Apple developing wall-mounted smart home 'command center' with AI Siri

Apple is working on a wall-mounted device for the smart home—a tablet-like screen that would hang in your kitchen or living room and let you control your lights, thermostats, and other connected devices without reaching for your phone. According to reporting from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the company is designing this as an inexpensive entry point into a category it hasn't really occupied before, a kind of physical command center for the connected home.

The device itself is modest in scale: a six-inch touchscreen with a square shape and a noticeable bezel around the edges, more like a compact iPad than a sleek modern tablet. What matters more than the hardware is what it's meant to do. The interface borrows from Apple's existing design language—it mixes the look and feel of the Apple Watch operating system with the iPhone's StandBy mode, that lock-screen display that activates when your phone is charging and lying flat. But the real innovation, according to people involved in its development, is how you interact with it. The device is built for voice first. You're meant to talk to it more than you tap it.

This is where Apple's push into artificial intelligence becomes central to the strategy. The company revealed in June that it's working on a significantly upgraded version of Siri, its voice assistant, designed to understand more complex requests and actually execute multi-step tasks without requiring you to spell everything out. That new Siri is still in development, but the wall-mounted device is being engineered specifically to showcase what this smarter voice assistant can do. A person with knowledge of the project told Gurman that the goal is to bring Siri and Apple Intelligence to life in a way the company hasn't managed on existing products. The timing suggests Apple is thinking of these pieces as a package: the wall-mounted device, the enhanced Siri, and the broader Apple Intelligence features are all expected to arrive around the same window, with a March launch date circulating in reports.

Apple already has a smart home platform called HomeKit that lets users manage compatible devices—lights, thermostats, locks, cameras, and more. Right now, you control those devices through your iPhone, Mac, iPad, or HomePod. The new wall-mounted display would be another control point, but it's designed to feel less like a secondary screen and more like a dedicated hub for the home, something you glance at or speak to as you move through your space. It would also handle video calls, adding another layer of utility beyond smart home management.

The price point matters. Bloomberg's sources suggest Apple is aiming for around $200, making it accessible to people who might not otherwise invest in a smart home control system. That's significantly cheaper than an iPad and positions it as a gateway product. There's also word of a more expensive follow-up in the works—a tabletop version mounted on a robot arm, which would presumably offer more flexibility and a premium experience. But the wall-mounted version is the near-term focus.

Gurman first reported on this project back in September, and Tuesday's reporting filled in the technical details. What emerges is a picture of Apple trying to own a specific moment in the home: the place where you need quick access to your connected devices and where voice interaction makes more sense than fumbling with an app. Whether the market actually wants such a device, and whether an AI-powered Siri can deliver on the promise of understanding complex requests, remains to be seen. But the company is clearly betting that the combination of a physical presence in the home, a smarter voice assistant, and the broader Apple Intelligence ecosystem will resonate with people who've been waiting for a more natural way to control their connected lives.