So, as you may have seen, the HomePod Mini just got a new Midnight color. It looks cool and all (pretty much identical to Space Grey), but in the face of Apple Intelligence being announced at WWDC, this is such a missed opportunity.
Much like my frustration at England’s poor attacking play against Spain in the Euro 2024 final, AI just set up the perfect cross into the box and Apple just didn’t bother to tap it into the net.
My sadness at the 58 years of hurt continuing aside, let me explain why a more dramatic HomePod update is so desperately needed, and why (at least for now), the better Apple smart home speaker solution is your iPhone 15 Pro connected to something like the Beats Pill.
Apple Intelligence in the home
Currently, Apple Intelligence is a cross-device AI across iPhone, iPad and Mac — its new “personal intelligence” system that pairs generative models with “personal context” (your personal information) to be a useful and relevant assistant.
The vast majority of this is done on-device for privacy, but if a powerful Large Language Model (LLM) is needed, Apple can send your request to it in a secure manner. Currently that LLM of choice will be ChatGPT.
Benefits of this setup (beyond the silly things like Genmoji) include the likes of new system-wide writing tools to assist with wording, audio recording and transcribing, and (most important to my point) a vastly improved Siri that has better understanding of personal context and natural conversation.
On these devices, the promise of this is intriguing, but when you think about what that could do to a smart home, it absolutely slaps. A context-aware Siri could drastically improve conversational understanding (such as maybe stumbling and correcting yourself on what home scene to turn on), or be able to ask it to take action based on an answer the HomePod has given you.
Or maybe if you had a bunch of ingredients and no idea what to make with them, that can be the chance for HomePod to go to GPT-4o and give you step-by-step instructions with pre-prepared timers for every step of cooking.
Currently, we have Siri personal requests, which are good but rather limited in scope as to what actions can be taken, and there is just too much unreliability there to be worthwhile (it’s a 50/50 chance my HomePod will tell me my iPhone is not connected).
Plus, think about the ways the smart home could learn from the personal context your HomePod could have on its Neural Engine. There’s plenty of opportunities for this to learn your routines around the home and make proactive suggestions — such as picking a good time to workout, turning on the A/C and loading up the latest Apple Fitness+ workout.
But as of now, these speakers are now just good-sounding speakers with some barebones smart home abilities that you’d be faster doing on your phone.
Playing it too safe?
That last bit got me thinking. When it comes to what would be a smarter smart speaker, it’s not the HomePod. Instead, it would be a combination of my iPhone 15 Pro in Standby mode connected to a bluetooth speaker. You’ve got all that Apple Intelligence goodness with the added benefit of a screen to boot.
And I wouldn’t blame the company if that’s what it intended to do — kill off the HomePod speaker range and focus on making the iPhone (or even an iPad with MagSafe) the controller of your smart home. If 2024 was the last time we ever heard about a HomePod, I’d be OK with that.
But instead, Apple has dressed up a nearly four-year-old mini device in a new color — a device with the same chip as an Apple Watch Series 5. This puts the speaker in a relative no man’s land, and one that may prove to scupper the company’s very ambitious AI plans.
Apple Intelligence runs on personal context, and there’s no context more personal than your home. This is such a missed opportunity, at least until we see this much-rumored HomePod with a screen (which they hopefully don’t put an Apple Watch chip inside).
