Tim Hardwick, last week for MacRumors, “Apple Smart Home Hub Launch Possibly Delayed Until Later in Year”:

Apple’s long-rumoured smart home hub or “command center” may not arrive in the spring as previously expected, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. [...]

Apple originally planned to introduce the home hub in March 2025. However, writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says that the device “may take longer to reach consumers,” owing to the operating system’s heavy reliance on App Intents features that won’t be ready until iOS 18.4 and iOS 19. This in itself means “it’s plausible that the hardware itself will ship later,” adds Gurman.

Here’s Gurman in his own words:

Then there’s the brand-new smart home hub. This device has a roughly 7-inch screen and can help manage household tasks, run apps and conduct video calls. Consumers will be able to hang it on a wall or place it on a countertop — perhaps in a few spots around the home.

Apple has been planning to introduce the home hub in March, but it may take longer to reach consumers. The device’s new operating system — code-named Pebble — is heavily tied to App Intents features coming in iOS 18.4 and iOS 19, so it’s plausible that the hardware itself will ship a bit later.

How many Apple products that miss “expected” ship dates that were announced only by Gurman do we need before MacRumors writers, and the others on the Gurman regurgitation re-blogging beat, start to wonder whether it’s really the case, as Gurman’s reporting would have us believe, that every single product from Apple winds up shipping months or even years later than intended?

Maybe Gurman’s right, and Apple hasn’t shipped a single product on schedule since like maybe the original AirPods back in 2016 (an absolute banger of a scoop, from before Gurman left 9to5Mac for Bloomberg).

Or, and I’m just tossing this out there, maybe the way companies that are good at shipping new products actually ship new products is by setting aggressive, probably impossible, internal milestones to keep the entire team inside the company and manufacturing partners in the supply chain moving with urgency until the thing is actually ready to announce and ship. And that by reporting these milestones as actual expected ship dates, repeatedly, it makes Mark Gurman and Bloomberg News wrong, not the products late, when those dates are missed without the products ever having been announced. Something like that could happen when the incentive structure of a news publication is based on whether the reporting moves stock prices, not whether it turns out to be accurate.

I’m sure it’s just the case, though, that Apple has been unable to ship anything new on schedule for close to a decade.

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