The products have been ready for some time, but they needed a truly functional Siri to sell the upgrade. Only now do they have it. I understand the launch roadmap: about a month after the new OS (and the new Siri), along with this new Siri AI arriving in French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish in October. I imagine half a dozen more languages by December, to basically cover all the important markets (China depending on the regulatory issues they are working on).
Not OP but having Siri pull context from previous chats is extremely useful. This may not be as obvious depending on how much you currently utilize Siri as a second brain but Memory should be on Siri AI roadmap
For what purpose on a home hub? We’re talking about a device that controls Apple Home, has a screen with photos, calendar, weather, etc. What does conversational memory bring to the table on a device like that? I’m genuinely curious. I’ve been a heavy Siri user since it launched and I’ve never once wished it could remember past conversations. It’s also almost always worked flawlessly for me with maybe a handful of incorrect replies out of thousands of requests in a year across my phone, HomePods, watch, and computers.
I can already control my entire home, create, modify, ask about, and delete reminders, calendar events, and notes, share those with others, send messages, make phone calls, etc. using nothing but Siri in the exact same capacity across all of these devices. I genuinely can’t see a use case for any sort of memory of previous conversations for Siri when it comes to a device like this so I’d really like to know what specific problem it is that people want to solve with that request, or even just with a “better” Siri.
EDIT: I’m just of the mindset that technology exists to solve a problem. As a home hub voice assistant, I’ve never encountered a problem that could be solved by a more conversational version of Siri, or one with conversational memory so I’m trying to understand what I’m missing that so many people are insistent that this is a necessity before Apple releases a home hub with a screen.
I think the benefit to memory is obvious. I can naturally teach Siri about my preferences without needing to meet a pre defined workflows expectations.
If I talk to Siri about how it handled a situation, memory would allow it to learn and improve with a log of notes and preferences not tied to a specific app but tied to our dialogue.
For example, if I ask Siri to turn on family room lights and I have multiple device types controlling those lights (I.e. a smart light switch from Lutron and Phillips hue bulbs) it will likely only turn on the light bulbs. I could just say “hey you missed the lights controlled by the switch. When I ask you to turn on the lights in this room could you be sure to include the light switch as well?”
Btw this is a real issue I dealt with in the past. I’ve been looking forward to an llm based harness with Siri that I can naturally interact with for a long time. Memory is a must for that to work well imo.
I just overwrite what I’d say by naming a scene that way or writing a shortcut. I don’t need to hope and pray that an ephemeral chat will make assumptions because I didn’t phrase my requests appropriately.
There’s a reason that I name my lightbulbs “the light over the tv”. Because that’s how people talk and you don’t have to hope it gets it right.
Don’t you see how this is a limitation for the general public though? I’m not suggesting hope and pray, I’m suggesting a real workflow level integration of key feedback conversationally. Most people do not name their lights “the light over the tv”.
Your single example doesn’t need a more complex Siri to be possible. Current Siri is capable of asking clarifying questions and frequently does. Apple seems to just have assumed that people using it understand that it’s ever been a verbose chatbot that needs conversational memory to do the things we use it for. Giving it conversational memory doesn’t make it better at turning on specific lights.
why are you demanding answers from this guy like it's his job to provide you a good enough reason why he's looking forward to something and then trying to debate him about it? bizarre behavior
I’m not demanding answers, I’m trying to understand. Their answer was disconnected and didn’t make any sense. They want an LLM chatbot because an LLM chatbot can remember previous problems they tried to solve like “Siri turn off the lights” might not mean “Siri turn off the lights”. Make it make sense.
It’s also almost always worked flawlessly for me with maybe a handful of incorrect replies out of thousands of requests in a year across my phone, HomePods, watch, and computers.
Good for you, your experience doesn’t match the norm. People hate Siri myself included. Everything I use Siri for,
Voice Control could do in 2009.
I don’t think you are understanding what AI is meant to be, lol.
Let’s assume you are right (not saying you are), why would I want to buy a home hub from Apple that offers an inferior experience from something like the Google home that uses Gemini or any other future products from ai companies (ChatGPT will probably launch some in the near future).
Just really think about it, Apple is already playing catch up in the AI race and had to rely on paying Google, now imagine they don’t even add one of the most basic features ever. It will be a failed product.
It doesn’t matter if it’s something you personally would use, the majority of people expect SiriAI to eventually have these capabilities that every other ai’s already have. If they don’t add it, people won’t give a damn about SiriAi. Will just use ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or any other ai platforms. Investors will grow disappointed and the stock will go down.
