New Apple TV, Homepod Mini and the Long Delayed Home Hub All Arrive on October 13: Report

Apple has finally put a date on its smart home product lineup. Bloomberg reports that the company will introduce a set of new home products on Tuesday, October 13, including the long-delayed smart home hub, a new HomePod mini and a new Apple TV.

There is no redesign happening here. Both the HomePod mini and the Apple TV are said to keep their current looks, with faster chips inside to run Siri AI. The HomePod mini is also getting fresh colours, pink and green among them. That lines up with the official Apple product images MacRumors dug up last week, so the leak trail has been fairly consistent.

What Apple's home gear costs in India right now

None of the new devices have prices yet, but the current lineup gives you a fair idea of where Apple sits in this market. The HomePod (2nd generation) sells on the Apple India Store for Rs 44,900, and the HomePod mini for Rs 15,900.

The Apple TV 4K is the pricier bit. The Wi-Fi only model with 64GB of storage costs Rs 25,900, and the Wi-Fi plus Ethernet version with 128GB goes for Rs 31,900. These numbers follow the price revisions Apple has pushed across its smart home range in India.

Put that against a Fire TV Stick or a Chromecast and the gap is hard to argue away on hardware alone. Which is exactly why the Siri AI upgrade matters more than the chip inside.

The two year wait finally ends

All three devices are meant to show off Siri AI, and that is apparently why they slipped in the first place. They were originally planned for 2024. Two years is a long time to sit on finished hardware, and it tells you how much Apple has staked on getting the new Siri right before letting it run a person's living room.

The hub is the piece worth watching. Apple has been circling a screen-based home controller for years while Amazon and Google have shipped several generations of theirs. Showing up late with a 7-inch square display means the software has to do the convincing.

What is still in the pipeline

The bigger HomePod gets its update at a later date. Apple is also working on a privacy-focused home security camera and sensor that can tell which room a person is in without recording video, plus a higher-end hub with a 9-inch display on a robotic arm that swivels a full 360 degrees.

For Indian buyers, the practical question is not the hardware. It is whether Siri AI actually works in Indian English and Hindi at launch, because the HomePod mini here has always been a pricey speaker that does less than a cheap Echo. A faster chip does not fix that. A Siri that finally understands how we speak might.

October 13 also sits right next to the iPhone Duo pre-order window that opens on October 12, so Apple seems to be up for a busy fortnight.