Apple’s ‘iPad-like’ smart home plan hits a tired market

Apple is allegedly preparing to introduce an iPad-like Control Center for smart homes. Equipped with a display and some form of homeOS, it is expected to be some kind of wall-mounted device that lets you access some Apple services, control smart home devices, handle security camera feeds, and the like. 

This sounds like a good idea. After all, we know there’s a market for sophisticated alarm systems, and Apple’s HomeKit Secure video system will no doubt play a part in what’s introduced.  As long as Siri really does improve, the company might have a hope of introducing something that works for a while. But will it?

Smart homes? It’s complicated…

I recently spent another fruitless hour trying to make my printer connect to my new Wi-Fi network, which it still won’t do. While doing that, I was also attempting to return an old HomePod to factory fresh (and make it stop making weird belching sounds) when it really hit me how utterly frustrating most “smart home” experiences still are.

Things that promise huge leaps in convenience can become hugely frustrating exercises, with a user experience that becomes characterized in folk memory by myopic attempts at stabbing tiny, awkwardly-placed holes with bent paperclips, or endlessly pressing software reset buttons that don’t seem to make anything happen.

That’s just the hardware user experience. The software adds another dimension. 

Who hasn’t found it quite creepy when ads for products they’ve just been talking to their family about appear online shortly after installing a new smart TV? Who else dislikes it when Alexa or Siri or any other smart assistant raises its little voice to remind you it’s there? Don’t even get me started on the privacy policy statements manufacturers provide, and how so many seem to think these give them carte blanche to gather data about you and sell that information (“anonymized” they say) to people you know nothing about. 

All in all, smart home tech seems to end up meaning you put quite costly devices in your home that stop working pretty soon, don’t work particularly well together, and turn you into a profit center for people you’ve got no relationship with. That’s smart for the manufacturers, I suppose, but not for the rest of us. But so many years into the evolution of the space, it really seems like the faults in some attempts at home automation are a feature, not a bug.

Is it smarter to be cynical?

That’s not to say every manufacturer in the space can be accused of the same thing.

 I’m sure many have introduced smart home products that are easy to switch to new networks and ship with clear and actionable instructions for returning the gadget to factory fresh, rather than sending them via your local electronics recycling center to be cannibalized for conflict minerals with the carcass sent to landfill.

With so many problems, no wonder consumers don’t seem to be racing to invest in smart home devices. 

Sure, billions of dollars are being spent on these things, but over half of that spend goes on devices for video playback, and market growth seems anaemic overall — and growth predictions seem to defy historical reality. Look at this Statista graph for some sense of this. That big column at the right looks really promising until you realize it’s an estimated figure for 2027, which requires the market to enter a period of accelerated growth that exceeds any historical growth trends.

It is also fair to point to other surveys that suggest once they do get their smart homes together, consumers believe the devices improve their quality of life.

Though there is the issue of trust. 

A matter of trust

While governments eager for growth seem to think tech will save us, consumers trust the sector less and less. There’s lots of data that reflects this decline. Arguably this could well represent a reaction against everything from huge security problems such as the recent Crowdstrike disaster to election interference, mass deception, concerns about fake news, privacy erosion, security, and even frustration at the never-ending nature of digital transformation. It’s not just tech leaders who feel like they are under constant pressure to adopt new digitized working practices. Those on the front line are also struggling to keep up with endless digital change. 

Perhaps, once people do make it home, (dodging self-driving vehicles, smartphone zombies, and electronic scooters on their domestic commute), they just want their home kit to work without needing to read a manual. Assuming there even is a manual.

Can Apple change this? Maybe. Perhaps it can introduce an iPad-like smart home device with a privacy-first OS and decent integration with peripheral devices from a range of manufacturers thanks to Matter and Thread. Perhaps it can make Siri simply clever and deploy artificial intelligence to make your smart home actually smart.  Perhaps Apple can breathe life into the whole category. But maybe consumers are tired of promises and want to see an ecosystem that delivers on those promises before they slap too many dollars down. With that in mind, I’m going to kick my frustrating printer and go for a bracing stroll.

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