I'm not so sure users are worried about a local device storing local video though. It's the cloud, when your video data leaves your home, that people are unhappy with.
With so-called smart TV's recording audio, pushing to the cloud, I suspect Apple believes consumers are becoming twice-shy about a device that records at all. Like, how am I supposed to believe you that the data stays local?
But then if the device has a camera/mic. at all, I'm not sure how we are supposed to believe you that it's not storing the recording at all—only post-processing and deleting right away.
(It reminds me though of a thought-experiment device described in a Scientific American article from the 80's—sorry, I'll have to exhaustively scour to find the issue. It described a hypothetical device with a camera that you point at a thing and the device says, "Chair"—if you had pointed it at a chair—or "Couch", etc. Such a thing can of course exist today with little more than pixels from the CCD being passed to a local "AI" where they are processed and dropped out of memory.)
How is this getting investor money, and how are consumers seeing this as something worth paying for?
It's just not hard to flip the light switch when you leave the room, and you don't need an all-seeing eye uploading everything that happens in your house to a massive corporation.
I can't believe this is a feature that gets the hype that it does. It's almost as cliche as the example of making a dinner reservation.
I live in a 1700sqft space - not small, but not large. I have ~15 separate banks of overhead lights that were built into my builder grade condo when I bought it, and probably 20 light fixtures (lamps, accent lights, etc) I've added myself. If you are even remotely interested in design, decor or lighting it's easy to end up with a similar number of lights in an average sized space. When I walk through the door, the scene sets itself perfectly based on the time of day. If I didn't have that automation, I'd probably end up turning on the nearest 1-2 lights out of convenience. It's a huge quality of life improvement. Today it takes some up front effort to get it set up, but it's getting easier and easier and more people will realize the benefit.
I think their point is that a simple infra red sensor like outdoor motion detector lights will do what you need. There's zero need for a camera to do this. Massive, massive overkill.
There's a fairly large and thriving market in zigbee and/or zwave based "human presence" sensors which can serve dual duty as motion detection via infrared and also using very basic radar, for both turning on/off lights and also to provide data to a DIY security or automation system in Home Assistant.
There have been significant price drops in small modules for short range, rudimentary V-band (60 GHz) radar to do this sort of thing, which companies can built into their consumer-priced product.
I think some of the better ones are a little bit too power hungry to be entirely wireless on battery, and have a USB-C port in their rear, you're meant to plug it in persistently to a small USB charger and tuck the cable away somewhere.
I have three lights in the living room that I toggle just before sunset manually with a switch. Instead of three separate switches, my electrician made it so that one switch turns on all three lights at the same time.
I really don't see it as a "huge quality of life improvement" to not have to walk to the light switch. I typically combine it with a trip to the kitchen to grab some water or a snack.
This sounds very cool. I have home assistant and have fiddled around with presence detection but I feel like its pretty niche and preference dependent. My gf did not like it in the bathroom and getting the timing to work perfectly required a ton of fiddling. Maybe apple will get it right but I don’t think their core customers care about home automation to this degree.
This immediately made me think of "smart water bottles" that detect how much of your drink has left the vessel. They can detect what kind of drink they contain and what temperature it is. And so on.
You could not pay me to use such a stupid device. No clue why people invest in or purchase such a product.
Also how much are we saving flipping lights off for a few hours in the age of LEDs? Most of my electricity bill is either fixed costs or from heating water.
I recently installed a basic flat, round, white LED overhead ceiling light in a bedroom that's been repurposed as a home office (replacing a very old dual screw-bulb center of ceiling fixture on the octagon box), and I don't know if there's any actual savings in the new unit. The previous thing had two "same size/shape as an incandescent" 11 or 12 watt white LED "bulbs" in it, the new unit is specced at 28W. It provides a more evenly distributed light and has a toggle switch to choose between three different color temperatures.
At $0.11 per kWh if say it's 30W and I leave it on 24x7 for a month it's 22.32 kWh, or about $2.5 of electricity a month. Multiply by three for like $7.5 a month if this was a California electric rate. In the longer run I'd like to have a way to turn it on and off automatically not so much to save money, but to have a way to turn off all the house lights in one toggle in home assistant when going to bed, just for the convenience of it.
Across my house, I think I have about a kilowatt or two of LED lights, mostly in the form of ceiling cans at 16W each. Running everything full brightness would thus be about $0.30-$0.50 per hour. It’s the paradox that the same rooms probably would have used the wattage with the old incandescents, it just would have had a lot more shadowy corners.
Do you grow any plants in your home? An average family home will have around a tenth of that energy consumption if you turn on all the lights. 200 watt tops. That is 25 LED bulbs of 8 watt.
