Apple apparently thinks you’ll want more than one of these. According to MacRumors, citing Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is planning to release a new smart home hub between October and early next year, with the device designed to be placed across multiple rooms in your home. That last detail is notable. Apple isn’t positioning this as a single central device. It’s thinking in multiples, which tells you something about the pricing strategy and the broader ambition here.
The hub will ship in both tabletop and wall-mounted versions, making it flexible enough to fit a kitchen counter, a bedroom nightstand, or a living room shelf. Siri is expected to be a core part of the experience, which puts this squarely in competition with Amazon’s Echo Show lineup and Google’s Nest Hub. Both of those products have been on the market for years and have iterated through multiple hardware generations. Apple is arriving late to this specific category, and that gap matters when you’re trying to displace habits people have already built.
Still, Apple has real advantages here. HomeKit integration, tight coupling with iPhone and Apple Watch, and a user base that already trusts Apple with their home devices give it a meaningful starting point. The question is whether Siri in its current state is actually good enough to anchor a dedicated home device. Siri has lagged behind Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa on reliability and third-party integration for years. Apple has been working to improve it with its Apple Intelligence push, but a home hub puts Siri front and center in a way that will expose every limitation.
The timing is also interesting. An October launch would land right in the holiday shopping window, which is exactly where Apple wants to be if it’s expecting customers to buy multiple units per household. It also follows a broader industry trend where the ambient, always-on AI assistant is becoming a physical product category, not just a software feature. Meta, Amazon, and Google are all placing bets on screens and speakers with AI at the center. Apple joining that race with dedicated hardware is a clear signal that the company sees the connected home as worth fighting for again, not just supporting through third-party accessories and an app.
For developers and HomeKit ecosystem builders, this is worth watching closely. A first-party Apple hub could raise the floor on what smart home experiences look like on Apple’s platform, and potentially create new surface areas for apps and automation that don’t exist today.
