Apple is reportedly preparing its biggest smart home push in years, with a redesigned Siri expected to become the centerpiece of an expanded connected-device ecosystem.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is planning a new smart home hub that combines a HomePod-style speaker with a seven-inch display, alongside refreshed HomePod mini and Apple TV hardware. The devices are expected to rely heavily on a more capable Siri that can handle more complex requests and better coordinate smart home controls.
For Apple, the bigger challenge isn’t launching new hardware—it’s convincing users that Siri can finally compete with AI assistants from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic while making the smart home a more meaningful part of its ecosystem.
Revamped Siri may improve Apple’s smart home share
Apple’s attempts to make inroads into the AI market have had limited success so far, but the new Siri could represent a turning point for the iPhone maker. It is powered in part by Google Gemini, while Nvidia has reportedly supplied Apple with Blackwell chips to support more advanced features.
The revamped assistant will be capable of handling far more complex tasks, but whether that will be enough to pull users away from preferred AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude remains unclear. Apple can integrate Siri more deeply into iOS and the smart home than rival chatbot providers, but it could face an uphill battle if the assistant remains less capable than its competitors.
Price may also reduce demand for Apple’s new smart home devices. The company has raised prices across almost all of its hardware apart from the iPhone, with some products becoming as much as $300 more expensive. Strong demand for memory chips, driven by the expansion of AI data centres, has led all major memory manufacturers to raise prices.
Smart home services still generate little revenue
The smart home is increasingly seen as an important battleground in the AI market, providing a key entry point for users to interact with voice-led AI services. However, it remains unclear whether these devices can generate meaningful profits, as most interactions involve low-value tasks such as playing music or checking the weather.
Amazon has led the market for more than a decade through Alexa, but the vast majority of tasks performed through the assistant generate no revenue. Early projections that consumers would use Alexa speakers to order products from Amazon or search for flights failed to reflect how most people actually use the devices. Amazon reportedly lost more than $25 billion on its Alexa-led devices business between 2017 and 2021, according to The Wall Street Journal.
With most leading chatbots charging around $20 a month for premium features, and newer large language models better able to understand complex requests, users may eventually pay more for voice services or use them for higher-value tasks. That outcome is far from certain, however, as most chatbot interactions still take place through text rather than voice.
Whether Apple’s latest smart home push succeeds may depend less on the hardware than on whether Siri can finally become an AI assistant users rely on every day. If the revamped assistant delivers meaningful improvements, it could strengthen Apple’s position in connected homes. If not, the company risks joining Amazon and Google in proving that smart speakers are easy to sell—but much harder to turn into profitable AI platforms.
Related News: Apple is also reportedly preparing a new AI-powered smart home hub alongside refreshed Apple TV and HomePod mini devices, with launches expected between October and early next year.