Apple rumored to be working on a smart home operating system version | Hacker News Reader

Apple rumored to be working on a smart home operating system version

macrumors.com

74 pointsmgh288 comments

In one sense this is logical. A HomePod with a screen and an iOS variant. On the other hand, what is this for? What uses do these smart home devices serve? We are a decade plus into the “smart home” era and most of these things are more trouble than they are worth.

Apple has on a few occasions in the past come in after people have spent a lot of time and energy developing things and making a small market, figuring out how it should actually work, making a nice version 1.0 of how it should actually work, making that market explode 100-fold and taking all the money.

That smart homes are more trouble than they are worth currently sounds to me like ripe territory for Apple to poach.

However not sure if without Jobs and Ive if they can actually do anything like what they used to.

Was Johnny Ive really a driver of innovation? Or just trading repairabily for vanity metrics?

You tell me, was the iPhone innovative?

No it was inevitable

the inevitable things are the greatest innovations (in the realm of technology)

Inevitable * in hindsight *

Innovation is the introduction of a new paradigm that works so well that people can no longer imagine not having

No one was close to the original iPhone at launch and they didn’t really catch up until ~iPhone 12 for truly competitive alternatives

It was inevitable in the sense the hardware was already available on the wholesale market. People tend to lionize these companies like they forged the phone out of the living earth themselves. Really they just contract with factories that assemble products out of components available on the wholesale market.

Sexy OS? You can argue that came mostly from within since that is how that software was developed, in house. But the hardware stack they ordered and had assembled for you? I’m not so sure.

Was Ive involved in the iPhone creation? Or only its enshittification?

When the iPhone was developed, Jony led industrial design but not yet software design.

Jony owned iPhone hardware design top-to-bottom through development and multiple launches

You think he’s glorified for literally nothing?

The iPhone wasn’t as innovative as the AppStore which didn’t come around until iPhone OS 2. Selling software like music changed everything

Cool. App Store extended the true innovation which was a fully capable OS in everyone’s pocket

App Store doesn’t exist without iPhone just like Windows doesn’t exist without the PC

Not really. There was a way of slab typed smart phones with capacitance touch screen windows mobile devices and they were more capable than the iPhone with on board GPS, etc. but they didn’t have an integrated App Store, which was the key to customer retention. The first iPhones didn’t have GPS and so the map app wasn’t quiet as capable as the other high end smart phones in the market as it couldn’t do directions properly. It had the best web browser, though.

Every other model of high end smart phones quickly adopted the App Store model since it was such an obviously thing to install application directly to the device, but up until it was a major missing feature. All phones at the time required a computer tethered to do the purchase and installation.

With the App Store the age of phones needing full general purpose computers was coming to an end. It was a whole cultural shift in software

Later they started the iCloud sync so backups could be done ‘in the field’ as well.

I recall getting apps on my Blackberry and Treo before iPhone existed.

He was a great designer with low business acumen (without Jobs).

His realm at Apple began crumbling when he executed a flawed strategy for the Apple watch launch as a fashion item, instead of a technology product geared toward health (Fitbit was 1st). It costed Apple 25M, and seemed like buying advertising from influencers (similar to 23andme launch).

I usually value this youtuber's insights, but he has recently been reaching the wrong conclusions: https://youtu.be/JUG1PlqAUJk?si=_Y87UQGdhIo92a7r&t=469

If I had to guess they are going to try and shoehorn AI into it to get a last gasp on the stock price going up.

They're amazing at invading privacy!

I feel like Apple has historical been good at taking things that are "good ideas but everyone is doing the execution so badly they haven't really caught on" into the "everyone uses it all the time" category (eg ipod, iphone, airpods). Certainly smart home stuff is kinda in the first category right now, like you said. Perhaps they believe they can give them the same treatment? It seems kinda plausible to me: there's no reason smart home stuff couldn't be a really good, seamless experience.

We tried the, "One company makes everything in your house," thing in the mid-century, and it didn't work. A home is an ecosystem - not the corpo buzzword that actually means "walled garden", but an actual ecosystem, with a diverse set of (often competing) "organisms" coexisting. An average room needs seating, storage, entertainment, and its contents are highly influenced by culture, lifestyle, memory, family, desire/ambition. Smart home products have become better over time as manufacturers realized that any given room is going to be a chaotic mix of other manufacturers' products, including those of competitors, and that the only way for the entire ecosystem to succeed is for all of the parts to play as nice together with each other as possible.

