HomePod with screen is still a year away (at least)

Wish Apple would go ahead and release a HomePod with a screen already? Same here, but apparently it’ll be at least a year before our Apple smart display wishes are granted—if they’re granted at all. 

In his weekly Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that while Apple “continues to pursue” the concept of a display-equipped HomePod, “a launch wouldn’t come until 2025 at the earliest.” 

Chatter about a HomePod smart display heated up earlier this month, when 9to5Mac spotted references to a new device within the latest tvOS update that “could be the rumored HomePod with a screen.” 

Of course, Apple has long been rumored to have several iterations of a display-equipped HomePod on its test bench, including a “low-end iPad” for controlling home devices, an iPod dock that would turn the tablet in the smart display (similar to Google’s subsequent Pixel Tablet), an Apple TV/HomePod combo, and even a HomePod with a swiveling screen (similar to Amazon’s Echo Show 10). 

As tantalizing as those products sound, none of them are “imminent,” and part of the problem is that Apple remains “indecisive about what to do with the smart home,” Gurman writes. 

For now, the closest we’ve come to an Apple smart display is iOS’s StandBy mode, which turns an iPhone’s screen into a quasi-smart display when the handset is locked and charging in a horizontal orientation. 

The overall smart display market is in an odd place at the moment. Amazon continues to dole out Echo Show displays, including the recent Echo Show 8, and last week, the company unleased the Echo Hub, a wall-mounted display that’s focused on home control. (Read our Echo Hub review.) 

Last year, Google released the aforementioned Google Pixel Tablet, which can turn into a smart display when connected to its magnetic dock. 

But Google hasn’t released a dedicated smart display since 2021, when the second-gen Nest Hub arrived, while the larger Nest Hub Max is nearly five years old. 

Meanwhile, there’s been word that Google’s stock of Nest speakers and displays is running low.