Five futures for Apple’s HomePod with a screen

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

While smart displays — the more expensive sibling to smart speakers — haven’t lived up to their potential, they can be useful and are a missing piece in Apple’s smart home, which the company has largely avoided creating products for — so far, just a couple of smart speakers and a bit of help from the Apple TV.

An Apple smart display with a touch-screen display, a dedicated Apple Home control panel, a smarter Siri, and the chops to be an Apple Home hub supporting Thread and Matter is something I’d put in my smart home.

It appears Apple has been working on this type of competitor to Amazon’s Echo Shows and Google’s Nest Hubs for a while, at least based on long-running rumors. But since WWDC last month, the rumor mill has kicked into high gear.

First, MacRumors discovered code indicating a new “Home Accessory” is being readied. Then, last week 9to5Mac found details in the tvOS 18 developer beta 3 about a new interface called PlasterBoard that is touchscreen-ready and has a lock screen — two things an Apple TV doesn’t need. But as HomePods run on a modified version of tvOS it could apply to a new version of the smart speaker with a touchscreen interface.

This means we could see a new Home-focused device from Apple as soon as this fall when tvOS 18 launches to the public. However, Apple watcher Mark Gurman says early next year is more likely. Gurman says Apple has been testing at least four speaker / display devices that 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 move is coming into focus. But the question remains: what will it be? Here’s a look at all the rumors to date, in order of those I think are most likely to happen to the longer shots.

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

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

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

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

More interesting is the rumored traditional smart display — a combined touchscreen tablet with a smart speaker. This is also the most persistent rumor. Kuo says a HomePod with a seven-inch screen is in the works, and combined with the rumor that Apple engineers have been running tvOS on a modified iPad Mini, many signs point this way.

This product may look like an Echo Show 8 or Google Nest Hub Max, where the screen is embedded in the speaker. Or if you go by Gurman’s reporting at Bloomberg, it could resemble the Echo Show 10 — with a touchscreen on a motorized arm.

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

If Apple goes this route, it’ll need to put a good processor in the device. My primary issue with smart displays today is that they’re underpowered. And it looks like this might be Apple’s move.

Last month, Gurman reported that Apple’s “table-top robot,” as he calls it, will be the first Apple Home device from Apple to use Apple Intelligence. The current HomePods don’t have the processing power to support AI. Plus, the code MacRumors found indicating a new “Home Accessory” also points toward the device using the as-yet-unannounced A18 chip, making it primed to be AI-powered.

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

A souped-up Apple smart display with a big speaker, a smarter Siris, and a robot arm will be a pricey product; $500 to $600 would be my guess. So, I hope Apple also plans to introduce a more budget-friendly option — and it sounds like the company might be working on exactly that.

Bloomberg’s Gurman has reported Apple is developing a low-end iPad just for the home. A HomePad perhaps? This could be similar to Amazon’s Echo Hub — a tablet-style device that can be mounted to the wall or propped on a table for controlling smart home devices, viewing camera feeds, and making video calls.

Many Apple Home users have tried to shoehorn an iPad into this role, and they’re commonly seen in high-end smart home installations running custom software. But in my experience, it’s not a great solution because the iPad is designed as a personal device. An Apple Home iPad would need to be designed for multiple users — as the HomePod is today.

An affordable Apple Home iPad feels like the smartest move at this stage. It should be a simple lift from a development and hardware perspective; it addresses all the smart home needs and, without fancy speakers, would be the least expensive option. If Apple can keep it under $300, it would be a big hit in the smart home.

But maybe that budget-friendly iPad won’t just hang out on the wall. Maybe it will have a dock like the Google Pixel Tablet. The device could know when it’s docked to a speaker — potentially via a MagSafe appendage that could enable an iPad version of Apple’s StandBy feature for the iPhone.

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

Still, having used both the Echo Show 10 with its motorized screen and the Pixel Tablet with its removable tablet, I’m not big on either design for home control. A tablet needs to stay in one place if it’s being relied upon to control things like lights and locks or view live camera feeds, and robotic smart displays take up a lot of room — they need a surprising amount of space to rotate.

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

While this all-in-one TV, smart speaker, and video calling device appeared to be a ways off, MacRumors reports it found evidence of two new Apple TVs in Apple’s code, so it could be here 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 act as smart home hubs (for Samsung SmartThings and Google Home, respectively). If Apple is going to put all this functionality into a single device, it makes sense to just produce an actual Apple TV. That thing’s been rumored for over a decade.