Apple's AI smart screen devices will have to wait on Siri revamp

AppleInsider

Two future iPad-like devices that rely on future Apple Intelligence features will come to market only after the long-promised major Siri upgrade.

Concept image of the future Siri smart-home hub

Apple is said to be working on two different "home hub" devices for release in the near future. One is expected to be a mountable iPad-like screen to control smart-home devices, while the other is envisioned as a tabletop device with a robotic arm.

A new report from Bloomberg suggests that both are currently waiting on the delayed revamp of Siri before coming to market. A revamp that incorporates on-screen awareness, which will be essential for the smart home products to function properly.

Responsibility for completing the long-awaited Siri upgrade has recently been handed to Apple Vision Pro leader Mike Rockwell's team.

The two distinct devices have been code-named J490 -- the wall-mounted iPad home hub -- and J595 for the robotic-arm mounted interactive tabletop screen.

The former is now expected to arrive either near the end of 2025 or in the first half of 2026. It is also currently undergoing internal employee testing.

The more ambitious robotic arm product, J595, is now expected to follow in the second half of 2026 or early 2027. However, it will probably be missing some of its more innovative features when it first ships.

The current focus of the teams behind the products is to get them to market as quickly as possible after last year's showcased Siri upgrade finally arrives. Apple has acknowledged that the more contextual Siri, which relies on Apple Intelligence features that depend on app intents, has been delayed.

Rumor Score: Possible

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applezulu

This starts to perhaps support my argument that the home hub itself will be a screen-less, stationary box, like Apple TV, that will provide centralized computational power to enable AI on all home-networked devices, including HomePods, TVs and dedicated home control screens. The J490 screens described here would be comparatively inexpensive portable terminals, networked to the hub. Wall mounts (and other mount options) would give the screens a powered home base, with the idea that a home would have multiple screens distributed to key locations. 

Having a truly Apple-like Apple Home where it all “just works” depends on reliable and convenient user control available throughout the home. HomePods offer distributed voice control, but convenient hands-on control has thus far included the common inconvenience of the user having left their iPhone or iPad elsewhere in the home. Wall-mounted terminal screens inexpensive enough to own a few resolve that problem. 

dewme

The closest thing I’ve seen to a home hub so far is Home Assistant running on a headless server like a Raspberry Pi. It’s a decent integration and aggregation point for pretty much everything in your home that has connectivity. Its biggest drawback in my opinion is the user experience and UI. It has all the pieces and parts but it’s similar to Apple Home in just being pages with boxes. I’d prefer to have additional or alternative representations like a home layout or even a topology view. 

My perspective is obviously skewed towards more graphical layouts like you would see on an industrial HMI display where the devices are shown as graphical representations of the actual devices or standard symbols defined by a domain specific standard. In these cases live data like process variables, device health, zones, temperature, tank levels, etc., user controls like switches, push buttons, and sliders are integrated directly into the views. 

Different views can be shown that correspond to areas, which in a home would be rooms, as well as summary views in table or spreadsheet format. This may sound overly complex but for a home based  environment the complexity would be far simpler than a manufacturing line or industrial possess. I just want something a lot more intuitive than a bunch of squares. If this is something that Apple intends to sell to non-geeks the boxes are going to cut it. 

What I’m thinking of would be tailor made for Apple Vision Pro but it would also work on IPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple TV. 

edited May 25

javert24601

AppleZulu said:

This starts to perhaps support my argument that the home hub itself will be a screen-less, stationary box, like Apple TV, that will provide centralized computational power to enable AI on all home-networked devices, including HomePods, TVs and dedicated home control screens. The J490 screens described here would be comparatively inexpensive portable terminals, networked to the hub. Wall mounts (and other mount options) would give the screens a powered home base, with the idea that a home would have multiple screens distributed to key locations. 

Having a truly Apple-like Apple Home where it all “just works” depends on reliable and convenient user control available throughout the home. HomePods offer distributed voice control, but convenient hands-on control has thus far included the common inconvenience of the user having left their iPhone or iPad elsewhere in the home. Wall-mounted terminal screens inexpensive enough to own a few resolve that problem. 

I certainly hope Apple is not planning on wall-mounted terminal screens.  That would look like the Control-4 screen controls that the previous owners of my house had installed ~10 years ago.  I'm sure they were "state of the art" at the time, but they did not age well.  When I remodel the home, I had them ripped out and drywalled the openings (as well as the old telephone ports).  Technology advances quickly, so nothing should be wall mounted.  They become obsolete and are more difficult to update.  Furthermore, the manufacturer (ie Apple) is locked into a certain device size.  Is Apple going to expect home owners to make wall openings bigger or smaller with every iteration?  Is Apple going to keep the power cable at the exact same location forever?  Is Apple is going expect home owners to be running electrical and ethernet cables for every device?  If Apple does produce such a device, then we know that Apple employees clearly don't use their company's own products and don't help consumers think through the implications of their decisions.  

applezulu

Javert24601 said:

AppleZulu said:

This starts to perhaps support my argument that the home hub itself will be a screen-less, stationary box, like Apple TV, that will provide centralized computational power to enable AI on all home-networked devices, including HomePods, TVs and dedicated home control screens. The J490 screens described here would be comparatively inexpensive portable terminals, networked to the hub. Wall mounts (and other mount options) would give the screens a powered home base, with the idea that a home would have multiple screens distributed to key locations. 

