Mention “smart home” and which company (or company branding) do you think of? Philips Hue? Google Nest? Kasa, Ring, Eufy? Apple is that kid in the back of the gym class jumping up and down eagerly, pleading for you to pick it first for the team and give it a shot. (Apple’s smart home division is Rudy.)
According to the rumor mill (via Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman), Apple is working on a smart doorbell to crack Ring’s bell and horn in on its marketshare in the $1.97 billion industry. And because it’s Apple, it’s going to demand the intimacy of staring you in the face.
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iKnock? iBell? i… Help me out here
Given that Apple is wedging FaceID into everything it can, it’s no surprise that the rumors say the doorbell would be using some iteration of it, too. The details in Gurman’s newsletter are scant, but ostensibly the doorbell would be able to recognize its authorized residents and unlock itself without a need for a code.
I wonder, though, if I’d want my doorbell looking me in the face. Staring at me. Judging me. And the doorbell sector isn’t impervious to security leaks and concerns. Yeah, you don’t have to worry about losing your house key and having a burglar find it, but not all burglars are too dumb to know how to go high-tech in hacking their way through a home’s smart lock or smart doorbell. Then there’s Apple’s commitment to the project, which according to Gurman won’t come out any sooner than late 2025.
Apple’s HomePod was released way back on February 9, 2018, and ever since it’s felt like the least favorite child in the Apple product portfolio. The iPhone is the star college athlete and valedictorian that the Apple family pins all its hopes on, the Mac range the mature older child who’s settled into a comfortable and respectable life, and iCloud-as-a-service an up-and-coming child prodigy.
facing the future of a crowded market
Gurman brings up a good point that Apple could use upsell its doorbell customers onto larger iCloud accounts to hold video recordings. Apple’s made no secret of its intentions to pursue services, iCloud in particular, as a growing part of its revenue generation that has been overwhelmingly focused on hardware for its entire history. Video files aren’t small, and iCloud subscriptions would offer lots of small bites of revenue for Apple.
Also noted in Gurman’s post is that Apple believes it holds a certain cachet among consumers for its relatively privacy-friendly reputation among its Big Tech rivals. Now respect for privacy in Silicon Valley is an extraordinarily low bar to clear. A snake could jump over it.
Ring, maker of smart doorbells, caught shit for years for handing out its video footage to police departments like fun-sized Mars Bars on Halloween, until the bad press finally forced it stop in January, 2024. Its security failures have also been noted and reported on for years.
Grafting a video camera onto your private oasis, your home, is rightly balked at by many people. We’re not saying don’t do it. Just weigh the costs, and choose the most trustworthy, transparent company if you decide to proceed. Apple hasn’t been immune or flawless in the past. But again, it’s a low bar to clear to be considered most trustworthy. Let’s see if this Apple comes to fruition, and then we can dissect it.