Yes almost 60 sounds right, and I keep the dimmers at about 50% usually since it’s a small condo. But it also very /evenly/ illuminated. The builders chose this, not me. Your typical incandescent hallway or stairwell probably used to have 1-2 lights (60-120W) to cast enough light to get around. Now that same hall in modern LED style might have 4-6, because it eliminates shadows, not because it makes it brighter in a given spot. Same for the kitchen—it probably used to have one central 100W light and 50W over sink, and now a modern style build in the same space might have at least 6 LED ceiling lights+6 under cabinet lights
About 1700sf with taller than normal ceilings. It’s unnecessary bright in the evening, but blends with sunlight in the day. I feel like our brains must interpret light differently depending on the angle it reaches the eye. I used to rent a place that was 900sf with normal ceilings, which had 4 of those tiny sort of ones in the living room, and it was painfully bright in the way they concentrated the light into spots so we never used them (unfortunately they didn’t have dimmers)
I realized I did accidentally almost double my final number, so 500-1000W would be more accurate for the way this condo was built (depending on which extra lamps we are including—does every understair closet light count or just the main rooms, at the low end estimate)
So your teenager doesn't flip the light switch. The LED bulb now continues to draw 8 watt of power. That is less than what a security camera that monitors room activity draws.
The fact that a camera is involved is what is jarring, I think. There's plenty of less creepy ways to achieve what other smart home platforms do, which makes one wonder what else it is being used for. If we are to trust them, the camera won't record... until the terms of service update and it gets buried in legalese and surprise, everyone gets opted into having all of the camera's sensors constantly beaming to a cloud for myriad purposes.
About 10 years ago I was browsing Home Depot and found an electronic Bluetooth enabled egg carton. It paired with a mobile app to let you know you were out of eggs. Don’t know what the target market for that product was either.
Motion sensor is not the same as a presence sensor. Presence sensors often include a PIR sensor in addition to several other sensors to detect if someone is in an area.
What investor money? This is purportedly an internal project by a large tech company. And what hype? This is speculative article based on second-hand leaked information.
Well, fair point. The investors are the people buying Apple stock I guess. But this is what they're chosing to promote as a benefit for the trillions being spent on GPUs, servers, data centers, power, water, and all the rest of it? Turning off the lights when you leave the room?
I so sorely lost faith in Apple when they started serving ads in Maps. I know they're trying to be privacy preserving. But a compromised value isn't a value, it's a guideline.
The number of ads I have gotten lately about buying ads on Apple Maps has me glad I'm not using Apple Maps. It turns out they're just late to the ad game, not opposed to it.
what are you using for a Maps app if not Apple? Google is (probably) much worse and does pretty much all the same things. Even in nav mode it shows a bunch of sponsored pins like chain restaurants or stores.
I've always thought that consumer complaints about Apple in HN only come from a loud and self-important minority, but wow the replies here represent such an infinitesimal market share
CoMaps. Though that's probably a bit hardcore for most people.
At the end of the day, Google is worse. But Google has a better set of POIs. If Apple is throwing in the towel on privacy, I'm not sure the degrees matter as much as the difference in quality.
Sadly in current year, whenever tech companies say they aren't going to do something that means they are going to do it in two different ways and try to hide them both.
Amounts of telemetry is pretty vague though. The type and sensitivity of the data is what matters. They can collect gigabytes of crash reports or performance metrics for all I care because that’s not my personal data.
Crash reports contain a lot of personal data. It's not just a bunch of memory addresses. It's also the environment, what you were doing, etc. Performance metrics are even worse. It's what you are doing when it's not crashing.
"They found the analytics control and other privacy settings had no obvious effect on Apple’s data collection—the tracking remained the same whether iPhone Analytics was switched on or off." (https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...)
> It could also create limitations for customers who expect a security camera to provide footage after a break-in, package theft, or other incident. How Apple’s wider security system would handle those situations remains unclear.
What would be the main advantage of this design? My understanding is that it captures image frames, retains them in RAM, and processes them with a CPU without saving them to a flash (or an SSD). Even if an attacker manages to compromise the camera, there wouldn't be historical data to retrieve. But couldn't an attacker with sufficient access read the frames currently in RAM and possibly capture footage while maintaining the access? Could hardware isolation prevent this even if some of the camera's software were compromised?
It feels like it's becoming harder to strike the right balance between privacy and the actual utility that the device is supposed to provide.