Having a truly Apple-like Apple Home where it all “just works” depends on reliable and convenient user control available throughout the home. HomePods offer distributed voice control, but convenient hands-on control has thus far included the common inconvenience of the user having left their iPhone or iPad elsewhere in the home. Wall-mounted terminal screens inexpensive enough to own a few resolve that problem. 

I certainly hope Apple is not planning on wall-mounted terminal screens.  That would look like the Control-4 screen controls that the previous owners of my house had installed ~10 years ago.  I'm sure they were "state of the art" at the time, but they did not age well.  When I remodel the home, I had them ripped out and drywalled the openings (as well as the old telephone ports).  Technology advances quickly, so nothing should be wall mounted.  They become obsolete and are more difficult to update.  Furthermore, the manufacturer (ie Apple) is locked into a certain device size.  Is Apple going to expect home owners to make wall openings bigger or smaller with every iteration?  Is Apple going to keep the power cable at the exact same location forever?  Is Apple is going expect home owners to be running electrical and ethernet cables for every device?  If Apple does produce such a device, then we know that Apple employees clearly don't use their company's own products and don't help consumers think through the implications of their decisions.  

You’ve gone down a rabbit hole. This wouldn’t be a permanent wall mount. It would be something like a MagSafe charger you attach to the wall and plug into power nearby. The screen would be a tablet that you can remove if desired, and would be connected to the home hub via WiFi. And no, the screen wouldn’t be an iPad, but rather a dedicated Home Screen, dependent on the home hub to operate. 

massiveattack

I hope Homepod does look like the  concept image. There is no way it looks like the concept image. 
The concept image looks like iPad. 

What is the selling point then.. Apple could try to integrate all possible features of homepod into iPad to drive iPad sales up. 

dewme

I had a small Control4 setup about 20 years ago that was only accessible on my TV and eventually my iPhone. The cost of the system and trivial upgrades, like iPhone access, were ridiculously expensive, like $400 for a license to use the iPhone app. Control 4 wasn't a walled garden, it was more like a gulag with razor wire topped walls and armed guards. That was such a waste of money and painful lesson in what NOT to do. At least I didn't cut any holes in the walls. There were holes in my wallet.

What was even worse than Control 4 was having a "professional security system" installed by one of the big home security companies. Wires everywhere, holes drilled in window and door frames, holes drilled in walls to connect keypads and sensors, etc., Oh, and a bigass monthly subscription price for professional monitoring and remote access - even without any cameras. I was paying about the same amount per-month that I ended up paying for a year with a DIY Ring system with unlimited cameras and professional monitoring with police and fire dispatch. Recently Ring doubled their yearly subscription price, but it's still a fabulous deal in my mind, especially with the variety of sensors they offer, including PoE cameras. It's still a fraction of what I was paying a big security company. As an aside, whenever one of my hardwired sensors would die on my previous big company security system the company would replace it with a wireless sensor. Wake up call.

If I were to move to a new home automation system today I would probably base it all around Ubiquiti Unifi gear, including all of the security devices, cameras, local AV storage, remote access, etc. I've been using their networking gear for several years and I'm extremely happy with it. But I'm atypical and wired my house with CAT6 throughout. I don't think that casual technology users or people who can't run wires would want to head down that path. Plus, most home users probably don't want to be systems administrators on their home infrastructure. This is an area where I think Apple could make a big difference.

The more Apple gets into "Home" stuff the more I think they can build a system focused, zero admin, plug & play system that is still DIY for people who don't really want to worry about things that are typically DIY, like pretty much everything sold at Ikea or Amazon. One of the biggest hassles I'm faced with in managing my own network is that some of Apple's attempts to improve privacy throw a massive monkey wrench into my system. Apple's Private WiFi Address, Private Relay, and Limit IP Tracking features wreak havoc on networks that have static IP, IP reservations, Pi-hole DNS processing, and even my gateway's DHCP server. Apple doesn't play well with my network and doesn't respect the boundaries that I've configured in DHCP or IP reservations.

These types of conflicts tell me that if Apple really wants to work seamlessly in a connected or "smart" home environment, they really need to take over a lot more of the vital functions that are necessary to keep everything running smoothly. If Apple makes a home hub it really needs to own things like routing, DHCP, DNS, IP reservations, static IPs, privacy, security, blocking of unwanted sites, etc., in addition to serving as gateway for Matter, Thread, and possibly add-on extensions like Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Hue, for example. Does this mean that Apple needs to jump back into the networking devices business? Maybe, maybe not. There's no reason why Apple's home hub needs to provide switching and wireless access points as long as Apple's gateway/router/home=hub can adopt third party switches and access points. 

bonobob

AppleZulu said:

Having a truly Apple-like Apple Home where it all “just works” depends on reliable and convenient user control available throughout the home. HomePods offer distributed voice control, but convenient hands-on control has thus far included the common inconvenience of the user having left their iPhone or iPad elsewhere in the home. Wall-mounted terminal screens inexpensive enough to own a few resolve that problem. 

Then I’ll just use my watch.  There’s no need for multiple touch screens mounted all around the house.