The device will apparently use AI to analyze activity in your home without actually filming it.
After finally making Siri a half-decent assistant in this year’s round of major OS updates, it looks like the smart home is going to Apple’s big area of focus in the coming months. Reliable Apple insider Mark Gurman revealed earlier this week that the company’s long-awaited home hub could arrive later in October, and in the debut episode of his new Power On podcast, he predicted that a security camera may follow. But unlike its many soon-to-be rivals, this one somewhat bizarrely won’t actually record video.
As well as the home hub device, which will be the centrepiece of the whole Siri-led smart home push, Gurman claims that Apple will also launch more powerful versions of the HomePod mini and Apple TV, which will both support the new Siri AI ecosystem. But the camera is arguably more interesting, as much for what it can’t do as what it can.
The Bloomberg reporter says the camera device is a companion product to Apple’s also as-yet unannounced smart home display, which the company is referring to internally as J490. These small cameras can be installed around your home and will apparently be cylindrical, resembling chapstick. Gurman says they will have a very low frame rate and crucially won’t actually offer video recording as a feature.
What’s the point of a camera that doesn’t capture moving images, you may ask? Apple appears to be mindful of the growing and very reasonable concerns about over-surveillance and what happens with that data, and so the sensor will instead use AI to analyze movement in your home. It’s not clear if you’ll be able to pull still images from it, but it will be able to do facial recognition.
If the camera identifies someone walking into a room, it can notify you of whether you know that person or not, but you’ll only receive text descriptions. As Gurman points out, a total lack of video footage probably won’t be particularly helpful to the police in the event that someone breaks into your home, but the added layer of privacy would definitely make Apple’s camera stand out in a crowded market.
Gurman added that the security camera will use “a very similar technology to what they‘re going to be using for the AirPods with cameras,” which leaked over the summer. Based on code buried in an early build of macOS Tahoe 26.7, these AirPods will each have their own tiny embedded cameras that take extremely low resolution RGB still images that can be analyzed using Visual Intelligence. In the wake of Meta’s “pervert glasses” fallout, Apple’s camera-equipped AirPods reportedly won’t be able to take pictures or record video.