I feel like this is one of Apple's weaknesses. The AVP was a massive indication that they're not ready for that kind of paradigm, because even within their own product, apps (organisms) that should have been able to exist as complete digital "objects" and interact with others were instead siloed off experiences that took over the whole device.

Is it actually a good idea, though? It's crystal clear why companies would want to make and sell smart home devices which get customers locked into proprietary web services, but the problems these gadgets are meant to solve for the user have always struck me as... trivial. The last thing I want in my house are more fussy, flaky widgets to manage; they'd better have a really good reason to exist.

Apple and everyone else has agree to Matter.

But no one is going to buy an Apple home device if they aren’t already in the Apple ecosystem.

Besides, Amazon, Google and even Apple services are all cross platform. While there isn’t an iCloud app for Android, there is one for Windows.

If apple would make them less fussy, flaky and maybe let them just work without you managing them - would this already a good reason to exist?

I think this is something apple done right in the past. Like holding your new AirPods just beside your phone and the phone recognizes them.

That would certainly remove a significant obstacle, but my question is really more about whether the problems smart-home devices purport to solve actually matter enough to be worth inventing and buying this much new technology.

My vote is no. I can imagine no smart device that is easier and less troublesome than simple wall switches for my lights and a simple thermostat for my heating and cooling. The less technology the better in one’s home. It’s not conducive to a serene environment.

Something’s are pretty handy, like I go on vacation and forgot to turn off the heater/light. Open an app, click „off“, done. Yes, it might be an inconvenience if they are on for two weeks, but it could be also dangerous. Certain electronic devices still plugged in can cause fires. And yes, this might not count as „smart“ in the sense that it’s more „connected“.

Other scenario what would be nice is restocking. Fridge/kitchen cabinet „notice“ that something is running low and reminds me if I wanna put it on a shopping list. And again, yes it’s a small inconvenience if I return from the grocery store after work and open the fridge to see that I forgot milk. But I think that’s what’s technology is about: taking away inconveniences so we can focus on more important things.

The example with going on vacation is something I really enjoy because it’s removing some friction to „just go“ for me. Before I always took pictures of rooms, heater, power sockets etc before leaving because evertime I arrived a the hotel I thought „did I turnoff x? Did I locked the door?“. Now I just open an app and see if everything is fine and don’t worry the whole vacation.

Anything more than air, water, shelter, food, and companionship is trivial.

I want to live like I'm in Star Trek. The good Trek, not the new stuff.

So when I wake up to pee in the middle of the night because I'm an old man my bathroom light turns on, dimmed to its lowest level, upon detecting my presence in the bathroom. I do my business and stumble back to bed and the light turns itself off.

When I leave home my front door locks, and when I pull into the driveway it unlocks. Also if the sun has set, the driveway, front porch, and foyer lights turn on.

When I say "hey Siri, it's movie time" my projector turns on, the lights dim, and if music is playing elsewhere it stops.

One day I was on the road for work and a package was unexpectedly delivered. I texted my neighbor to put it in my garage and opened my garage door from 2,700 miles away. When they replied that it was safe from the rain, I closed it.

Triviality. Beautiful, glorious, triviality.

I love it.

Thanks for sharing that perspective; that's exactly what I was curious about.

agree with this completely. the goal (and maybe this is what Apple can do) is make this possible for everyone, not just clever motivated people. I think it takes more leadership than the industry has mustered.

(And maybe their successors can also make it cheap...)

Multi-user support is possibly something deserving of a larger rewrite to iOS. It's been a pretty big assumption in all of the devices outside Macos, right?

On the iPad and iOS front, I feel like the real driver of support for multiuser is families. I just can’t see it being a big desirable ask beyond families with kids because the devices form factors. If I am Apple, I am wondering if that subset market is big enough to add the feature. I love my wife and she loves me, but a single shared phone or iPad among us would create more problems than a coke bottle amid the bush people of the Kalahari.

I wonder if it might be useful if you had a phone, a tablet and one or two other form factors - but when you rub your finger on the detector, it loads your environment.

but I can't imagine having to wait to use my phone or tablet. maybe the living room TV or the kitchen assistant.

OS X was a multi user UNIX wasn't it?

It’s supported for iPads, just locked by software [1].

1: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep9a34c2ba...

