Apple's HomePad: Could It Be the Ultimate Smart Home Hub?

A smart home speaker with a screen would be an awesome device, and it looks like we might be finally getting a little closer to that reality.

The technology is there. A HomePad, as it’s being called, could literally be an iPad screen with the HomePod’s great speakers behind it. So what’s taken so long? After all, smart speakers with screens aren’t exactly new. Amazon has the Echo Hub, and Google’s dock-able Pixel tablet. Perhaps Apple just hasn’t managed to get the software side of things right yet (though that’s getting easier as Matter continues to mature and be adopted by smart device makers). Or maybe it is hamstrung by its own aversion to allowing more than one user to log into an iOS device. Whatever the reason, it’s a real shame because an Apple smart home display could be awesome.

“My wife often FaceTimes with her sister in the mornings before work while she’s getting her breakfast together. She pops her phone on the stand and sometimes sends the audio to the kitchen HomePod if she’s got noisy breakfast cooking going on. A device like that would be great for her,” writes HomePod owner Seek3r in a MacRumors forum thread participated in by Lifewire.

What Could a HomePad Be Good For?

At the risk of stating the obvious, there are two parts of a smart screen/speaker, and Apple is peerless in making both. The HomePod mini is already the best smart speaker you can buy in terms of sound quality. And the iPad’s screen is similarly hard to beat. Now, you don’t really need a fancy screen if all you’re doing is looking at reminders, choosing music, and so on, but since Apple’s release of Apple Intelligence, it’s easy to imagine that it will do so much more than that. 

Imagine HomePod with a big iPad Pro-sized screen, a kind of portable TV for the modern day. It would be amazing to watch movies and TV shows on that, especially with the Spatial Audio capabilities available in today’s iPads. 

But to be honest, a really useful smart home screen doesn’t have to be much bigger than an iPad mini. And the adoption of the Matter standard means an Apple HomePad could connect to all kinds of (non-Apple branded) devices. Then add Apple Intelligence, and you’ve got something that’s truly useful for controlling your smart home. For example, if you have a compatible smart camera set up, you can view its feed or recordings on the device. You could see who’s at the door, for example, or ask Siri to show you the front porch to see if the delivery person has just dumped the box and run off again. Apple Intelligence could even notify you if the person is friend or foe before you even look at the video feed.

It could “display a variety of different types of visual material, including images, movies, and animations. This would make the user’s experience better while opening up new doors for interactive content. With the assistance of visual displays, users, for instance, can view directions for preparing recipes, watch films, and operate the equipment in their smart homes,” James White of design, communication, and media training company MediaFirst told Lifewire via email. 

You can do most of this with other smart screens, but there’s one important feature that none of them have…

Apple Smart Home Display With Privacy

A new HomePad could be the perfect Home Hub, as Apple calls it. It’s a central brain for any of your smart home devices, and unlike other vendors, Apple offers one essential feature: privacy—especially when you’re connecting with Apple’s smart home devices. If you use HomeKit Secure Video, for example, the video recordings are encrypted and can only be unlocked by a key stored on your devices. While Amazon and Google’s offerings might provide the same functionality, Amazon’s Alexa gobbles up user data and Google uses your information to sell ads. This might make you think twice about trusting them. 

Apple’s welcome obsession with privacy brings us to our final point: multiple users sharing the same device. If we take the iPhone and iPad as the model for Apple’s future HomePad screen, it doesn’t look good. Well over a decade into its life, the iPad remains, like the iPhone, strictly single-user (a multi-user option is available in education, but as schools mostly use Chromebooks, it’s a rather niche feature). No matter how powerful your iPad is, no matter that it has plenty of RAM and storage—you cannot let another person log in and use it like you can with a Mac. 

Fortunately, the answer comes from Apple’s own HomePods. When you first set up a new HomePod, you can have it recognize your voice and use that to personalize your experience.

For example, it will draw music from your own Apple Music library and playlists and allow you to interact with the calendar, have Siri read your messages, and so on. This works for multiple users and should be how a future Apple smart home display could work. If it ever gets here.