Home > News

Apple Developing an iPad Smart Home Hub or Dock

By Laura Tucker
Apple Developing Smart Home Hub Featured

Apple happens to have a golden touch when it comes to developing new products. Even when it develops a product that is already marketed by other manufacturers, it can quickly rise to the top and become the top seller, such as the Apple Watch and AirTag. Apple is also working on a smart home hub or dock to work with an iPad that would rival the Amazon Echo Show or Google’s Nest Hub.

Apple Marrying Existing Products

One of Apple’s most successful products has been the iPad. It definitely owns the market in that field. There aren’t any devices that could rival the popularity of the iPad. It sold nearly double the tablets that Samsung sold last year. The Apple HomePod, however, could have been considered one of Apple’s rare flubs – until it released the HomePod Mini.

Apple Developing Smart Home Hub Homepod Mini

What Apple doesn’t have is a smart speaker with a screen to rival the Amazon Echo Show series or Google’s Nest Hub series. These devices have multiple uses: play music and videos, give information, and act as a smart home hub.

Apple must have realized it didn’t have to stray too far to develop a similar smart home hub, as it already has a screen-less smart speaker and a display that isn’t much of a speaker. It just needs to figure out how to capitalize on those existing devices to create a new one.

Apple Developing Smart Home Hub Lineup

Apple is working on developing a product that would be similar to Google’s new accessory that acts as a dock for a Pixel tablet to be used as a smart speaker and smart home hub. This new Apple device would work like a HomePod and allow you to attach an iPad to it as a display and smart home hub.

At the same time, Apple is exploring an all-in-one device similar to an Echo Show or Google Nest Hub that would allow you to do it all and not attach an iPad to it.

New Device Availability

Whichever way Apple decides to go with this new device, it won’t be available at Apple’s expected new iPad announcement this week. However, it could be ready as soon as next year.

In the meantime, perhaps we can learn which way Apple is leaning in this new development process by looking at what it does release this week. A new iPad that Apple releases may be perfect for connecting to the under-development smart home hub to work as a smart speaker. If Apple finally ditches the Lightning port in all iPads, that would certainly lend to using it to attach to a hub or cradle, as it’s sometimes referred to.

Apple Developing Smart Home Hub App

Additionally, Apple made big changes to its Home app that controls smart home devices. It gives a better picture of everything in your smart home.

But perhaps the one Apple improvement that will make the most difference to a new smart home hub will be Matter, which was recently made official. The technology will allow products from different manufacturers to work together more easily and efficiently, streamlining the process. The improved Home app would work great with Matter.

We’ll have to wait and see what Apple releases next week, but even without a new smart home hub/smart speaker device, the iPad launches could be important to your future smart home.

Read on to learn about the new iPhone 14 series that was released last month

Image credit: Newsroom. All screenshots by Laura Tucker.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.