Apple is reportedly building a smart home camera that won’t record video footage of you or anyone else
After finally making Siri a halfway decent assistant during this year’s round of major OS updates, it looks like the smart home will become Apple’s main area of focus in the coming months. Reliable Apple insider Mark Gurman revealed earlier this week that the company’s long-awaited hub could arrive later in October, and in the first episode of its new To light up podcast, he predicted a security camera could follow. But unlike its many future rivals, this one, oddly, won’t record video.
In addition to the Home Hub, which will be the centerpiece of the entire Siri-led smart home campaign, Gurman says Apple will also release more powerful versions of the HomePod mini and Apple TV, both of which will support the new Siri AI ecosystem. But the camera is arguably more interesting, as much for what it can’t do as for what it can.
THE Bloomberg The reporter claims the camera is a companion product to Apple’s also-unannounced smart home display, which the company internally calls J490. These small cameras can be installed around your home and will appear cylindrical, resembling sticks. Gurman says they will have a very low frame rate and, importantly, will not offer video recording as a feature.
What’s the point of a camera that doesn’t capture moving images, you ask? Apple seems to be aware of the growing and very reasonable concerns about excessive surveillance and what’s happening with that data, and so the sensor will use AI to analyze movements in your home. It’s not clear if you’ll be able to extract still images from it, but it will be able to perform facial recognition.
If the camera identifies someone entering a room, it can tell you whether you know that person or not, but you’ll only receive text descriptions. As Gurman points out, a complete lack of video footage probably won’t be particularly helpful to police if your home is broken into, but the added layer of privacy would certainly make Apple’s camera stand out in a crowded market.
Gurman added that the security camera will use “very similar technology to what they’re going to use for AirPods with cameras,” which leaked over the summer. Based on code buried in an early version of macOS Tahoe 26.7, these AirPods will each have their own small cameras built in that will take very low-resolution RGB still images that can be analyzed using visual intelligence. Following the fallout from Meta’s “evil glasses,” Apple’s camera-equipped AirPods reportedly won’t be able to take photos or record videos.