I don't know if this is still the case but the last time I saw this discussion, someone with experience using the "shared iPad" education feature said it seemed like a massive hack, and switching users was seemingly implemented by "seamlessly" doing a full reset of the iPad to the new user, taking a bunch of time to backup the old user and restore the new one, nothing like a quick user switch on macOS, and nothing you'd want to use as a family handing an iPad back and forth.

We do so much on phones now and sometimes it’s easier on a big display.

This sounds like it would be a quick home hub to add stuff to the calendar, check that email about soccer game carpool, buy plane tickets or pay a bill you got in the mail.

Like this but way more functions.

https://www.costco.com/skylight-15%22-smart-touchscreen-cale...

I personally like to not carry my phone around the house, and in kitchen having recipes displayed or an interactive reader would be great. We have a Google home but it doesn’t have a proper browser or search other than voice so it’s very kludgy. Recipes on phone are annoying because the screen timeout.

I would recommend a laser display keyboard or maybe onscreen for somewhat more sophisticated actions, but maybe an LLM will suffice

I’m a sort of reluctant/embarrassed user of smart home technology. I understand your pause, but the opportunity is so clearly there, it’s just that no one has executed well enough on it yet.

I’m not sure that a new OS is really the way to get there, but hey maybe, I’m not an expert on the internal workings.

I agree. The only “smart home” features I use are turning of lights and some one off electrical outlets. Wake me up when we have humanoid robots in the home that I can ask to vacuum the house, do the dishes and fold the laundry. There’s some progress in that space and I would love to see it happen.

So, a new skin counts as "all-new"?

I can't wait to see the list of home automation gadgets it interoperates with. All five of them.

It's true that out of box compatibility is still kind of a mess, and Matter has not dramatically improved that, but if you're willing to run an instance of HomeAssistant or Homebridge you can get practically any home automation device to work with Homekit. I don't imagine that will change with the "new" os.

'all-new' meaning based on macOS just like iOS, watchOS, etc...

All new meaning yet another App Store target to build for and UX to support.

> For example, he expects there to be a hexagonal grid of apps, just like on the Apple Watch.

One of the worst UI experiences out there.

28 million watch sales may suggest that not everyone shares your opinion.

It'll also be a very different experience on a screen many times as large.

As someone who has owned every single Apple Watch model/generation and love the hardware, I agree with GP on the terrible UX of the app grid.

I only ever use mine for the face + notifications. The UX is godawful. I'd probably buy an Apple watch that only served to relay OTPs.

Since when are sales in any way correlated to quality of the product?

I think since forever...

https://frederik.today/blog/quality-vs-sales-affect-conversi...

https://avenuetalentpartners.com/2017/12/05/quality-always-w...

https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbescommunicationscouncil/...

Not saying it is a direct 1:1 correlation, but I think it's fair to say there is a correlation. And perhaps your definition of quality differs from others.

Apple Watch lets you switch between the unusable hexagonal grid and a list.

I’ve been an Apple Watch user for over ten years and switched from the grid to the list as soon as that was an option.

Also, thanks for introducing me to the term argumentum ad populum. I didn’t know what that was called before.

If you're trying to passive-aggressively imply my comment is a logical fallacy, I would counter with another one and say I think that's a false equivalence, as there is scientific data that shows quality of a product (which I am defining in this context as not thinking it is "one of the worst UI experiences") can in fact influence sales.

I also qualified my comment with "may suggest" so as to not imply it as some kind of unfounded fact.

https://www.enrichment.iocspublisher.org/index.php/enrichmen...

https://www.firstinsight.com/blog/price-vs-quality-what-matt...

Maybe your definition of quality differs from mine or these people though.

They sold 28 million? That's only 0.34% of all people, so I'm not sure that's the wild success you think it is.

This type of comment is so tiring. I didn’t say other people’s perspective wasn’t valid. I’m just offering mine.

By the way, by your logic $200 laptops/Chromebooks are better than MacBook Pros, since they sell so much better. McDonald’s is actually better than Michelin starred cuisine, too.

Also you’re basically locked into an Apple Watch as the only wearable that can actually do anything so it’s not really a free market of wearables on iOS.

This is a logical fallacy in two dimensions.

First, you're conflating one UI option in the product with the entire product. It could be that 28 million users are using the list-based view.

