Apple had originally intended to launch its new Smart Home Display as a part of last week's product launch marathon. However, in the face of the ongoing delays related to the rollout of the revamped Siri, Apple has been forced to substantially extend the launch timeline of the new device, as per the latest tidbit from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Apple was not able to launch the Smart Home Display last week, as the revamped Siri is not ready yet to power AI features
For the benefit of those who might not be aware yet, Apple intends to launch a revamped version of Siri this year, bringing the much-delayed in-app actions, personal context awareness, and on-screen awareness to its bespoke voice assistant, thereby, enabling a wide variety of agentic actions across apps, based on personal data and on-screen content. This revamped Siri would be powered by a 1.2-trillion-parameter custom Gemini AI model, dubbed the Foundation Models version 10.
Unlike the chatbot Siri that is expected to ship next year with the iOS 27, and run on Google's own TPUs and cloud infrastructure, albeit owned by Apple, the revamped Siri would operate within Apple's Private Cloud Compute framework, where relatively simple AI tasks are performed by using on-device models and the computational resources of the device itself, while the more complex tasks are offloaded to Apple's private cloud servers using encrypted and stateless data for subsequent inference.
Of course, this revamped Siri was supposed to launch with the ongoing iOS 26.4 update cadence. However, according to Gurman, Apple has been forced to delay the new Siri's rollout in light of lingering performance-related inconsistencies.
This brings us to the core of today's topic. According to Gurman, Apple has delayed the new Smart Home Display, which bears an internal product code J490, as the revamped Siri is not ready yet:
"The product, code-named J490, was first scheduled for spring 2025 but was postponed to let the company finish work on a new Siri digital assistant — an integral piece of the device’s interface.
Apple had then planned to release the display this month, when it hoped the new Siri would be ready, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. With Siri delayed again, Apple is now postponing the smart home device once more."
Do note that Apple's new Smart Home Display resembles an iPad and can be mounted onto a dome-shaped speaker base or affixed to a wall attachment. It sports a 7-inch screen, a single USB-C port, and an aluminum casing.
Its star feature is its facial recognition ability, with the system able to identify individuals as they walk up to the device, and display personalized content as per the preference of each recognized individual.
As for its UI, the Smart Home Display is expected to launch with a variant of the tvOS 27, and features circular app icons akin to the Apple Watch's home screen.
According to Gurman, the revamped Siri would ship by September 2026, when Apple is expected to debut its iPhone 18 Pro lineup alongside the iPhone Fold. As such, we can reasonably expect the Apple Smart Home Display to launch around the fall of 2026.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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