Future Apple monitor could act as smart home display

AppleInsider · July 2, 2023 2:19PM

Apple's future external display may have it pulling double duty when the Mac is off, with claims it could also be used as a smart home display.

Apple Studio Display

Apple's lineup of external Mac displays is impressive, with the Apple Studio Display and Pro Display XDR offering great picture quality when paired with a Mac or MacBook. However, Apple is looking into ways to employ the monitor when it's not actively being used with a Mac.

As part of the "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg on Sunday, Mark Gurman claims Apple is working on multiple new monitors, and that one would also function as a smart home display when the Mac is idle.

That display would echo the Studio Display in running on an A13 chip, but instead of just powering audio and camera features, the chip could enable the display to be an independent device. In a low-power mode, the screen could show useful information as if its a smart home display, such as notifications or the weather.

The concept isn't entirely new, as Apple is trialing something similar with the StandBy feature of iOS 17. However, its use on a Mac display could offer a lot more information than the small screen of the iPhone could display.

Gurman reckons that Apple's still a fair way off from offering a smart monitor to the public, with a release in 2024 "at the earliest."

Read on AppleInsider

japhey · July 2, 2023 3:39PM

This is what I want for the Apple TV…for it to present as a smart display while it sits idle.

dewme · July 2, 2023 4:03PM

Japhey said:

This is what I want for the Apple TV…for it to present as a smart display while it sits idle.

Exactly!

This is especially true considering how inexpensive 4K TVs are compared to decent monitors. Plus, all of my Macs are in home office space while my TV is in family space. It would be nice to be able to sequence through security and doorbell cameras from the TV when I’m in the family room/kitchen/dining space.

Amazon’s FireStick 4K has the camera capability, which is good, but it’s otherwise an advertising screen when not being used. The Apple TV isn’t far behind depending on the top level selection but it eventually falls through to a screen saver.

eric_wvgg · July 2, 2023 5:45PM

I was just lamenting that the Studio Display doesn’t work as a HomeKit hub… I was going to fire off a Feedback suggestion, when I realized that there’s no Wi-Fi in there.

Pity for all that A13 power to mostly go to waste. What a bizarrely over-engineered product.

crofford · July 2, 2023 7:11PM

As I've said many times before....I'd immediately buy a 65" iPad. Nowadays, I'd even by four or five.

purplepear · July 2, 2023 7:50PM

I do hope they think to include stand alone Apple TV functionality in any future screen powered by an A series chip..

I am kinda surprised they didn’t do that with the Studio Display..

mikethemartian · July 2, 2023 8:59PM

Wouldn’t this imply a touchscreen?

9secondkox2 · July 3, 2023 12:42AM

This is such a great idea. Would be cool to see iMacs come with a remote again too.

tenthousandthings · July 3, 2023 7:44AM

The part of this story that catches my eye is “Apple is working on multiple new monitors” — that is the lede, IMHO. The promise of Mac Studio and the enhanced Mac mini is they give Apple incentive to provide more choices when it comes to displays. Indeed, it’s possible that’s the whole point.

The industry knows this, and it’s no coincidence that after years of indifference toward the Retina 5K iMac, suddenly Dell has a competitive 6K and Samsung has finally come out with a 5K Studio Display copycat (pricing on it has just become known this week, it’s about what you would expect, around what the LG UltraFine 5K used to cost).

Apple can’t possibly be sitting still.

9secondkox2 · July 3, 2023 9:46AM

mikethemartian said:

Wouldn’t this imply a touchscreen?

Apple used to bundle a remote. Didn’t last long though. This feature would require either that or a touch later added to the screen as you say.

9secondkox2 · July 3, 2023 9:48AM

Eric_WVGG said:

I was just lamenting that the Studio Display doesn’t work as a HomeKit hub… I was going to fire off a Feedback suggestion, when I realized that there’s no Wi-Fi in there.

Pity for all that A13 power to mostly go to waste. What a bizarrely over-engineered product.

All the Studio Display needs is a firmware update. It already has the hardware and OS to do this.

john-useless · July 3, 2023 2:32PM

Eric_WVGG said:

I was just lamenting that the Studio Display doesn’t work as a HomeKit hub… I was going to fire off a Feedback suggestion, when I realized that there’s no Wi-Fi in there.

Pity for all that A13 power to mostly go to waste. What a bizarrely over-engineered product.

I have tended to think of the A13 chip in my Studio Display as providing the smarts only for Center Stage (for the webcam), spatial audio (such as it is — not sure how "spatial" it feels to me, although the speakers sound fantastic) and the like. As such, yeah, it's not unreasonable to call it over-engineered.

