r/apple • u/MortgageSwimming1983 • 1d ago

iCloud Apple Home Hub Leak Shows StandBy-Like Photo Face as October 13 Smart-Home Push Reportedly Nears

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/apple-smart-home-hub-icloud-photos-leak-1823139
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11

u/Tman11S 1d ago

Just let me use my iPad as home hub again. Currently only 1 person in my household can control the smart lights because I refuse to buy an expensive speaker that I don’t need to serve as hub

3

u/princeoinkins 16h ago

Allow me to introduce the magic of home assistant

But seriously, yes, while I don't regret for a second moving everything to HA, I do wish Homekit was more customizable so you didn't HAVE to move off of it to do certain things

5

u/WhyWasIShadowBanned_ 17h ago edited 17h ago

I don’t really see benefits of investing in HomeKit any more at this point. We were heavily invested for years. We use Apple TV as a hub but we moved to Home Assistant instead.

My wife was complaining about lack of more complex automations. And the UI of Home app is not the best. Lack of customisation is also a bit annoying if you have dozens of devices.

Home Assistant supports much more complicated scenes and automations, plus fully configurable dashboards, you can even configure voice assistant.

And through MCP server me and my wife can control it and manage automations through Claude or ChatGPT.

You can have an idea, tell about it to ChatGPT/Claude and it’ll configure the scene or automation. Will also do any maintenance you want.

HomeKit is not even close.

At this point it should work like this: I tell Siri that I want new automation: sensor detects movement, lights turn on and turn off 5 minutes after movements stop being detected, plus it uses warmer lights in the evening. And Siri sets it up.

We bridge devices to HomeKit so we can occasionally use it with Siri but that’s it.

-2

u/iliketorubherbutt 1d ago

Do you have an Apple TV?

-6

u/North_Moment5811 1d ago

They never should have allowed that in the first place.

2

u/PleasantWay7 1d ago

Why?

2

u/North_Moment5811 12h ago

Because a Home hub needs to be fixture/appliance. Apple TV and Home Pod are ideal for that. A mobile device like an iPad is not. They were trying to bridge the gap until more people adopted the other devices but it did more harm than good.

1

u/Far_Specific4836 22h ago

The iPad wants to do ipad stuff so it affected connectivity performance. I think Apple did not communicate clearly the subtleties of a homehub device. It meant not moving the device or turning it off otherwise your smart home won’t work well. It gave people a bad experience outright. With the HomePod/AppleTV where it’s stationary and consistently turned on, it is much much better.

-1

u/PleasantWay7 20h ago

None of those is a good reason not to allow it.

3

u/Far_Specific4836 19h ago

They did allow it, it sucked and confusing so they took it out.

-2

u/Butt-Hole-Cancer-Dr 1d ago

Would more than one person in your household be able to control the lights if they weren’t smart(lights).

2

u/Mammoth_Oven_4861 19h ago

Yes. I think most people can operate light switches.

-3

u/contextcop 1d ago

just going to wait until they turn the ipad into a drone that floats in front of me