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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 a

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.

Mistletoe 1y ago
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.
bryanrasmussen 1y ago
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 1y ago
  Was Johnny Ive really a driver of innovation? Or just trading repairabily for vanity metrics?
  - DrBenCarson 1y ago
    You tell me, was the iPhone innovative?
    - kjkjadksj 1y ago
      No it was inevitable
      - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
        the inevitable things are the greatest innovations (in the realm of technology)
      - DrBenCarson 1y ago
        Inevitable * in hindsight * Innovation is the introduction of a new paradigm that works so well that people can no longer imagine not having No one was close to the original iPhone at launch and they didn’t really catch up until ~iPhone 12 for truly competitive alternatives
        kjkjadksj 1y ago
        It was inevitable in the sense the hardware was already available on the wholesale market. People tend to lionize these companies like they forged the phone out of the living earth themselves. Really they just contract with factories that assemble products out of components available on the wholesale market. Sexy OS? You can argue that came mostly from within since that is how that software was developed, in house. But the hardware stack they ordered and had assembled for you? I’m not so sure.
    - paulryanrogers 1y ago
      Was Ive involved in the iPhone creation? Or only its enshittification?
      - dcrazy 1y ago
        When the iPhone was developed, Jony led industrial design but not yet software design.
      - DrBenCarson 1y ago
        Jony owned iPhone hardware design top-to-bottom through development and multiple launches You think he’s glorified for literally nothing?
    - guestbest 1y ago
      The iPhone wasn’t as innovative as the AppStore which didn’t come around until iPhone OS 2. Selling software like music changed everything
      - DrBenCarson 1y ago
        Cool. App Store extended the true innovation which was a fully capable OS in everyone’s pocket App Store doesn’t exist without iPhone just like Windows doesn’t exist without the PC
        guestbest 1y ago
        Not really. There was a way of slab typed smart phones with capacitance touch screen windows mobile devices and they were more capable than the iPhone with on board GPS, etc. but they didn’t have an integrated App Store, which was the key to customer retention. The first iPhones didn’t have GPS and so the map app wasn’t quiet as capable as the other high end smart phones in the market as it couldn’t do directions properly. It had the best web browser, though. Every other model of high end smart phones quickly adopted the App Store model since it was such an obviously thing to install application directly to the device, but up until it was a major missing feature. All phones at the time required a computer tethered to do the purchase and installation. With the App Store the age of phones needing full general purpose computers was coming to an end. It was a whole cultural shift in software Later they started the iCloud sync so backups could be done ‘in the field’ as well.
        paulryanrogers 1y ago
        I recall getting apps on my Blackberry and Treo before iPhone existed.
  - mgh2 1y ago
    He was a great designer with low business acumen (without Jobs). His realm at Apple began crumbling when he executed a flawed strategy for the Apple watch launch as a fashion item, instead of a technology product geared toward health (Fitbit was 1st). It costed Apple 25M, and seemed like buying advertising from influencers (similar to 23andme launch). I usually value this youtuber's insights, but he has recently been reaching the wrong conclusions: https://youtu.be/JUG1PlqAUJk?si=_Y87UQGdhIo92a7r&t=469 https://youtu.be/JUG1PlqAUJk?si=_Y87UQGdhIo92a7r&t=469
