Siri-Personal-Context.png

Gurman no longer expects the home hub to launch this month, but he has not provided a revised timeframe for the device's release.

"At one point, the company had hoped to announce this product in March," he said, in his Power On newsletter today. "But because the device, to an extent, relies on the delayed Siri capabilities, it has been postponed as well."

In the meantime, he said Apple has started allowing select employees to test a pre-release version of the device at home.

This comes a few days after Apple said it needs more time to finish the more personalized version of Siri, which it previewed at WWDC 2024 last June. The promised Siri upgrades will be powered by Apple Intelligence, so you will need an iPhone 15 Pro or newer.

"We've also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps," said Apple, in a statement shared with Daring Fireball's John Gruber. "It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year."

Gurman said Apple was initially aiming to launch the more personalized Siri as part of iOS 18.4, which is already in beta and lacks any of the promised features. He then said that the features were delayed until iOS 18.5 in May, but Apple's statement suggests the features will take even longer to arrive. The more personalized Siri will likely launch at some point between iOS 19 in September 2025 and iOS 19.4 in March 2026.

Whenever they launch, the Siri upgrades will include understanding of a user's personal context, on-screen awareness, and deeper per-app controls. For example, during its WWDC 2024 keynote, Apple showed an iPhone user asking Siri about their mother's flight and lunch reservation plans based on info from the Mail and Messages apps.

With these new Siri capabilities rumored to be at the core of Apple's smart home hub, it would make sense if the company has pushed back its internal timeframe for launching the device. It's not ideal to launch one without the other. This is not an official delay, given that Apple never publicly announced plans to release a home hub, but it is clear that Apple has missed its internal targets for the more personalized Siri and this related project.

Gurman previously said the home hub would be "Apple's most significant release of the year," as it represents the company's "first step toward a bigger role in the smart home." He said the device will be like a "smaller and cheaper iPad" that lets users "control appliances, conduct FaceTime chats, and handle other tasks."

The device is expected to be similar to a HomePod with a screen, with rumored features including a 6-inch or 7-inch display, an A18 chip, and Apple Intelligence support. Gurman said it can be attached to a tabletop base with a speaker, or mounted on a wall.

So, when will Apple's home hub launch? "In the coming year" probably applies here, too.

Article Link: Apple's Smart Home Hub Now 'Postponed' Due to Delayed Siri Features
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/09/apple-smart-home-hub-postponed/
Last edited:
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From what I can understand, Apple wants Siri AI features that can actually do a bunch of home personalization things and can control a lot of aspects of your home, calendar, car, etc. Can models like Chat GPT even do this today? If not, no way Apple has anything close - as good as Apple is, have they ever led with that kind of software innovation? It's just not what they do
 
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The “assistance” which just really means information I want should be on my Apple TV with a swipe or complication on my Apple Watch.
 
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Reactions: xmarcuswildx and 211
CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Apple today announced the postponement of the Home Hub, it was to feature blazing-fast performance, up to 18 hours of backup battery life, a new 24GP Webcam, all at a low starting price. It also offers support for up to 248 devices. It was supposed to have 16GB of starting unified memory, and the incredible capabilities of the soon to posibly be released hubOS with Apple Intelligence — all packed into its strikingly compact design that’s built to last. The new Home Hub will soon come in an all-new colors — stratosphere blue, amazing amber, lovely lavender, gregarious green, and yolo yellow — giving Home Hub the most beautiful array of colors ever seen in a home hub. Apple Home Hub is parsecs ahead of any other home hub on the market. We think you are going to love it...one day.
 
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Adelphos33 said:
From what I can understand, Apple wants Siri AI features that can actually do a bunch of home personalization things and can control a lot of aspects of your home, calendar, car, etc. Can models like Chat GPT even do this today? If not, no way Apple has anything close - as good as Apple is, have they ever led with that kind of software innovation? It's just not what they do
Click to expand...
Yeah people do it in Home Assistant today
 
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Adelphos33 said:
From what I can understand, Apple wants Siri AI features that can actually do a bunch of home personalization things and can control a lot of aspects of your home, calendar, car, etc. Can models like Chat GPT even do this today? If not, no way Apple has anything close - as good as Apple is, have they ever led with that kind of software innovation? It's just not what they do
Click to expand...
You have described exactly the problem they are having.
Most of the people in these comments don’t get it, I’ve seen over and over and over again variations on the same “Google/Open AI could do it in months, why can’t Apple do it in years?”
But neither Google nor open AI have done anything close to what Apple is proposing.
In fact, it’s kind of funny to see people talk about it as “the new Siri” when that’s not what it is at all, that’s barely what it was introduced as.
Yes, the end goal is to make Siri more useful, but even if all of the features shipped on time, it’s not going to make Siri work like GPT, that was never what was promised.
If anything, it wasn’t a next generation Siri, it was the next generation Automator/Shortcuts.

The idea was never that you could ask it any question in the world And it answers it the way Google or GPT would.
 
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Lounge vibes 05 said:
You have described exactly the problem they are having.
Most of the people in these comments don’t get it, I’ve seen over and over and over again variations on the same “Google/Open AI could do it in months, why can’t Apple do it in years?”
But neither Google nor open AI have done anything close to what Apple is proposing.
In fact, it’s kind of funny to see people talk about it as “the new Siri” when that’s not what it is at all, that’s barely what it was introduced as.
Yes, the end goal is to make Siri more useful, but even if all of the features shipped on time, it’s not going to make Siri work like GPT, that was never what was promised.
If anything, it wasn’t a next generation Siri, it was the next generation Automator/Shortcuts.

The idea was never that you could ask it any question in the world And it answers it the way Google or GPT would.
Click to expand...
The problem is Siri struggles to do things Apple promised years ago that it could do, and other companies don’t have these issues as much. Now, Apple wants to leapfrog its competitors when Siri cant even handle the basics properly?
 
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Adelphos33 said:
From what I can understand, Apple wants Siri AI features that can actually do a bunch of home personalization things and can control a lot of aspects of your home, calendar, car, etc. Can models like Chat GPT even do this today? If not, no way Apple has anything close - as good as Apple is, have they ever led with that kind of software innovation? It's just not what they do
Click to expand...
Apple needs to have better compatibility with other devices first before even focusing on AI Siri for the home. Instead they seriously rely on homebridge to make it functional with devices.
 
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211 said:
The problem is Siri struggles to do things Apple promised years ago that it could do, and other companies don’t have these issues as much. Now, Apple wants to leapfrog its competitors when Siri cant even handle the basics properly?
Click to expand...
Exactly I tell Siri to turn my kitchen on. It says cannot find the kitchen do you mean the kitchen lights? Yeah ******* that’s what I just said.

Growing increasingly sick of Apple…I just don’t feel like making the ecosystem switch.
 
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