Apple is overhauling its retail stores to make room for a new line of smart home products — including a 7-inch hub with facial recognition that wants to sit in the middle of your house and listen to everything.
The stakes are straightforward: Apple is building a device designed to interface with your doorbell camera, your thermostat, your appliances, and every other internet-connected thing in your home, recognize each member of your household by face, and route it all through Siri. The smart home has always been the surveillance home. Now Apple is rearranging the furniture — literally — to make sure you're comfortable buying in.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman first reported the retail changes. According to 9to5Mac, Apple is preparing "significant changes" to the Avenues sections of its stores — the peripheral areas where accessories and smaller products currently sit — including rearranging displays and adding accessory bays to showcase new products. The scale of those modifications, Gurman wrote, "suggests something else is coming: the long-anticipated home hub with a display. The planned modifications appear too extensive to be solely about routine updates to existing products."
That hub is the one to watch. Both outlets confirm the device will sport a 7-inch square display and come in two versions: one with a built-in speaker and another with magnets for wall mounting. It will run a new operating system with widgets, support FaceTime calls, serve as a command center for all your smart home accessories, and ship with an A18 chip. Gizmodo reported that the hub "may also have custom interactions with different members of the household triggered by facial recognition."
A refreshed HomePod mini and Apple TV 4K are also expected this fall, alongside a new Siri Remote. 9to5Mac noted that Apple's entire Home product lineup had been bottlenecked by delays in the company's Siri revamp, and that the products are now ready to ship.
Neither outlet spent much time on the obvious question: what happens when a single company's hardware runs your doorbell, your thermostat, your speaker, and a screen that watches who's in the room. Gizmodo acknowledged the facial recognition feature with a shrug — "if you're into that sort of thing" — and moved on. 9to5Mac didn't raise it at all, opting instead to list accessory recommendations at the bottom of its story.
Apple's business model here isn't complicated. The Avenues display redesign exists because, as Gurman put it, current store layouts "aren't particularly well suited to demonstrating such a product." Translation: most people don't yet know why they'd want a home hub, so Apple needs to build an experience that manufactures that desire.
The question isn't whether the technology works. It's whether a household run through a single corporate ecosystem — doorbell to thermostat to speaker to screen, all reporting back to Cupertino — is a convenience or a liability. The founders debated standing armies in peacetime. They didn't have to debate microphones in every room. We do.
