I know being late to the game and doing the tech "right" in terms of design and usability is kinda Apple's thing, but lately it seems like they have been only picking areas that weren't successful for a reason, like insurmountable technical difficulties or lack of customer interest, and no amount of Apple's design or marketing magic can fix that. See – self driving, AR/VR, smart speakers, folding phones, now home robotics. I know for a fact that they have been hiring a bunch of engineers from Google's Everyday Robots division (which shut down last year), but I really can't see why the same people will be successful under a new corporate overlord.
For me the "transformative" aspect of personal robotics is... maintenance<p>Why does every store have self opening doors, but no houses do? I think it's because paying ~$500/year to get it running again when it breaks feels like a waste to almost any home owner. The same with other random innovations, like a car stacker to push your car into the garage roof when not in use so you can use the garage (the hydraulics would break), fans and pumps to move heat in or out of the house or water around the garden, they're a pain because they break, it's only worth it if you're running a commercial operation.<p>So homes end up with the absolute minimum number of things that could break. Calling out trades for the few things people must have requires smart people who are physically able, that have their ticket in a protected industry (in many countries). But a robot could have the same knowledge and physicality - at a fixed yearly cost.<p>If that were to happen, homes would transform as all sorts of things that require very occasional maintenance would start to appear. If something breaks even a very weak robot could diagnose it, find the parts online, have them delivered and probably install them.
"Smart home" has really fallen flat across the board, from smart speakers to the Roomba. It would be great if Apple changed that, but I'm not optimistic. I just don't think people really want smart home devices all that much.
I want something that cleans my bathroom and toilet. I will buy it for my business and will pay 20-30k/year.<p>Also, something to Clean my dishes (Load in the dishwasher, turn it on, and put it away).<p>Doing my laundry - load, wash and fold. Mow the lawn.
Japan makes incredible bidet toilets that got some traction during the pandemic. The jokes write themselves but a smart toilet that had health tracking features liked to the rest of the Apple fitness eco-system could be interesting.<p>The security camera, door lock, and thermostat space has room for improvement. The annual subscription model for cameras combined with their privacy gaps opens a space for Apple. My car unlocks when I walk up to it. Shouldn't my house do the same?<p>Kitchen appliances have gone done in quality to the point that they are replaced every few years when the linear motors fail. I don't know if there is enough margin for Apple but knowing what food is cycling through the kitchen would be another interesting health input.<p>3D printer, laser cutter, replicator machine that manufactures physical goods in your house.<p>Automatic pool/hot tub system that keeps chemical levels balanced and orders supplies as needed.<p>Urban gardening pods that allow anyone to grow healthy food at home.
> Near its campus in Cupertino, California, Apple has a secret facility that resembles the inside of a house — a site where it can test future devices and initiatives for the home.<p>Apple has a condo in Cupertino?
There are a bunch of things in a house that are time consuming that would benefit from the help of robots. In fact it’s all the things that rich people can afford to hire someone to do:<p>- cooking<p>- cleaning<p>- taking care of kids<p>You can be sure that a ton of people are working on those.
It would be nice to have a tripod on wheels that can have my iPad follow me around, and possibly respond to voice commands (move up, move down) or possibly integrate with the iPad camera to automatically be at eye level.<p>I've been using this and it's great but has its limitations: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01J6HBY1Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01J6HBY1Q</a>
This seems like one of the most hideously complex products you could possibly choose. Self driving cars were already out of reach for Apple and their team abandoned the effort. How do they think they are going to navigate and clean people’s homes!?
They should just fix Siri and iTunes. Siri is shockingly useless. If Siri were even a little more useful I would get a Home Pod but it's utterly useless for most things except setting timers and turning on lights.
Barring major technical glitches, installation and configuration of a reliable locally hosted Zigbee-based solution is on the order of two hours.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJEwrSSFe9s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJEwrSSFe9s</a><p>Here's what I used:<p><pre><code> Raspberry Pi Model 4 B
Raspberry Pi CPU
Raspberry Pi CPU heatsink (w/self-adhesive)
Raspberry Pi manual
Raspberry Pi A/C adapter
Raspberry Pi case
ConBee II Zigbee USB gateway
USB ADATA Micro SD card reader
USB cable
Micro SD card (for operating system and Home Assistant)
Ethernet cable (probably not needed because the Pi 4 has onboard WiFi)
</code></pre>
Thermostats: <a href="https://www.sinopetech.com/en/products/thermostat/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sinopetech.com/en/products/thermostat/</a><p>I haven't tried running a local text-to-speech engine backed by an LLM to control Home Assistant (HA). Maybe someone is working on this already?<p>TTS: <a href="https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper">https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper</a><p>LLM: <a href="https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile/releases">https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile/releases</a><p>LLM: <a href="https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral-8x7B-DPO-GGUF/blob/main/nous-hermes-2-mixtral-8x7b-dpo.Q4_K_M.gguf" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral-8x7B-D...</a><p>HA: <a href="https://www.home-assistant.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.home-assistant.io/</a><p>It would take some tweaking to get the voice commands working correctly.