Apple is preparing a push into the smart home with a new Apple TV 4K, an updated HomePod mini, and a hub device built around its rebuilt Siri, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported on Tuesday. The hardware for the first two has reportedly been finished for months and is already being tested by Apple employees on the Cupertino campus.

That detail is the story. Apple did not have a hardware problem, it had a software one, and the entire lineup sat waiting on an assistant that kept slipping.

What is coming

The new Apple TV 4K keeps the current form factor but replaces the ageing A15 with an A17 Pro or better, enough to run Apple Intelligence and Siri AI. The current box supports no Apple Intelligence features at all, so the chip upgrade is what makes the rest of the strategy possible.

It is also expected to gain more RAM and Apple’s N1 networking chip, bringing Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread. The HomePod mini is a more conservative refresh, with a faster chip, an upgraded ultra-wideband chip, new colours, and no new form factor.

The hub is the ambitious part

The long-delayed smart home hub is reportedly an iPad-like device with a seven-inch square display, offered with either a wall mount or a speaker base whose hemispherical dome recalls the iMac G4. Rumoured pricing sits around $350.

It would carry a camera for video calls, facial recognition, and presence detection, and run Safari, Calendar, Photos, and Home alongside Siri AI. Apple is also reportedly designing its own security camera, potentially this year, as iOS 27 brings 4K recording, AI summaries, and cross-camera event stitching to HomeKit Secure Video.

Why it took this long

Apple finally shipped its AI do-over at WWDC in June, unveiling Siri AI as a standalone app with personal context, multi-step commands across apps, and a three-tier privacy architecture. Public release is projected for September, which is what unlocks the hardware.

The rebuilt assistant is not entirely Apple’s own. Siri now runs on a custom Gemini model of roughly 1.2 trillion parameters, licensed from Google in a deal reported at around $1 billion a year, with simple tasks staying on-device.

Some of the promised capability is still missing. Apple built a third-party AI extensions system for Siri and then declined to show it at WWDC, leaving open how much of the assistant’s app integration will exist at launch.

The European problem

There is a complication for anyone buying this hardware in the EU. Siri AI will not be available on iPhone or iPad in the European Union when iOS 27 ships, and this time Apple has given no timeline.

That leaves European customers facing a smart home lineup whose central selling point is an assistant they cannot yet use. A faster Apple TV is still a faster Apple TV, but the case for the hub in particular rests almost entirely on Siri AI.

The competitive position

Apple is arriving late to a market that reorganised without it. Amazon and Google spent years expanding Alexa and Google Assistant into broader AI ecosystems while HomePod and Siri largely stood still.

The interoperability question has also moved on. Matter-certified devices now work across Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung ecosystems without extra configuration, shifting competition from device compatibility towards software quality and assistant capability.

That shift should favour whoever has the best assistant. It is not obvious that Apple can claim that, having licensed its frontier model from a direct competitor in the smart home market.

When it might land

The Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini could arrive as soon as September, potentially alongside the iPhone launch. Apple often holds a second autumn event, usually for iPads or Macs, and a home-focused October event is a plausible alternative given how many devices are queued.

None of this is confirmed. Apple has not announced any of these products, timelines have slipped repeatedly before, and the reporting rests on people familiar with plans that Apple itself has changed more than once.

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.