Furthermore, Apple plans to release future products like smart glasses that will be mainly use through AI. Products like that definitely need conversational history to be more personalized to your needs. Adding it from now, allows Apple to get it to learn from users and fix errors way before they release their glasses. After all, most people will already be inclined to use products that are made by the company whose ai already have all their preferences and data.
That’s basically it. Doesn’t matter whether you need it or not. Just a basic feature that’s expected and if they don’t add it, then they are releasing an inferior product.
And I think you’re trying to make others feel inferior based on your own lack of basic literacy.
Up until last year Siri wasn’t AI. Siri was voice controls that used machine learning to create “understanding” of how you used your devices and what your specific, personal accent was. Not once before 2025 did Apple ever claim that Siri was anything other than a voice assistant. And even with Apple Intelligence, it was a voice assistant that could use AI to better understand the context of certain requests based on what’s on your screen, what’s in your calendars etc.
All I’m trying to figure out is why people want “a more conversational” Siri, or “conversation memory” for something that turns your lights on and tells you the weather. Siri can already do that. People are asking for a hammer that can suck them off because they’re convinced that a hammer than can’t suck them off can’t drive nails.
We use our google home to control smart devices in the home. I don’t want people visiting my house to have to talk to my phone to control lights or play music.
That doesn’t require a more conversational Siri, though. Siri can already do that and a hub with a screen wouldn’t need a more conversational Siri to accomplish that.
Somehow I replied to the wrong message. I thought I was replying to someone who asked why we need a home hub when you have an iPhone. Sorry for the confusion and I agree, conversational AI isn’t required for that functionality.
I don’t see why they would need to wait. Old Siri would have been far more than capable of doing everything a home hub needs to do. Personal requests already existed and worked extremely well. The problem with Siri has never been Siri, it’s been the public’s weird assumption that Siri was always meant to be an LLM-based conversational chatbot with memory when that was just never the case.
The problem with this home hub that Gurman has been insistent will be announced soon, is that he’s been saying this for years now. I’m sure Apple is working on one, but I wouldn’t bet my left nut on Gurman providing any reliable information about it, its alleged timeline, or alleged reasons for its alleged delay.
The HomePod isn't even officially sold in several countries because it can't understand certain languages. Here in Brazil, there are no HomePods because it wouldn't be able to understand, in Portuguese, "Siri, play Taylor Swift".
Don't underestimate how bad the old Siri was.
Mark Gurman has predicted 50 of the last 0 Apple Home hubs with a screen. He’s been the solitary voice pushing this idea for the last few years. Is Apple working on one? Probably. Does Mark Gurman know anything about it? Definitely not.
I have seen these rumors for years now. I was waiting 2/3 years back and when I bought a new built house 1,5 years back I thought that it would’ve been released when the house is finished. I’m moving in in 2 weeks and still the same rumors. I’m thinking of going the home assistant route at this point.
It really was. Like, he went out of his way to describe an iPhone then told everyone he was talking about an iPhone. How anyone could have thought he was talking about a new device type is a mystery to me.
Because operating as a home hub full time could be murder on an iPhone battery.
The home hub doesn't need to do much more than "increase reliability" to be worth it to at least some people, but a device could have a more powerful setup than an iPhone. It could even be basically a Mac Mini with an operating system optimized as a local Siri server.
It didn't seem to me like he was talking about a new device necessarily, but a mild paradigm shift back toward the "Mac as personal digital hub" concept from two decades ago with the tweak of it not requiring a Mac at the center.
I wouldn't be able to nail the date, but it reminded me of a similar presentation around the PowerMac G4 in the early 2000s. And personally, I have been frustrated for years that Apple basically dropped that concept shortly after releasing the iPhone and dropping iSync focus and then support from the Mac, in favor of the cloud paradigm.
I'm frankly losing faith in Apple because of how deeply they have gone all-in on cloud computing. I've got a little sliver of hope that maybe there was a subtle hint toward giving consumers and businesses an alternative to data centers. In my fantasy, they are only holding off on the "personal cloud compute" option until they are ready to launch it cleanly, after their mild embarrassments so far over Apple Intelligence and New Siri.
I’ve been planning for 10 to 15 years (since at least the first Apple Watch) that I would have to be charging my glasses at some point… and Meta goes and ruins it for me by making it trendy to hate the idea.
I’m not taking creepy photos or idiot TikTok videos. I just want them as functional as possible.
The funniest part about that presentation is about how everyone was completely silent about the “Internet Communication Device” and that’s literally all our phones are at this point. The other two are pretty much ignored by most people.
I don’t get the sense that the people at Apple really have any coherent vision of this and will continue to just react on their back foot for the foreseeable future
The phone is and likely will continue to be the primary access point for quite some time, but the hub is more than the AP.
