Roy_Knable
New member
Gurman's latest has Apple shipping a small square smart display, roughly seven inches, somewhere between October 2026 and early next year. Two variants apparently. Camera for video calls plus presence detection and user recognition, so the panel changes what it shows depending on who walks up to it. None of this is from Apple - the HomePad name, the size, the price, the date, all of it is reporting, and the schedule is described as flexible, which in Apple rumour terms usually means another spring goes by.
The detail worth chewing on for this forum is the OS. It's said to be built on tvOS rather than a cut-down iPadOS. If that holds, this is a sibling of the Apple TV box rather than a wall-mounted iPad, and that matters more than the screen size does. A tvOS device is a home hub. It handles Thread, it's an AirPlay target, and it's the thing that keeps your automations alive when every phone in the house is out. Right now that job sits on an Apple TV or a HomePod, and if your Apple TV lives in a rack that gets switched off with the projector and the amp, you have already discovered what happens to your schedules.
The per-user layout thing I'm less sold on. Apple has done face-aware profiles on the Apple TV for a while and I've watched it hand my account to whoever sat down first often enough to stop trusting it. A camera in a kitchen making that same guess is a harder sell.
For anyone whose HomeKit hub is an Apple TV sharing a power strip with the rest of the rack - would you actually buy a separate always-on box, or would you rather Apple just made the Apple TV stop sleeping?
The detail worth chewing on for this forum is the OS. It's said to be built on tvOS rather than a cut-down iPadOS. If that holds, this is a sibling of the Apple TV box rather than a wall-mounted iPad, and that matters more than the screen size does. A tvOS device is a home hub. It handles Thread, it's an AirPlay target, and it's the thing that keeps your automations alive when every phone in the house is out. Right now that job sits on an Apple TV or a HomePod, and if your Apple TV lives in a rack that gets switched off with the projector and the amp, you have already discovered what happens to your schedules.
The per-user layout thing I'm less sold on. Apple has done face-aware profiles on the Apple TV for a while and I've watched it hand my account to whoever sat down first often enough to stop trusting it. A camera in a kitchen making that same guess is a harder sell.
For anyone whose HomeKit hub is an Apple TV sharing a power strip with the rest of the rack - would you actually buy a separate always-on box, or would you rather Apple just made the Apple TV stop sleeping?
