Apple is preparing to make its long-delayed push into the smart-home market on October 13th, according to Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman, in a product expansion that would be one of the first major category moves under new Chief Executive Officer John Ternus.
At the center of the plan is a smart-home hub internally code-named J490, Gurman reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Apple also intends to announce the first update to the HomePod mini since that speaker’s 2020 debut and its first new Apple TV set-top box since 2022.
The hub is expected to take the form of a compact, roughly square display — about 6 to 7 inches — available in versions that sit on a counter or mount on a wall. It is designed to act as a household control point: managing connected accessories, handling video calls and intercom functions, showing photos and calendars, playing music, and running a new operating system built around Apple’s upgraded Siri AI. Facial recognition is meant to identify who is standing in front of the screen and personalize the interface, content, and responses.
The refreshed HomePod mini and Apple TV are expected to keep familiar designs while receiving faster processors so they can run the same more capable Siri models. Together, the three products would give Apple a coordinated hardware lineup in a category long dominated by Amazon and Google, after years in which Apple mostly leaned on HomeKit and third-party accessories.
The timing follows the public arrival of Siri AI with iOS 27. Earlier reporting by Gurman had described the hub as hardware that was largely ready while Apple waited for the assistant to catch up; the device has reportedly been in wider testing in employees’ homes. Apple has also been working to expand HomeKit and partner with third-party manufacturers around the new platform.
The October 13th date would put the announcement in the heart of the holiday selling season and shortly after Apple’s first foldable iPhone cycle under Ternus. A more ambitious follow-on product — a higher-end display on a moving robotic arm — has been described in earlier Gurman reporting as a later-stage project, not part of this first wave.
Apple did not immediately comment on the report. If the devices ship as planned, they would mark the company’s clearest attempt yet to make the home, not just the pocket, a core Apple surface.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ve been waiting for the new Apple TV hardware, among other things, for what seems like forever!
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I can only hope a reintroduction of Apple’s Airport router with mesh networking will be part of this ‘Home offensive’. Implementing that capability within HomePod would be ideal… routers hidden in plain sight.
Just get eero. It’s about as “Apple-like” as WiFi products get, it’s very easy to setup, and it’s pretty affordable to boot.
Eero is a division of Amazon … a company well known for their crapware. While they’ve obviously taken over the position Apple used to hold in the home networking market, it’s missing several advanced networking features without subscription, the price is high, and no way in hell would I recommend sending any more data to Bezos than he already scrapes from you. Also, unless you live in a mansion or a house with significant unique connectivity challenges, you might actually have better performance from a newer non-meshed router. The overhead of the mesh doesn’t come for free.
Consider other choices:
Linksys in general offers better Homekit compatibility.
Synology offers significantly more advanced networking without subscription.
Netgear also offers very simple setup.
TP-Link is probably the cheapest option for WiFi 7, though company links to China are a concern.
Asus, of course, is your best way to share data with your Chinese overlords.