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

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/16/apple-working-on-all-new-operating-system/

by mgh2 • 11 months ago

74 83 11 months ago

macrumors.com

dangus3• 11 months ago

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.

ranger_danger3• 11 months ago

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

glhaynes• 11 months ago

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

jsjohnst• 11 months ago

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.

mkbelieve• 11 months ago

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.

jcelerier• 11 months ago

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

aaronbrethorst• 11 months ago

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.

leptons• 11 months ago

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.

dangus3• 11 months ago

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.

rpdillon• 11 months ago

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.

mathiaspoint• 11 months ago

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

kamma4434• 11 months ago

Agreed. Super frustrating

RatchetWerks• 11 months ago

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.

veidr• 11 months ago

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)_/¯

dangus3• 11 months ago

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.

joshmarinacci• 11 months ago

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.

bryanrasmussen2• 11 months ago

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.

paulryanrogers3• 11 months ago

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

Mistletoe• 11 months ago

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.

treetalker• 11 months ago

They're amazing at invading privacy!

ajkjk2• 11 months ago

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.

underlipton• 11 months ago

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.

marssaxman3• 11 months ago

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.

jayd162• 11 months ago

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?

kcplate• 11 months ago

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.

exe342• 11 months ago

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

simpleintheory• 11 months ago

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

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

nytesky• 11 months ago

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

pgwhalen• 11 months ago

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.

dyauspitr• 11 months ago

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.

amelius• 11 months ago

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

vlovich1232• 11 months ago

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).

easton• 11 months ago

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.

altairprime• 11 months ago

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.

calibas• 11 months ago

I assume another custom version of FreeBSD.

Klonoar• 11 months ago

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

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

slashdave• 11 months ago

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

SG-• 11 months ago

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

jayd162• 11 months ago

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

bnchrch• 11 months ago

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.

gnerd00• 11 months ago

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.

codeaether• 11 months ago

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.

colechristensen2• 11 months ago

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.

kjkjadksj3• 11 months ago

Airliners look the same because of regulations

cosmicgadget2• 11 months ago

Are you saying there is not technology left?

sumedh• 11 months ago

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.

AtlasBarfed• 11 months ago

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.

kalleboo2• 11 months ago

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.

hu3• 11 months ago

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

cosmicgadget2• 11 months ago

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

bretto13• 11 months ago

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.

alehlopeh• 11 months ago

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.

Zopieux• 11 months ago

Oh my god please just stop and install HomeAssistant already.

vrighter• 11 months ago

developing a ui != developing an os.

drcongo• 11 months ago

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

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

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