GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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John Ternus didn’t mention Apple Home once during his first keynote as Apple CEO. But he did open by describing an “intelligent personal hub” that prioritizes local processing, protects your privacy, and integrates with all your other devices, apps, and services. While Ternus was talking about the iPhone — not a new smart home device — what he spelled out is exactly what I want to see Apple make: an intelligent home hub, a computer for your home.
Rumors suggest Apple’s first smart home hub with a screen is imminent. While that’s long overdue, it’s likely to be more interface than infrastructure, a device that can run your home locally but still uses the cloud. What the smart home needs is a computer to run it — one that controls and processes data from connected devices locally, improving speed, reliability, and privacy while securely storing your digital life, from photos and files to music and movies. Crucially, it would do all this inside your home.
The cloud has worked well for years, but the recent proliferation of AI-powered home features, such as generating text descriptions from security camera footage, makes local computing more compelling. On-device processing can be faster and more private, and it depends less on an internet connection. These features will also evolve quickly to feed more context to our smart homes, bringing more utility but also a greater need for privacy and security.
The category of smart home super hubs emerged at IFA in Berlin this month. This is the Anker Eufy MindBase, a smart home hub that supports dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Thread, and Zigbee, and is a Matter controller. It runs an on-device, Anker-developed LLM with support for 16 wireless cameras with expandable local storage up to 48 TB. Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
This type of dedicated home computer — or smart home brain — was an emerging category at last week’s IFA consumer tech show. Anker launched its Eufy MindBase home hub, and Ugreen debuted its HomeAgent, both combining network-attached storage, local AI to process and store footage from cameras, with a smart home hub to connect all your devices.
But one piece is still missing: networking.
A hub. AI. A router. Are you getting it? Call it an Apple Home Server.
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