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - veidr 1y ago
    A fuck of a lot better than HomePod, LOL! (Context: I have 2 Apple TV devices and 5 HomePod devices in my home, plus one Apple Vision Pro. I only like one of those more than my Pixel 9 Fold.)
    - FireBeyond 1y ago
      I use HomePod Minis solely as Thread/Matter routers, as my home is set up very heavily with HomeKit. I have 2 in areas where I have a bunch of devices but no Apple TVs nearby. So fully invested. But yeah...
  - api 1y ago
    The problem isn't that Vision Pro is a bad product. The problem is that it's built for a bad thesis. People don't want VR/AR goggles very much, or at least not many people do, and I think eventually we will stop trying to make this happen. VR/AR has niche applications: gaming, industrial and military AR uses, assistive uses with people who are mobility challenged, education. These are niche uses. Even gaming is a niche-- most gamers have demonstrated that a big-ass monitor is preferred over goggles. Making the goggles better may push this a little but I doubt it's going to lead to a landslide of gaming demand. VR/AR was largely a feature of dystopian sci-fi for a reason, too. Everyone jacking into goggles is dystopian. It's something that would appeal to people if the world got so shitty that you just don't even want to see what's in front of you, but I'd rather us spend our engineering effort making the world not get like that by solving some of our real world problems. I don't think I'm alone here. It might be a good idea for long duration space flight, but personally if I were on a ship on the way to Mars I'd rather read books or hang with my ship mates and talk about the problems we're going to face when we land. If I decided to go into space I'd rather experience life in space -- including the boring parts and the hard parts -- than jack into some kind of VR escape world. I could do that at home.
    - 1y ago
treetalker 1y ago
They're amazing at invading privacy!
ajkjk 1y ago
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.
- underlipton 1y ago
  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.
- marssaxman 1y ago
  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.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    Apple and everyone else has agree to Matter. But no one is going to buy an Apple home device if they aren’t already in the Apple ecosystem. Besides, Amazon, Google and even Apple services are all cross platform. While there isn’t an iCloud app for Android, there is one for Windows.
jayd16 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - exe34 1y ago
    I wonder if it might be useful if you had a phone, a tablet and one or two other form factors - but when you rub your finger on the detector, it loads your environment. but I can't imagine having to wait to use my phone or tablet. maybe the living room TV or the kitchen assistant.
- exe34 1y ago
  OS X was a multi user UNIX wasn't it?
- simpleintheory 1y ago
  It’s supported for iPads, just locked by software [1]. 1: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep9a34c2ba2/web https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep9a34c2ba...
  - kalleboo 1y ago
    I don't know if this is still the case but the last time I saw this discussion, someone with experience using the "shared iPad" education feature said it seemed like a massive hack, and switching users was seemingly implemented by "seamlessly" doing a full reset of the iPad to the new user, taking a bunch of time to backup the old user and restore the new one, nothing like a quick user switch on macOS, and nothing you'd want to use as a family handing an iPad back and forth.
nytesky 1y ago
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-calendar-and-organizer.product.4000234720.html 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
pgwhalen 1y ago
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.
dyauspitr 1y ago
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.

