Apple is expected to unveil a bunch of new products in the first quarter of 2025, including an M4 MacBook Air refresh, the exciting iPhone SE 4, and a new iPad Air. But not all new Apple products set to hit stores in early 2025 will be updates to existing lineups.
We learned a few days ago that Apple plans to introduce a wall-mountable iPad-like device as soon as March 2025. The point of the gadget is to act as a controller for the smart home. The unnamed iPad-like gadget will become the center of your smart home, rocking an operating system that will feature elements from watchOS and iOS.
The new smart device is expected to be about as big as two iPhones sitting side by side. It’ll have a 6-inch display, and these comparisons made me think that some of the development work going into this product might benefit a future foldable iPhone.
But the smart home hub will look and behave like a smaller iPad whose primary focus will be the home. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman explained how the device will work in a new report, making me question whether I’ll ever need such a gadget.
Gurman said in his Power On newsletter over the weekend that the smart home device will run a homeOS operating system that supports Apple Intelligence and the smart Siri assistant. The latter will let users control software by voice via the new App Intents feature.
The gadget will run many Apple apps, including Safari, Notes, and Calendar. The user interface will be focused on a customizable screen featuring widgets similar to the iPhone and regular iPad, as well as smart home controls.
Gurman says that features like the iPhone’s StandBy Mode and Control Center update in iOS 18 are precursors of the new smart home device. These features make it easy to control a smart home from the iPhone and iPad.
The more I read about the 6-inch smart display, the more I wonder whether I’d really need one. Gurman says the gadget will be available in silver and black, and it’ll look like a low-end iPad. It’ll feature a camera for FaceTime, speakers, and a built-in battery. Built-in sensors will change the UI depending on how far the user is from the screen, which is a nifty feature.
“Apple envisions customers using the device as an intercom, with people FaceTiming each other from different rooms,” Gurman says. This sort of usage implies buying multiple iPads for the home and mounting them in various rooms of the house. It’s also something I will probably never want to do.
The smart home features of this device would be a different matter, and I can see the need to have a standalone gadget for controlling the home. Gurman says you’ll be able to use the device to check security footage, control lights, and control music. Gurman says the product should be “more polished and feature-packed than its Amazon and Google counterparts.”
The report notes that the smart display will work with hundreds of HomeKit-compatible devices, which is to be expected.
Apple is also rumored to launch its own smart home camera in 2026. It obviously should work well with the smart display Gurman has been detailing.
What’s missing here is a tentative price. The cheapest iPad 10 you can score right now starts at $349, so perhaps we should expect the smart display to cost about that much or even less. Of course, the iPad 10 could easily become a smart home hub. It can also be mounted on a wall. The success of a 6-inch smart display with more limited capabilities likely depends on how much Apple will charge for it.