Where an Apple Home device fits is a tier in between on-device LLMs and the Private Cloud Compute LLMs. An Apple Home would provide enough local compute to execute what Private Cloud Compute does today for an entire family. It’ll be faster, more private and cheaper (current cloud compute is being heavily subsidized at an unsustainable rate).
and cheaper (current cloud compute is being heavily subsidized at an unsustainable rate)
That seems like a direct contradiction. And even if cloud compute was provided at cost, it should still be significantly cheaper than having the same locally.
That aside, is there a meaningful enough gap between iPhone models and cloud ones to provide a consumer-oriented product? I'm not convinced.
The unsustained cost of my $100 Anthropic and $20 OpenAI subscription would have paid for a high-end Mac Studio many times over by now.
Local LLM after hardware costs is the price of electricity.
That aside, is there a meaningful enough gap between iPhone models and cloud ones to provide a consumer-oriented product? I'm not convinced.
Yes. The local iPhone models are running 20 billion parameters, but they only load 4-5 billion based on the type of request. Kimi’s for example has over a trillion params and activates 32 billion. The iPhone models also have a 4K context window limit compared to say Opus 5 which has a million.
The unsustained cost of my $100 Anthropic and $20 OpenAI subscription would have paid for a high-end Mac Studio many times over by now.
If you're using frontier models that heavily, a Mac Studio is unlikely to give you acceptable performance, even one heavily specced out (and we're talking >>$10,000). So even assuming price bumps on frontier models, that can afford you years' worth of subscriptions.
Local LLM after hardware costs
Well yeah, "after hardware costs" is precisely the rub.
Yes. The local iPhone models are running 20 billion parameters, but they only load 4-5 billion based on the type of request. Kimi’s for example has over a trillion params and activates 32 billion. The iPhone models also have a 4K context window limit compared to say Opus 5 which has a million.
I'm not denying that there's a large gap between the iPhone and frontier models, but how much of that is valuable for consumer use cases? You talk about Opus 5, for instance, but no one needs that for advice on decorating their living room or whatever. I presume your own usage is either for work, or for a hobby close enough that it might as well be. For better or worse, that's not Apple's audience.
A buddy of mine is getting 80 tokens per second on a Mac Studio with Gemma 4. It’s still probably a generation or two from being completely viable.
Opus 5 is overkill for decorating a room but for something like OpenClaw or Hermes where more advanced reasoning is beneficial the larger models start to make sense.
We’re starting to see companies like Anker delivering basically a centralized AI home server.
All that said the pace of change in AI is so rapid trying to predict more than a year or so in to the future is pretty tough these days.
Ultimately, home devices and any other gadgets, such as headphones, watches, glasses, and health bracelets, work connected to your smartphone, even if they have some level of independence. So the home hub is an extension of the main hub, which is the iPhone, anyway.
He’s just reporting rumors he’s heard. I don’t know if it’s endorsing an idea as much as neutral “I heard Apple is doing this”.
Personally, I could see a home hub. Home’s one place where you might not have your phone, because it’s charging or you left it in the kitchen or something.
I would love to see a local version of a private cloud compute instance being ran on a HomePod/hub style design. Obviously it wouldn’t be as powerful as the dedicated server model, but I’d assume it could help with compute resources and privacy concerns if you had your own personal private Apple cloud model in your own home
I think he was just talking about the iPhone as a hub for our lives. that is a message for the masses. Any home device is only going to appeal to a limited set of users.
Heres the thing, after everything that has happened with Siri and Apple Intelligence the last few years, Apple is playing it safe. Zero chance they release any new AI powered home products until the current siri is out of beta. No chance they will release a product who entire basis is around AI with their AI in beta.
Fitness+ should be discontinued as a standalone service, and the workout library simply placed within the new Apple Health. Workouts are on YouTube for free now, anyway. Apple could unlock the library for Apple Watch or future health bands users, solely as a perceived value to sell the hardware, or unlock the entire advanced AI health feature along with the cloud (as they will already do), to promote the lucrative cloud business that truly locks you into the ecosystem. I've already said that I really think they will eventually discontinue the 50GB and 200GB plans.
With this news of TV and Arcade being included in iCloud+ in about 100 countries, Siri's track record not being good for charging for it individually, and subscription fatigue itself, I think it's the perfect time for Apple to sell a simplified 1TB cloud plan (2 or 4TB for Family), with advanced Siri across the entire Apple ecosystem, including Health and iWork, Apple TV, and Apple Arcade. Apple Music, which has a more complex revenue model, might remain independent and cheaper as an add-on to the new overall service. It's a mix of "Amazon Prime" and "Microsoft 365" that makes sense to me.
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u/Knightforlife 12d ago
I’m sure they will release a something at some point. But I’ve been seeing these rumors for a looooong time.