Mistletoe 1y ago

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.

bryanrasmussen 1y ago

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 1y ago
Was Johnny Ive really a driver of innovation? Or just trading repairabily for vanity metrics?
- DrBenCarson 1y ago
  You tell me, was the iPhone innovative?
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    No it was inevitable
    - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
      the inevitable things are the greatest innovations (in the realm of technology)
    - DrBenCarson 1y ago
      Inevitable * in hindsight * Innovation is the introduction of a new paradigm that works so well that people can no longer imagine not having No one was close to the original iPhone at launch and they didn’t really catch up until ~iPhone 12 for truly competitive alternatives
      - kjkjadksj 1y ago
        It was inevitable in the sense the hardware was already available on the wholesale market. People tend to lionize these companies like they forged the phone out of the living earth themselves. Really they just contract with factories that assemble products out of components available on the wholesale market. Sexy OS? You can argue that came mostly from within since that is how that software was developed, in house. But the hardware stack they ordered and had assembled for you? I’m not so sure.
  - paulryanrogers 1y ago
    Was Ive involved in the iPhone creation? Or only its enshittification?
    - dcrazy 1y ago
      When the iPhone was developed, Jony led industrial design but not yet software design.
    - DrBenCarson 1y ago
      Jony owned iPhone hardware design top-to-bottom through development and multiple launches You think he’s glorified for literally nothing?
  - guestbest 1y ago
    The iPhone wasn’t as innovative as the AppStore which didn’t come around until iPhone OS 2. Selling software like music changed everything
    - DrBenCarson 1y ago
      Cool. App Store extended the true innovation which was a fully capable OS in everyone’s pocket App Store doesn’t exist without iPhone just like Windows doesn’t exist without the PC
      - guestbest 1y ago
        Not really. There was a way of slab typed smart phones with capacitance touch screen windows mobile devices and they were more capable than the iPhone with on board GPS, etc. but they didn’t have an integrated App Store, which was the key to customer retention. The first iPhones didn’t have GPS and so the map app wasn’t quiet as capable as the other high end smart phones in the market as it couldn’t do directions properly. It had the best web browser, though. Every other model of high end smart phones quickly adopted the App Store model since it was such an obviously thing to install application directly to the device, but up until it was a major missing feature. All phones at the time required a computer tethered to do the purchase and installation. With the App Store the age of phones needing full general purpose computers was coming to an end. It was a whole cultural shift in software Later they started the iCloud sync so backups could be done ‘in the field’ as well.
      - paulryanrogers 1y ago
        I recall getting apps on my Blackberry and Treo before iPhone existed.
- mgh2 1y ago
  He was a great designer with low business acumen (without Jobs). His realm at Apple began crumbling when he executed a flawed strategy for the Apple watch launch as a fashion item, instead of a technology product geared toward health (Fitbit was 1st). It costed Apple 25M, and seemed like buying advertising from influencers (similar to 23andme launch). I usually value this youtuber's insights, but he has recently been reaching the wrong conclusions: https://youtu.be/JUG1PlqAUJk?si=_Y87UQGdhIo92a7r&t=469 https://youtu.be/JUG1PlqAUJk?si=_Y87UQGdhIo92a7r&t=469
FireBeyond 1y ago
[flagged]
- veidr 1y ago
  A fuck of a lot better than HomePod, LOL! (Context: I have 2 Apple TV devices and 5 HomePod devices in my home, plus one Apple Vision Pro. I only like one of those more than my Pixel 9 Fold.)
  - FireBeyond 1y ago
    I use HomePod Minis solely as Thread/Matter routers, as my home is set up very heavily with HomeKit. I have 2 in areas where I have a bunch of devices but no Apple TVs nearby. So fully invested. But yeah...
- api 1y ago
  The problem isn't that Vision Pro is a bad product. The problem is that it's built for a bad thesis. People don't want VR/AR goggles very much, or at least not many people do, and I think eventually we will stop trying to make this happen. VR/AR has niche applications: gaming, industrial and military AR uses, assistive uses with people who are mobility challenged, education. These are niche uses. Even gaming is a niche-- most gamers have demonstrated that a big-ass monitor is preferred over goggles. Making the goggles better may push this a little but I doubt it's going to lead to a landslide of gaming demand. VR/AR was largely a feature of dystopian sci-fi for a reason, too. Everyone jacking into goggles is dystopian. It's something that would appeal to people if the world got so shitty that you just don't even want to see what's in front of you, but I'd rather us spend our engineering effort making the world not get like that by solving some of our real world problems. I don't think I'm alone here. It might be a good idea for long duration space flight, but personally if I were on a ship on the way to Mars I'd rather read books or hang with my ship mates and talk about the problems we're going to face when we land. If I decided to go into space I'd rather experience life in space -- including the boring parts and the hard parts -- than jack into some kind of VR escape world. I could do that at home.
  - 1y ago

treetalker 1y ago

They're amazing at invading privacy!

ajkjk 1y ago

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.

underlipton 1y ago
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.
marssaxman 1y ago
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.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  Apple and everyone else has agree to Matter. But no one is going to buy an Apple home device if they aren’t already in the Apple ecosystem. Besides, Amazon, Google and even Apple services are all cross platform. While there isn’t an iCloud app for Android, there is one for Windows.

jayd16 1y ago

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 1y ago
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.
- exe34 1y ago
  I wonder if it might be useful if you had a phone, a tablet and one or two other form factors - but when you rub your finger on the detector, it loads your environment. but I can't imagine having to wait to use my phone or tablet. maybe the living room TV or the kitchen assistant.
exe34 1y ago
OS X was a multi user UNIX wasn't it?
simpleintheory 1y ago
It’s supported for iPads, just locked by software [1]. 1: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep9a34c2ba2/web https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep9a34c2ba...
- kalleboo 1y ago
  I don't know if this is still the case but the last time I saw this discussion, someone with experience using the "shared iPad" education feature said it seemed like a massive hack, and switching users was seemingly implemented by "seamlessly" doing a full reset of the iPad to the new user, taking a bunch of time to backup the old user and restore the new one, nothing like a quick user switch on macOS, and nothing you'd want to use as a family handing an iPad back and forth.

nytesky 1y ago

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-calendar-and-organizer.product.4000234720.html 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

pgwhalen 1y ago

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.

dyauspitr 1y ago

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.