Surprise and Shine

Apple announced their perennial iPhone event for Wednesday, 9/9 this year with the “Surprise and shine” tagline. While the tagline varies around the world, it’s ironic to include the word “surprise” in this event. The iPhone is such an enormous operation that it’s impossible for the hardware details not to leak. If it follows recent years, the primary focus of this event will be iPhones, especially the new folding version, Apple Watch, and AirPods. Based on the many smart home rumors, I imagine Apple will wait to tell its story of its smart home product line another time. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we still get a refreshed HomePod mini at this event to help raise awareness for Apple’s smart speakers.

I will be freshly back from IFA and Germany, and I plan to cover anything smart home-related from the event.

New Mac mini

Last week, Apple announced new Mac minis. Perhaps the most applicable computer for a smart home just got more out of reach and less practical. Discounted sometimes down to $499, the previous the entry level machine could become the multi-purpose smart home tool, self-hosting Homey, acting like a NAS, or running tools like Plex or Home Assistant. But in the year since I published a video talking about my Mac mini as a NAS, it’s become an AI machine for me, taking care of admin and coding details with ChatGPT Codex or Claude.

The new starting price of $899, new configurations, and marketing show that AI machines or powerful desktop workstations are the new roles for the Mac mini. It’s not a desktop alternative to the MacBook Neo.

New Mac Studio

With the Mac Pro retired, Mac Studio is clearly Apple’s powerful desktop workstation. Last week, Apple updated the Mac Studio to M5 Max and a new M5 Ultra chip. My daily machine is an M5 Max MacBook Pro I bought before the price increases. The processor is a beast and exports my videos and builds in Xcode faster than anything I’ve seen. Of course, the new M5 Ultra chip is a multi-core performance jump, but the overkill starts to creep into local AI territory.

High-end smart home platform Savant uses Mac minis and even rack-mounted Mac Pros as Savant Hosts. You could see a future where AI power is able to happen locally on an M5-ultra-level machine to be a smart home butler in a high-end home. But given the demands for this kind of hardware in the business world, I doubt we will see this level of machine powering that many smart homes anytime soon.

The Schedule

Last week, I posted a video about my adventures and upgrades with Home Assistant. This week, I have a video posting very soon about cleaning up your Apple Home.

Unfortunately, I had to cancel last week’s live stream due to back-to-school events with my kids. There’s a chance I’ll be able to do a live stream from IFA in Germany on Friday, but I’m not sure yet.