Apple wants to fill your entire house with its smart home hardware. According to MacRumors, citing Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is planning to release an all-new home hub sometime between October and early next year. That’s a pretty tight window, and Gurman is about as reliable as it gets when it comes to Apple leaks.
The device is designed to sit in rooms throughout your home, think your kitchen counter, bedroom nightstand, or living room shelf. It will come in both tabletop and wall-mounted versions, which already tells you Apple is thinking about this as a multi-room product, not a single central device you stick somewhere and forget about.
And here’s the part that should raise some eyebrows: Apple apparently believes many customers will buy more than one. That’s a bold bet. Amazon has spent years trying to get people to put an Echo in every room, with mixed results. Apple will need to give buyers a genuinely compelling reason to spend that kind of money across multiple rooms, and right now, Siri is not exactly inspiring confidence.
That said, Siri is expected to be a core feature of the hub, which could mean Apple is counting on its AI improvements to do the heavy lifting here. If the on-device intelligence is actually good, and we mean actually good, not just marketing-deck good, this could be interesting. Apple’s home automation platform has long had the hardware and software pieces in place. What it’s lacked is a proper anchor device that ties everything together in a room.
This is also worth watching from a broader industry angle. Google, Amazon, and even Meta have been pushing hard into home displays and smart speakers. Apple has largely sat that fight out, apart from the HomePod. A proper hub with a screen and smarter Siri could finally give the Apple ecosystem a real presence in the smart home space, where it has always punched below its weight.
October is not far away. Let’s see if Apple can actually deliver something worth placing in more than one room.