Apple plans to make its long-delayed push into the smart-home market on 13 October with a new hub code-named J490, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The company also plans to announce the first update to the HomePod mini since the device’s 2020 debut and its first new TV set-top box since 2022, the report said. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Long-time hardware chief John Ternus took over as Apple’s CEO on 1 September, with analysts expecting his tenure to bring renewed emphasis on its core strength in devices and engineering, and on fusing AI capabilities into existing products. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Ternus is weighing a broad overhaul of the company aimed at sharpening its engineering focus and introducing products more frequently.
Apple has been seeking to expand its presence in the smart-home market while remaining anchored by its core iPhone business, which serves as the company’s flagship product and a key driver of its broader ecosystem.
The company currently offers the HomePod and HomePod mini as part of its smart-home line-up, while the Apple TV 4K set-top box is part of its home entertainment line-up.
Its commitment to the category has long looked half-hearted. HomeKit, Apple’s smart-home framework, has been around since 2014, Apple TV and HomePod speakers can already act as home hubs, and Apple has backed the Matter interoperability standard. Yet next to Amazon and Google, whose smart displays have been AI-first products for years, its ambitions have looked tentative, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod wrote in a column in August.
The upcoming hub, which is similar to Amazon’s Echo Show and Google’s Nest Hub smart displays, will take the form of a small, roughly square display, with versions that can be mounted on a wall or placed on a countertop, according to the Bloomberg report.
The missing piece
The hub will recognise individual household members and provide personalised content and responses based on their data and accounts, the report said.
The new HomePod mini and Apple TV will retain their current designs but include faster processors to support Siri’s more powerful AI models, the report said. In June, Apple unveiled a long-delayed overhaul of Siri as part of a broader effort to strengthen its AI capabilities.
Siri was the missing piece. The hub was delayed repeatedly because the old assistant was not capable enough to serve as its primary interface. The rebuilt assistant, Siri AI, runs partly on the device and, for heavier work, on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers. It began rolling out in beta with iOS 27 on 14 September, and South Africa is on the initial launch list.
McLeod argued that much of the intelligence a smart home needs is narrow, repetitive and intensely personal: who is home, which rooms they are in, their routines, cameras, appliances and electricity use. That is the data people will be least willing to send to the public cloud, and it plays to Apple’s strengths in efficient on-device silicon and privacy. In August, Apple marketed its new Mac mini as a machine for “always-on agentic computing”, meaning AI agents that run continuously.
Apple controls the chips, operating systems, phones, watches, televisions, speakers and computers that such a home would rely on, and hundreds of millions of customers already own several of them. “The smart home has spent 15 years as a hobby for people willing to fiddle with hubs, automations, incompatible standards and badly designed apps,” McLeod wrote. “AI finally offers a way to hide that complexity behind ordinary language. Instead of programming the house, you talk to it.” — Harshita Mary Varghese, (c) 2026 Reuters, with additional reporting (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
