Forget the iPhone: Apple’s real next act is your home

The most interesting thing at Apple’s September iPhone keynote might not be the iPhone.

That is an odd thing to say in a year when Apple is expected to introduce its first folding smartphone, possibly called the iPhone Ultra. Alongside it should come the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, while the standard iPhone 18 is reportedly held over until next year. Even the Pro models are expected to be evolutionary: better cameras, an A20 Pro built on a 2nm process, the usual refinements.

The event, scheduled for 9 September, will also be John Ternus’s first keynote as CEO having taken over from Tim Cook on 1 September.

The foldable will attract enormous attention. But if you want to understand where Apple is heading over the next few years, pay closer attention to everything happening around the iPhone. In particular, watch the home.

Apple has spent years looking strangely uncommitted to the smart home. HomeKit has been around since 2014. Apple TV and its HomePod speakers can already act as home hubs. Apple has backed Matter enthusiastically. Yet next to Amazon and Google, whose smart displays have been AI-first products for years, its ambitions have looked tentative.

That is all about to change. Apple is widely reported to be preparing a new Apple TV, a refreshed HomePod mini and, most intriguingly, a smart-home display unofficially called the HomePad: a roughly seven-inch square screen with a speaker, camera and presence detection, running an operating system derived from tvOS, in wall-mounted and tabletop versions.

The HomePad may not appear on 9 September. Reports suggest it could arrive anywhere between October and year-end. What matters is that the pieces are finally in place.

The missing piece was Siri. Apple’s home hub was delayed repeatedly because the old assistant simply wasn’t clever enough to be its primary interface. That stopped being theoretical in June, when Apple unveiled Siri AI , rebuilt around foundation models that run partly on the device and, for heavier work, on its Private Cloud Compute infrastructure. South Africa is on the initial launch list, alongside Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore and the UK.

The first generation of the consumer AI boom has been overwhelmingly cloud-based. We type extraordinarily personal information into enormous models running in remote data centres operated by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

For many tasks that makes sense. Frontier models need absurd quantities of computing power. But switching off the kitchen lights does not need a frontier model. Neither does checking what time the geyser came on, whether the garage door is open, which room somebody is in, or telling the house to lock up and kill the music because you are going to bed.

Much of the intelligence a smart home needs is narrow, repetitive and intensely personal. It involves knowing who is home, which rooms they are in, their routines, their cameras and microphones, their appliances, their electricity consumption, and perhaps eventually their health.