Second, you're implying that high sales of a product are correlated with quality. This isn't true: high sales are a result of demand and available options, as well as target audience. In Apple's case, because users don't buy a specific product from Apple, but rather buy into the entire ecosystem, Apple users don't typically have the choices that other users have. So it's perfectly viable that they would want the Apple Music integration and the iMessage integration, but hate the UI of the launcher.

Finally, the 'may suggest' phrasing doesn't sound like good faith, but rather a sarcastic quip, which is why I suspect you've been voted down.

Wow Apple watch in the mac form factor. It's like they want to be known for the worst OSes possible.

Agreed. Super frustrating

I'm in the minority here. I switched from list to hex. The hex allows for me to select X more apps versus scrolling down and looking for it. It was painful at first since I needed to remember what logos mapped to what app.

YMMV. I also hate it (and use the simple, GenX-compatible alphabetically-ordered list) but all my kids and also my wife prefer the weird hex grid — they're just faster with it, it doesn't slow them down the way it does to my 1970s heavy-rock brain ¯\\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯

I can see how it is faster since you can see more apps at once but I just hate the scavenger hunt of it.

I feel like something normal like a 4x4 grid with multiple customizable pages would have made more sense.

I’m amazed not a single comment here has mentioned tvOS. Even TFA barely mentions it. My Apple TV device acts as my smarthome/home app hub, and tvOS already supports multiple users.

It's such a pity to see how much respect Apple has lost due to its lack of real technological ambition. Just a few years ago, Apple was admired for pushing boundaries—now it feels like history is repeating itself.

I think it's more there's nothing left to be done.

There have been little refinements but airliners look the same as they did in the 60s and the basics of all of it are just the same as they were 60 years ago as now.

Operating systems are the same.

Airliners look the same because of regulations

Are you saying there is not technology left?

No. Just when it comes to the user-facing aspects of a computer/phone/tablet operating system, there's nothing left to do besides little tweaks.

> I think it's more there's nothing left to be done.

They could have worked on improving Siri and captured the most of the AI Assistant market but they simply dropped the ball.

So is this about the kernel, or just the GUI layer? Or somewhere in between?

Somewhere in between. “New os” is them taking the base components of the OS and excluding some, including some new ones, changing the UX and DX, and defining how it fits into their broader ecosystem (in addition to things like adding new hardware support and whatnot).

Probably mostly the GUI and some different set of system services / APIs. I think all of the OSes are the same XNU/Darwin base and then diverge dramatically in user space.

This is true to the best of our knowledge for their GUI-less OSes running on the HDMI adapter, T2 chips, and display chips as well.

They still package the kernel differently. It’s like Linux - you don’t compile in all the hardware support into one package - just the set of hardware it needs to support. And Apple has generally unified a lot of the HW architecture across their product line but there are always small differences here and there.

They also have RTKit (a RTOS as the name suggests) for simpler devices such as AirPods, AirTags and some dumber stuff.

Apple wants you to buy a new phone every year.

Home automation needs support for 30 years.

IoT won't ever take off without strict regulations on long term support and open standards, including escrowed support.

Apple has the best track record of anyone for length of OS support on their phones.

They're also trying to pivot from hardware purchases to the recurring revenue of "services". If making your home smart gets you to pay monthly for "Apple One" they'd probably be happy to support that for ages.

Not a high bar to clear when your back only competition is Android. They do barely better than most.

Home / Homekit is Apple's ginger step-child. Unloved and ignored every OS update.

In the past I used to get excited for any rum or, teaser or upcoming release.

However, in this apple era I can’t.

Why? Because I can’t count on them to deliver.

The M series chips, and air pods have been a smashing success.

But the fact that Siri is still behind even pre LLM state of the art is abominable.

Apple vision was innovative. But the forward facing display, and titanium parts that bloated weight and cost was a sign of deteriorating design thinking.

Their delivery is so inconsistent lately its hard to trust the known what they’re doing with their future.

Oh my god please just stop and install HomeAssistant already.

developing a ui != developing an os.

AI-centric phone-like OS? .. hard pass. California gave rise to so many inspired and marvelous technology in the past, but this always-on Big Brother world built on massive pools of cash.. n-o spells no. I do not understand how people accept these consumer devices.

I assume another custom version of FreeBSD.

I roll my eyes every time someone regurgitates the FreeBSD line.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths#FreeBSD_is_Just_macOS_Without...

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