That said, didn't Apple have some chips in early iPhone models whose functionality wasn't used, or at least wasn't fully utilized? I wonder if this is just part of the normal development cycle for hardware. "Version 1.0" of a product line (the Studio Display, in this case) has a chip that can clearly do more than the product needs it to do. But if & when Apple releases a "version 2.0" of this specific monitor, or a different monitor entirely — perhaps a 4K display with smart home capabilities, for a price point that's less than the 5K Studio Display but more than competitors' 4K monitors — maybe that's when we'll really see what Apple silicon can do in an Apple monitor.

mac_dog · July 3, 2023 2:39PM

For the first time, Apple has disappointed. I just purchased the studio display and the camera is of such an inferior quality. I think my iPhone 4s may have had a better camera. Not up to the Apple standard — and this is saying something. I haven’t been this disappointed in an Apple product since before Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the 90s. Unfortunately, it’s the only monitor available in the machine that meets my needs and I can’t hold out another year for a larger iMac.

john-useless · July 3, 2023 2:43PM

tenthousandthings said:

The part of this story that catches my eye is “Apple is working on multiple new monitors” — that is the lede, IMHO. The promise of Mac Studio and the enhanced Mac mini is they give Apple incentive to provide more choices when it comes to displays.

Apple can’t possibly be sitting still.

I agree. A good chunk of Apple's Mac customers are willing to pay a (reasonable) premium for Apple-branded products like monitors, despite the fact that there are plenty of third-party alternatives. I certainly am — because Apple's products typically have superior build quality and I can easily trust that Apple will be around years from now to support the product, both with software updates and hardware service, if needed.

I would like to see Apple offer a 4K version of the Studio Display, for example, at a price that's few hundred less than the existing (5K) Studio Display but presumably more than the best-quality 4K monitors from Dell, HP, and Samsung.

mike1 · July 3, 2023 4:33PM

dewme said:

Japhey said:

This is what I want for the Apple TV…for it to present as a smart display while it sits idle.

Exactly!
Plus, all of my Macs are in home office space while my TV is in family space. It would be nice to be able to sequence through security and doorbell cameras from the TV when I’m in the family room/kitchen/dining space.

It kinda does already. I agree, that having full Home control in stand-by would be awesome, However, you can currently view all you're HK cameras through the Apple TV and even control devices in those rooms. Also can turn scenes on and off.

tenthousandthings · July 3, 2023 4:51PM

mac_dog said:

For the first time, Apple has disappointed. I just purchased the studio display and the camera is of such an inferior quality. I think my iPhone 4s may have had a better camera. Not up to the Apple standard — and this is saying something. I haven’t been this disappointed in an Apple product since before Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the 90s. Unfortunately, it’s the only monitor available in the machine that meets my needs and I can’t hold out another year for a larger iMac.

Once I turned off Center Stage, it was fine. It’s like it was trying to be an iPad. I’m happy with it now.

macxpress · July 3, 2023 8:49PM

9secondkox2 said:

This is such a great idea. Would be cool to see iMacs come with a remote again too.

Why would you need another remote to keep track of when you can just use your phone or ask Siri. Perhaps even use your Apple Watch, or existing AppleTV remote.

macxpress · July 3, 2023 8:52PM

It would be nice to see Apple develop a nice set of screen savers for macOS with information on them of your choosing like you can for the iOS/iPadOS lock screen. Why can you have news, your rings, or perhaps the current weather displays nicely on the screen? Imagine seeing a thunderstorm viewed on your screen like in iOS when a thunderstorm is approaching your area? It would be better imo to have it as part of macOS as it's not tied to a specific display, such as requiring an Apple Studio Display. The current iMacs have nice displays on them too as well as any MacBook laptop. There are other 3rd party displays that are nice as well. Shouldn't just be tied to an external Apple display.

edited July 2023

dewme · July 3, 2023 10:33PM

mike1 said:

dewme said:

Japhey said:

This is what I want for the Apple TV…for it to present as a smart display while it sits idle.

Exactly!
Plus, all of my Macs are in home office space while my TV is in family space. It would be nice to be able to sequence through security and doorbell cameras from the TV when I’m in the family room/kitchen/dining space.

It kinda does already. I agree, that having full Home control in stand-by would be awesome, However, you can currently view all you're HK cameras through the Apple TV and even control devices in those rooms. Also can turn scenes on and off.

That's very good to know. I currently use very little of HomeKit because it was still too immature when I built my house and the alternatives were very mature, pretty much zero config, low maintenance, and covered 100% of what I needed functionally. When Matter really starts to gain traction and there are multiple choices in all of the key device categories that matter to me I will definitely do a major refresh. For now, I'm totally cool with what I have.

That said, I think Apple could very easily put together a way to compose a hyper-personalized dashboard that visualizes things that I want to know at a glance, like weather, emergency alerts, motion detection alerts from my security cameras and doorbells, Find My, upcoming reminders and calendar events, sports scores, currently playing track on my HomePod, delivery notifications (e.g., you are 3 stops away), etc., and have the ability to focus/zoom on specific feeds using Siri or my ATV remote, including the remote app on my iPhone.

Amazon has a biggy sized Echo device that attempts to provide the kind of thing I'm looking for. But I don't need another device hanging on the wall when I already have my TV in my home activity hub (family room/kitchen/dining area), plenty of monitors hooked up to Macs, not to mention iPads and iPhones. The dashboard could follow me around and wake up Macs and iPads when I walk into a room with the dashboard available, similar to how the AirPods transfer between devices. The dashboard I speak of could simply be an app that runs on multiple Apple devices. I was really hoping that Apple would turn the Home app into the kind of dashboard I am looking for, but its currently not much more than a very rudimentary device management tool that doesn't really do a whole lot in terms of displaying dynamic content. But it could be.

edited July 2023

Future Apple monitor could act as smart home display

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