[joshmarinacci]

In one sense this is logical. A HomePod with a screen and an iOS variant. On the other hand, what is this for? What uses do these smart home devices serve? We are a decade plus into the “smart home” era and most of these things are more trouble than they are worth.

[bryanrasmussen]

Apple has on a few occasions in the past come in after people have spent a lot of time and energy developing things and making a small market, figuring out how it should actually work, making a nice version 1.0 of how it should actually work, making that market explode 100-fold and taking all the money.

That smart homes are more trouble than they are worth currently sounds to me like ripe territory for Apple to poach.

However not sure if without Jobs and Ive if they can actually do anything like what they used to.

[paulryanrogers]

Was Johnny Ive really a driver of innovation? Or just trading repairabily for vanity metrics?

[ajkjk]

I feel like Apple has historical been good at taking things that are "good ideas but everyone is doing the execution so badly they haven't really caught on" into the "everyone uses it all the time" category (eg ipod, iphone, airpods). Certainly smart home stuff is kinda in the first category right now, like you said. Perhaps they believe they can give them the same treatment? It seems kinda plausible to me: there's no reason smart home stuff couldn't be a really good, seamless experience.

[marssaxman]

Is it actually a good idea, though? It's crystal clear why companies would want to make and sell smart home devices which get customers locked into proprietary web services, but the problems these gadgets are meant to solve for the user have always struck me as... trivial. The last thing I want in my house are more fussy, flaky widgets to manage; they'd better have a really good reason to exist.

[underlipton]

We tried the, "One company makes everything in your house," thing in the mid-century, and it didn't work. A home is an ecosystem - not the corpo buzzword that actually means "walled garden", but an actual ecosystem, with a diverse set of (often competing) "organisms" coexisting. An average room needs seating, storage, entertainment, and its contents are highly influenced by culture, lifestyle, memory, family, desire/ambition. Smart home products have become better over time as manufacturers realized that any given room is going to be a chaotic mix of other manufacturers' products, including those of competitors, and that the only way for the entire ecosystem to succeed is for all of the parts to play as nice together with each other as possible.

I feel like this is one of Apple's weaknesses. The AVP was a massive indication that they're not ready for that kind of paradigm, because even within their own product, apps (organisms) that should have been able to exist as complete digital "objects" and interact with others were instead siloed off experiences that took over the whole device.

[nytesky]

We do so much on phones now and sometimes it’s easier on a big display.

This sounds like it would be a quick home hub to add stuff to the calendar, check that email about soccer game carpool, buy plane tickets or pay a bill you got in the mail.

Like this but way more functions.

https://www.costco.com/skylight-15%22-smart-touchscreen-cale...

I personally like to not carry my phone around the house, and in kitchen having recipes displayed or an interactive reader would be great. We have a Google home but it doesn’t have a proper browser or search other than voice so it’s very kludgy. Recipes on phone are annoying because the screen timeout.

I would recommend a laser display keyboard or maybe onscreen for somewhat more sophisticated actions, but maybe an LLM will suffice

[jayd16]

Multi-user support is possibly something deserving of a larger rewrite to iOS. It's been a pretty big assumption in all of the devices outside Macos, right?

[kcplate]

On the iPad and iOS front, I feel like the real driver of support for multiuser is families. I just can’t see it being a big desirable ask beyond families with kids because the devices form factors. If I am Apple, I am wondering if that subset market is big enough to add the feature. I love my wife and she loves me, but a single shared phone or iPad among us would create more problems than a coke bottle amid the bush people of the Kalahari.

[simpleintheory]

It’s supported for iPads, just locked by software [1].

1: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep9a34c2ba...

[exe34]

OS X was a multi user UNIX wasn't it?

[pgwhalen]

I’m a sort of reluctant/embarrassed user of smart home technology. I understand your pause, but the opportunity is so clearly there, it’s just that no one has executed well enough on it yet.

I’m not sure that a new OS is really the way to get there, but hey maybe, I’m not an expert on the internal workings.

[Mistletoe]

If I had to guess they are going to try and shoehorn AI into it to get a last gasp on the stock price going up.

[dyauspitr]

I agree. The only “smart home” features I use are turning of lights and some one off electrical outlets. Wake me up when we have humanoid robots in the home that I can ask to vacuum the house, do the dishes and fold the laundry. There’s some progress in that space and I would love to see it happen.

[treetalker]

They're amazing at invading privacy!