Apple shipped iOS 27 on September 14, 2026, and for once the Home app was near the top of the changelog instead of buried under it. The update brings 4K HomeKit Secure Video, Apple Intelligence-powered clip summaries and natural-language search, grouped notifications, a new Energy tab, and Thread 1.4 support — the biggest single upgrade to Apple’s smart home platform in years. There is, however, a catch hiding in the iCloud+ pricing.
4K HomeKit Secure Video arrives
The headline feature is one Apple confirmed in a single line on its iOS 27 page: supported cameras will now “stream and record in 4K” in the Home app. That is the whole of Apple’s official confirmation — there is no published list of which HomeKit Secure Video cameras get 4K, no word on whether a camera already installed in a home gains it via software, and no detail on frame rates, bitrates, or HDR handling.
What is confirmed: you will need a home hub — a second-generation HomePod, HomePod mini, or Apple TV 4K — plus an iCloud+ subscription. Recording continues to use HomeKit Secure Video’s end-to-end encryption, and as before, video recordings do not count against your iCloud storage quota. For households that bought into Apple’s camera story early, 4K is a meaningful jump from the 1080p ceiling the platform has lived with for years, even if the fine print is still missing.
Apple Intelligence comes to your cameras
The more transformative change may be what Apple Intelligence does with all that footage. The Home app can now generate automatic summaries and descriptions of motion alerts — turning raw clips into notifications like “Person detected at front door carrying a package” — and lets you search recordings with natural language across cameras from different brands. Instead of scrubbing through days of footage, you describe the event — a delivery, a person arriving — and the Home app surfaces the relevant clips.
Related alerts are also merged into single grouped notifications, so a motion sensor and a door sensor firing together produce one coherent message rather than a burst of pings. The system can reportedly distinguish known family members, delivery staff, and unknown visitors to sharpen those alerts. Searching is straightforward: open the Home app, select the camera, tap the search field in the recordings view, and describe what you are looking for in plain language.
The Energy tab and Thread 1.4
Beyond cameras, iOS 27 adds an Energy tab to the Home app for monitoring smart plugs and energy-using accessories — a nod to the growing role of energy management in the smart home. And under the hood, Apple has added Thread 1.4 support, with compatible Apple TVs picking it up via the tvOS 27 update. Thread 1.4 standardizes how border routers share network credentials, which should eventually end the era of every ecosystem spinning up its own separate Thread network in your home. Full credential sharing is still rolling out, but the foundation is now in the OS.
The iCloud+ catch
Here is the part Apple revealed only on launch day: the AI camera features are tiered by iCloud+ storage plan. Clip summaries cover one camera on the $9.99/month 2TB plan, two cameras on the $29.99/month 6TB plan, and five on the $59.99/month 12TB plan. Beta release notes had earlier indicated that the Apple Intelligence Home features would require at least the 2TB tier — the same tier that already unlocks unlimited HomeKit Secure Video cameras — but the per-camera summary limits only appeared at release.
The AI features also demand recent hardware: an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, and a hub running tvOS 27 or HomePod Software 27. For context, iCloud+ pricing in the US runs $0.99/month for 50GB and $2.99/month for 200GB, and the 2TB plan is included in the $37.95/month Apple One Premier bundle. Households with several cameras who want AI summaries everywhere could find themselves pushed toward the $29.99 or $59.99 tiers — a real cost of admission worth factoring in before you get excited.
How to use the new camera search
Using the new search is deliberately simple. Open the Home app and select the HomeKit Secure Video camera you want to review, then open the camera’s recorded activity or search interface and tap the search field. Describe the event in natural language — “package delivery at the front door,” “person arriving after 6 PM” — and the Home app returns matching clips across your cameras. Tap any result to watch it. The more specific your description, the narrower the results, which beats scrubbing through timeline thumbnails the old way. One caveat from early coverage: the feature only searches cameras that support the new Apple Intelligence processing, and everything still flows through your home hub, so a second-generation HomePod, HomePod mini, or Apple TV 4K remains mandatory.
What it means for Apple Home users
Taken together, iOS 27 is Apple’s clearest statement yet that the Home app is a first-class platform, not an accessory to the iPhone. 4K video closes a long-standing spec gap with Arlo, Ring, and Nest; cross-brand AI search is something none of those rivals offer inside a single app; and the Energy tab hints at where Apple wants to go next. The tiered iCloud+ gating will annoy, but for committed Apple Home households, this is the update that makes the ecosystem feel modern again. Just check your iCloud+ plan before you go hunting for that package thief with a sentence.