Apple plans to launch its long-delayed smart home hub, a new HomePod mini and a new Apple TV on Tuesday, October 13th, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reported. That’s a report, not an announcement. Apple hasn’t confirmed the date, and a spokesperson declined to comment to Bloomberg.
The hub is the headline act. Gurman said it has a roughly 6-inch square screen on a metal arm above a round speaker base, which is to say it looks like a tiny iMac G4. A wall-mounted version is coming too. Neither has a battery, so both stay plugged in over USB-C. The trick is that it knows who’s in the room: it recognizes household members by voice or face and shows each person their own calendar, messages and notes, with a guest mode that hides all of it. Face recognition is less reliable than Face ID, Bloomberg said, so your iPhone works as the backup.
The HomePod mini and Apple TV keep their current designs but get faster chips to run Siri AI, Apple’s rebuilt assistant, according to the report. The mini also gets new colors, including green and pink. It’s the first HomePod mini update since 2020 and the first new Apple TV since 2022. All three were planned for 2024 and then waited on the new Siri, which makes them two years late. For Siri, that’s about on schedule.
Then there’s round two. MacRumors said multiple sources told it Apple has more products coming in the final week of October. It doesn’t know which ones, but its best guesses are all Macs: the long-rumored OLED MacBook Pro (some call it MacBook Ultra), plus a base 14-inch MacBook Pro and an iMac, both with the M6, Apple’s next Mac chip. Gurman said on his Power On podcast October 1st that the touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro could arrive “as early as October,” though “it could slip to November.”
Here’s what Apple has actually put on the calendar. The iPhone Duo, its first foldable, goes on sale Friday, October 23rd, and a Mac Studio with 512GB of memory is “coming in late October,” both per Apple’s own press releases. Everything else is reporting. Gurman is about as well-sourced as Apple coverage gets, but launch plans move, and nothing is real until Apple says so.
Bloomberg also called the home push a major early test for John Ternus, who took over as Apple’s CEO on September 1st. So, you know – no pressure. Either way, if you were looking to buy a HomePod mini or an Apple TV, wait a week. If it’s a Mac, you might want to wait three.
