Smart home device on a modern table in a minimalist living room
Key Points
•Apple has four finished products — Apple TV 4K, HomePod 3, HomePod mini 2, and a new smart display — stuck in warehouses waiting for Siri AI upgrades
•The new Siri has been delayed from iOS 26.4 to 26.5 to now iOS 27 in September 2026, a full year behind the original timeline
•Apple is reportedly integrating Google Gemini-based LLMs and may open Siri to third-party AI like Claude — a stunning admission that it can't do this alone
•The smart home market isn't waiting: Amazon and Google have had AI-powered assistants for years while Apple's hardware collects dust
Somewhere in Apple's supply chain, four finished products are sitting in boxes, waiting for software that doesn't exist yet.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman — Apple's most reliable leaker-in-chief — the company has completed work on an updated Apple TV 4K, a new HomePod 3, a refreshed HomePod mini 2, and an entirely new smart display product internally called the "HomePad" [1]. The hardware is done. The packaging is probably done. The marketing decks are almost certainly done. What isn't done is Siri — and until Apple's voice assistant gets a fundamental AI overhaul, none of these products will see daylight.
This isn't a minor delay. It's a strategic embarrassment that reveals just how far behind Apple has fallen in the AI race — and how deeply that gap is now affecting its product roadmap.
The Timeline That Keeps Slipping
The new Siri was originally supposed to arrive with iOS 26.4, which would have shipped around March 2026. When that didn't happen, the timeline shifted to iOS 26.5. But when Apple released the 26.5 beta on March 30, there were no new Siri AI features in sight [2]. The current expectation? iOS 27, which won't arrive until September 2026 at the earliest.
That means Apple's smart home lineup is frozen for at least six more months — and possibly longer, given this project's track record of missed deadlines. For a company that prides itself on synchronized hardware-software launches, this is deeply unusual. Apple doesn't typically finish building products and then wait around for the software to catch up. The fact that it's happening here tells you how badly Siri's AI transformation has gone off the rails.
Apple's smart home hardware is ready. Its software isn't.
Why Siri Is the Bottleneck
To understand why Siri is holding everything up, you need to understand what Apple is trying to build. The current Siri is essentially a command-based system — it can set timers, play music, and answer simple factual questions, but it can't hold a real conversation, reason through multi-step problems, or understand context the way modern large language models can. Apple knows this. Everyone who's used Siri for more than five minutes knows this.
The new Siri, as described in various reports, would be built on top of Apple's own foundation models, supplemented by Google's Gemini technology and potentially opened up to third-party AI services like Anthropic's Claude [3]. It would understand screen context, analyze documents, search the web intelligently, and integrate deeply with apps like Mail, Photos, and even Xcode. In other words, it would be the kind of AI assistant that ChatGPT, Google Assistant, and Alexa have been evolving toward for years.
The problem is that Apple is trying to do all of this while maintaining its trademark privacy guarantees. Most AI assistants send your data to cloud servers for processing. Apple wants to keep as much processing on-device as possible, using what it calls "Private Cloud Compute" for anything that needs more horsepower. That's a genuinely harder engineering challenge — and it shows.
The Strategic Admission Nobody's Talking About
Here's the part of this story that deserves more attention: Apple is reportedly planning to let users route Siri requests to third-party AI chatbots. If you have the Claude app or Gemini app installed, you'd be able to send complex queries to those services instead of relying on Apple's own models [4].
Think about what that means for a second. Apple — the company that has spent two decades building a walled garden, the company that insists it can do everything better in-house, the company that famously refused to let other browsers truly run on iOS — is admitting it needs help from Anthropic and Google to make its voice assistant competitive.
This isn't without precedent. Apple already partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri as a fallback for complex queries. But expanding that model to include Claude and Gemini suggests Apple recognizes the gap is too large to close with its own AI alone. It's a pragmatic move, and probably the right one for users. But it's also an admission that would have been unthinkable five years ago.
The Smart Home Market Isn't Waiting
While Apple's products gather dust, the competition is moving. Amazon's Alexa has been integrating LLM capabilities since 2023. Google's Nest ecosystem has had Gemini-powered features for months. Even smaller players like Samsung with SmartThings have been shipping AI-enhanced home automation. Every month Apple waits is another month its competitors consolidate their position in living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms worldwide.
The new "HomePad" smart display is particularly interesting — and particularly vulnerable to this delay. Smart displays have become the central hub of modern smart homes, and Amazon and Google have had years to refine their offerings. Apple entering this market with a product that's been sitting in a warehouse for months while its AI stack gets sorted out is, to put it diplomatically, not ideal timing.
The smart home race moves fast. Apple's delay leaves market share on the table for Amazon and Google.
What September Actually Needs to Deliver
When iOS 27 finally arrives — presumably alongside these four delayed products — Apple needs to deliver something genuinely transformative. A slightly better Siri won't justify an eight-month hardware delay and years of falling behind competitors. The new assistant needs to be so good that it retroactively makes the wait feel worth it.
Based on what's been reported, the iOS 27 Siri overhaul will include conversational context awareness (remembering what you talked about earlier), on-screen understanding (knowing what you're looking at), deep app integration beyond basic shortcuts, intelligent web search that synthesizes results rather than just listing links, and the ability to route to third-party AI when Apple's own models can't handle the request [3][4].
That's an ambitious list. If Apple delivers even 80% of it, the HomePod 3 and HomePad could become genuinely compelling smart home products. But "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, given the company's recent track record with Siri promises.
The Bigger Picture: Apple's AI Identity Crisis
This situation illuminates a broader tension in Apple's strategy. The company wants to be an AI leader, but it also wants to be a privacy leader. Those two goals aren't inherently contradictory, but they create engineering challenges that Apple's competitors don't face. Google can throw user data at Gemini. Amazon can pipe Alexa queries through massive cloud infrastructure. Apple has to figure out how to match that capability while keeping most of the processing local or in privacy-preserving cloud enclaves.
It's a worthy goal. Privacy-first AI is genuinely important, and Apple is one of the few companies with both the motivation and the resources to attempt it. But worthy goals don't ship products. And right now, Apple has four products that should be in customers' homes, sitting in cardboard boxes instead.
The September launch will be Apple's moment to prove that patience was the right strategy — that taking extra time to build AI the right way produces a better result than rushing features to market. But if iOS 27's Siri arrives and it's still asking "I found some web results for that," Apple will have a problem that no amount of hardware design excellence can solve.
For now, four products wait. And so do we.
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