Five futures for Apple’s HomePod with display

Apple’s smart home efforts need a smart display. If I have to hear Siri say, “I found some results from the web; I can show them if you ask again for your iPhone,” again, I can throw a HomePod out the window.

While smart displays – the more expensive sibling of smart speakers – haven’t reached their potential, they can be useful and are a missing piece of Apple’s smart home, which the company has avoided creating products for – until now, only a few smart speakers and a little help from Apple TV.

An Apple smart display with a touchscreen, a dedicated Apple Home control panel, a smarter Siri, and the abilities to be an Apple Home hub with Thread and Matter support is something I would put in my smart home.

It seems like Apple has been working on this kind of competitor to Amazon’s Echo Shows and Google’s Nest Hubs for a while now, at least based on long-standing rumors. But since WWDC last month, the rumor mill has accelerated.

First, MacRumors code discovered indicating that a new “Home Accessory” is being prepared. So last week 9to5Mac details found in tvOS 18 developer beta 3 about one new interface called PlasterBoard Touchscreen and lock screen support – two things an Apple TV doesn’t need. But since HomePods run on a modified version of tvOS, this could apply to a new version of the smart speaker with a touchscreen interface.

This means we could see a new home-focused Apple device as early as this fall when tvOS 18 is released to the public. However, Apple watcher Mark Gurman says early next year is more likely. Gurman says Apple is testing at least four speakers/display devices which could fit into the smart home. Apple Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo also thinks a HomePod with a seven-inch screen is coming.

With these tasty crumbs in the code, the shape of Apple’s next big smart home change is coming into focus. But the question remains: what will it be? Here’s a look at all the rumors so far, in order of those I think are most likely to happen in the longer plans.

Just a small tweak to the existing HomePod could bring us a kind of Apple smart display: improving the touchscreen on the $300 smart speaker so it can do more than just show pretty lights and control playback.

This is the simplest and least interesting upgrade option, and therefore the most likely. But it would make the HomePod a little more useful, providing additional controls for switching tracks and audio sources, selecting podcasts, answering calls, and potentially performing simple smart home controls.

The rumor that Apple would do something like this started a while ago, and there hasn’t been much evidence to support it recently. O touch screen interface 9to5Mac found in tvOS 18 could be applied here, but it seems more relevant for a larger screen.

The small size and placement of the HomePod’s existing screen would limit the function of an improved version compared to other smart displays. But it could show some information in response to Siri queries and offer different interfaces based on the requests — like displaying a darker dial when you ask it to control a light, for example. I could see the interface being similar to the controls on an Apple Watch.

More interesting is the supposed traditional smart display – a touchscreen tablet combined with a smart speaker. This is also the most persistent rumor. Kuo says a HomePod with a seven-inch screen is in development and combined with the rumor that Apple engineers are running tvOS on a modified iPad Mini, many signs point in that direction.

This product may look like an Echo Show 8 or Google Nest Hub Max, where the screen is built into the speaker. Or if you pass Reporting by Gurman in Bloombergit could look like the Echo Show 10 – with a touchscreen on a motorized arm.

I have Gurman here. Apple is big on sound quality, and the standard design of smart displays sound worse than smart speakers. The screen blocks the acoustics! Lifting the screen away from the speaker definitely helps with this.

If Apple goes this route, it will need to put a good processor in the device. My main problem with smart displays today is that they are underpowered. And it looks like this could be Apple’s move.

Last month, Gurman reported that Apple’s “desktop robot,” as he calls it, will be the first Apple’s Apple Home device to use Apple Intelligence. Current HomePods don’t have the processing power to support AI. Additionally, the code MacRumors found indicating a new “Home Accessory” also points to the device using the A18 chip not yet announcedmaking it ready to be powered by AI.

If all this is true, it is unlikely that we will see this gadget until next spring at the earliest – said Gurman Apple’s AI efforts won’t be ready until then. It’s also likely to be a very expensive device.

An improved Apple smart display with a big speaker, a smarter Siris, and a robotic arm will be an expensive product; $500 to $600 would be my guess. So I hope Apple also plans to introduce a more economical option – and it looks like the company may be working on just that.

Bloomberg‘s Gurman reported Apple is developing a low-cost iPad just home. A HomePad perhaps? This could be similar to Amazon’s Echo Hub – a tablet-like device that can be wall-mounted or propped on a table to control smart home devices, view camera feeds and make video calls.

Many Apple Home users have tried wear an iPad for this function, and are commonly seen in high-end smart home installations that run custom software. But in my experience, it’s not a great solution because the iPad was designed as a personal device. An Apple Home iPad would need to be designed for multiple users – like the HomePod is today.

An affordable price The Apple Home iPad seems like the smartest move at this stage. It should be a simple upgrade from a development and hardware perspective; it meets all your smart home needs, and without fancy speakers, it would be the cheapest option. If Apple can keep it under $300, it will be a big hit in the smart home.

But maybe that budget iPad won’t just hang on the wall. Maybe it has a dock like the Google Pixel Tablet. The device could know when it’s docked with a speaker – potentially via a MagSafe appendage that could activate an iPad version of Apple’s StandBy feature for the iPhone.

Apple’s DockKit can also come into play here, enabling automatic tracking for FaceTime calls or when following a recipe in the kitchen and having the screen move with you.

Still, having used the Echo Show 10 with its motorized screen and the Pixel Tablet with its detachable tablet, I don’t really like either design for home control. A tablet needs to stay in one place if it needs to control things like lights and locks or view live camera feeds, and robotic smart displays take up a lot of space – they need a surprising amount of room to rotate.

There is one final option. Gurman reported that Apple is working on a product that combines the Apple TV, a HomePod and a FaceTime camera in a single device.

Although this multifunctional TV, smart speaker and video calling device seemed far away, MacRumors reports found evidence of two new Apple TVs in Apple’s code, so it could arrive sooner than expected.

There are already smart TVs that can do most of the above, and both Samsung and LG even have models that can double as smart home hubs (for Samsung SmartThings and Google Home, respectively). If Apple intends to put all of this functionality into a single device, it makes sense to just produce one real Apple TV. There have been rumors about this for over a decade.