The reported Apple smart home camera will combine ultimate privacy with Apple Intelligence

Earlier this week Ming-Chi Kuo suggested that we’ll see an Apple smart home camera in 2026, with the company confident it will prove to be a popular accessory, selling in the tens of millions per year.

Given Apple’s habit of minimizing the number of products it makes, if the report is accurate the company must feel there’s good reason to enter a crowded product category, and I think an Apple camera will likely differentiate itself in two ways: privacy, and Apple Intelligence …

HomeKit Secure Video 

So far, Apple’s main contribution to the smart home camera field has been the introduction of HomeKit Secure Video (HSV).

Prior to this, you needed to make a choice between local storage of footage – typically on an SD card within the camera – and the cloud service offered by the camera manufacturer. The problem with the latter is you have to trust the camera company to keep your footage secure, and there have been enough issues here that I wouldn’t personally trust any of them.

• Wyze camera breach let 13,000 customers view other people’s homes
• Anker admits to lying about Eufy security camera encryption; describes future plans
• Wyze Cam security flaw gave hackers access to video; went unfixed for almost three years
• Ring reportedly gave employees full access to customers’ live camera feeds

HSV is different, in that it uses end-to-end encryption so that not even Apple can view your footage, and even if there was a breach the footage wouldn’t be viewable by anyone else.

Additionally, while it does require an iCloud subscription, and unlimited cameras requires the 2TB tier, video footage doesn’t actually count against your storage limit.

For those reasons, I have long argued that HSV support should be a must-have when choosing a smart home security camera.

Privacy will be assured with an Apple smart home camera

It’s unclear what additional security benefit an Apple smart home camera could offer over and above that offered by any HSV-compatible camera, but one point does come to mind.

As we noted in our recent roundup of HSV cameras, you do need to explicitly ensure that your camera is not also uploading to the camera maker’s own cloud service. With an Apple camera, you won’t have that concern: HSV will be the only form of cloud storage supported.

Effectively, other HSV-compatible cameras have the option of complete privacy, but users need to proactively enable this. An Apple camera offers a complete privacy guarantee right out of the box.

(Of course, Apple could also play hardball, and decline to offer HSV support to future competing cameras, but I’d hope it wouldn’t go that far.)

Apple Intelligence will be built in

We’ve seen a gradual increase in the AI features in smart security cameras.

Pre-AI cameras offered only dumb motion detection to trigger recording. An indoor camera could be triggered by a pet walking into the room, while an outdoor one could be activated by things like trees blowing in the wind or a car driving down the street.

The first AI feature to come along was person-detection. When the motion detector was activated, an AI system would check whether there was a person-shaped object in the frame, and only trigger recording if a human was detected.

More advanced cameras offer person-recognition, where it can recognize members of the household, and not trigger recordings of them, only saving clips of people it doesn’t recognize.

But it seems likely that an Apple smart home camera will aim to build on this with Apple Intelligence features, and it’s not hard to see the potential benefits of a much smarter home camera system.

First, look at what Visual Intelligence can do. An Apple camera will have a much greater awareness of what it is seeing than any existing camera.

Perhaps it will recognize a water leak from beneath the washing machine, or spot that a pet has knocked over some glassware and broken it, alerting you to the broken glass on the floor?

It might even do things like note that your calendar shows you heading out to the gym but detect that you’re leaving the home without your gym bag, triggering a voice alert?

It will also have access to things like your home calendars. For example, perhaps it will see that your cleaner or gardener should be there on a Friday, but has entered your home unexpectedly on a Tuesday, triggering recording?

It will almost certainly offer a high level of HomeKit integration. Maybe it will recognize that you are walking from your bedroom to the kitchen at night, and automatically trigger the lighting needed to light the way for you.

As with all things Apple Intelligence, the capabilities will increase over time, so the feature set you get when you buy the camera will likely only be the start. That in itself won’t be unique to Apple – there are other security cameras which get new features through firmware updates – but what likely will be assured is a greater degree of integration with HomeKit as a whole, and a longer-term commitment to software upgrades.

Are you likely to buy an Apple smart home camera?

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Photo of Xiaomi camera: Daniel ZH on Unsplash