Apple is finally ready to put a screen on your wall. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the company plans to launch its long-rumored smart home hub — widely called the HomePad — on October 13, 2026, marking Apple’s most serious push into the smart home market in years. The device is expected to arrive alongside an updated HomePod mini with new colors and a new Apple TV 4K with Siri AI support.
What the HomePad is expected to be
The HomePad, reportedly codenamed J490, is a roughly 6-inch square touchscreen display designed as a central control panel for the Apple smart home. Two versions are said to be in the works: a tabletop model with a design inspired by the iconic iMac G4 — a rounded metal speaker base connected to the display by an articulated arm that lets the screen tilt — and a wall-mountable version with a slimmer base housing the speakers and microphones. The iMac G4, with its hemispherical base and free-floating screen, remains one of Apple’s most beloved designs, and reviving it for a home product would be a deliberate statement.
Leaker and prototype collector Kosutami has added more color, reporting that one prototype features a MagSafe-like magnetic snap-to-wall capability along with doorbell integration, and that the device is heavily reliant on Apple Intelligence. The Information’s Wayne Ma reported earlier this year that Apple was also exploring a variant with a robotic swiveling base that could follow users around the room. The device is expected to handle everything a modern smart display does: control HomeKit and Matter accessories, make FaceTime video calls with its front-facing camera, play music through its built-in speaker, show photo slideshows, and run Intercom-style communication between rooms. Apple reportedly envisions customers placing multiple units around their homes rather than relying on a single central display. Power comes via USB-C, and the device is not expected to have a built-in battery, so it will need a permanent spot near an outlet.
homeOS: a brand-new operating system
The HomePad is expected to debut homeOS, an entirely new Apple operating system built on tvOS rather than iOS or iPadOS. According to reports, its interface borrows ideas from tvOS, watchOS, and the iPhone’s StandBy mode, centering on clock faces, photos, widgets, apps, and smart home controls.
One of the more intriguing details: the interface is said to adapt automatically depending on who is looking at the display and how far away they are. Facial recognition would identify individual household members and surface personalized calendars, notes, and content, while the layout shifts from glanceable information at a distance to detailed controls as someone approaches. Leaked setup screens have also revealed a Photo Face powered by iCloud Photos, displaying selected people, pets, places, Memories, and shared albums alongside a large clock. Code references to the new platform have been surfacing in Apple’s software since an iOS 26 leak late last year, which is how much of this picture was assembled in the first place.
Siri AI is the whole point — and the reason for the delay
Every report agrees on one thing: the HomePad waited on software, not hardware. The device was reportedly delayed for well over a year while Apple reworked Siri, and its launch will be judged on whether the new Siri AI can reliably understand spoken requests from across a room — a far harder environment than a phone, where several people share the device, requests arrive without a screen tap to confirm them, and mistakes with lights, locks, and routines are immediately noticeable.
Siri AI is expected to sit at the center of homeOS, handling accessory control, personal information retrieval across Apple devices and accounts, reminders, calendars, and precise in-app tasks. The home screen will support widgets and customizable clock faces, and the system is designed to find information stored across a user’s Apple devices — locating photos, playing previously shared media, and managing Notes, Reminders, and Calendar by voice. If Siri stumbles here, in the exact environment a home hub lives in, it will be hard to call the launch a success no matter how good the hardware looks.
Colors, pricing, and the competition
Leaker pdfu, who surfaced HomePad setup screens, reports the device may launch in four finishes: Silver, Space Gray, Starlight, and Rose Pink, with the setup process adapting its preview art to the hardware color. Pricing remains unconfirmed, though earlier reports suggested a figure around $350. A tabletop speaker-base model and a wall-mount version could also carry different prices, giving Apple room to segment the lineup.
The HomePad would put Apple in direct competition with Amazon’s Echo Show and Google’s Nest Hub, both of which have offered screen-based home hubs for years. Apple’s differentiators would be its privacy-first local processing, deep integration with the Apple Home app and HomeKit Secure Video, and the new Siri AI experience. Amazon and Google have spent years refining far-field voice and household profiles; Apple is betting that a more capable Siri plus its ecosystem lock-in can close that gap in one leap. Whether that is enough to win over households already invested in rival ecosystems is the open question — and October 13 may finally give us the answer.
What to watch next
With the reported launch date approaching, expect the usual pre-announcement leaks to intensify — and possibly an Apple event to frame the story, with review units for related products reportedly going out around the same time. For smart home shoppers, the key questions are price, exactly which HomePod mini and Apple TV 4K updates ship alongside the hub, and whether Siri AI is genuinely ready for the living room. A strong launch could finally give Apple Home the centerpiece it has always lacked; a weak one would raise harder questions about Apple’s AI execution. We’ll be covering the launch as it happens.