> record: to cause (sound, visual images, data, etc.) to be registered on something (such as a memory card, hard drive, or optical disc) in reproducible form
It is reproducible. It has to be for their feature to work. They're trying to find some way to communicate to people that the recording is to a ring buffer, and isn't durably saving everything it hears indefinitely. It's an unenviable position to have to find a way to sell your engineering that enables a fairly privacy-preserving implementation of a feature that intuitively feels like it depends on surveillance to a mass audience. Made especially difficult by the environment where most products really are surveilling you even when they don't need to.
Of course, Apple still collects more data than it needs to and abuses users in other ways, so I don't really feel bad for them.
Would you consider a phone call / VoIP a recording? Your voice is being encoded into digital data and put in a small buffer before it can be transmitted to the recipient.
Don't mean to make this sound like a gotcha, but the technical implementation is secondary to how there's no output .wav anyone could play back. I think saying "there's no recording" is a fair and clear to normal people description of what happens.
So the conclusion would be that if the software can be modified, it has a writable storage media attached (not necessarily local) and an image sensor and/or mic, it is, was or will be a recording device at some point in time.
I'm intrigued by the concept.
I'm not so sure users are worried about a local device storing local video though. It's the cloud, when your video data leaves your home, that people are unhappy with.
With so-called smart TV's recording audio, pushing to the cloud, I suspect Apple believes consumers are becoming twice-shy about a device that records at all. Like, how am I supposed to believe you that the data stays local?
But then if the device has a camera/mic. at all, I'm not sure how we are supposed to believe you that it's not storing the recording at all—only post-processing and deleting right away.
(It reminds me though of a thought-experiment device described in a Scientific American article from the 80's—sorry, I'll have to exhaustively scour to find the issue. It described a hypothetical device with a camera that you point at a thing and the device says, "Chair"—if you had pointed it at a chair—or "Couch", etc. Such a thing can of course exist today with little more than pixels from the CCD being passed to a local "AI" where they are processed and dropped out of memory.)
> switch lights off when a room becomes empty
How is this getting investor money, and how are consumers seeing this as something worth paying for?
It's just not hard to flip the light switch when you leave the room, and you don't need an all-seeing eye uploading everything that happens in your house to a massive corporation.
I can't believe this is a feature that gets the hype that it does. It's almost as cliche as the example of making a dinner reservation.
I live in a 1700sqft space - not small, but not large. I have ~15 separate banks of overhead lights that were built into my builder grade condo when I bought it, and probably 20 light fixtures (lamps, accent lights, etc) I've added myself. If you are even remotely interested in design, decor or lighting it's easy to end up with a similar number of lights in an average sized space. When I walk through the door, the scene sets itself perfectly based on the time of day. If I didn't have that automation, I'd probably end up turning on the nearest 1-2 lights out of convenience. It's a huge quality of life improvement. Today it takes some up front effort to get it set up, but it's getting easier and easier and more people will realize the benefit.
I think their point is that a simple infra red sensor like outdoor motion detector lights will do what you need. There's zero need for a camera to do this. Massive, massive overkill.
There's a fairly large and thriving market in zigbee and/or zwave based "human presence" sensors which can serve dual duty as motion detection via infrared and also using very basic radar, for both turning on/off lights and also to provide data to a DIY security or automation system in Home Assistant.
There have been significant price drops in small modules for short range, rudimentary V-band (60 GHz) radar to do this sort of thing, which companies can built into their consumer-priced product.
I think some of the better ones are a little bit too power hungry to be entirely wireless on battery, and have a USB-C port in their rear, you're meant to plug it in persistently to a small USB charger and tuck the cable away somewhere.
Ir detectors don’t work for presence detection.
OK.
Hell, 'SpaceSense' and other similar tech enables it with existing wifi radios and a software update.
I have three lights in the living room that I toggle just before sunset manually with a switch. Instead of three separate switches, my electrician made it so that one switch turns on all three lights at the same time.
I really don't see it as a "huge quality of life improvement" to not have to walk to the light switch. I typically combine it with a trip to the kitchen to grab some water or a snack.
This sounds very cool. I have home assistant and have fiddled around with presence detection but I feel like its pretty niche and preference dependent. My gf did not like it in the bathroom and getting the timing to work perfectly required a ton of fiddling. Maybe apple will get it right but I don’t think their core customers care about home automation to this degree.
This immediately made me think of "smart water bottles" that detect how much of your drink has left the vessel. They can detect what kind of drink they contain and what temperature it is. And so on.
You could not pay me to use such a stupid device. No clue why people invest in or purchase such a product.
Also how much are we saving flipping lights off for a few hours in the age of LEDs? Most of my electricity bill is either fixed costs or from heating water.
I recently installed a basic flat, round, white LED overhead ceiling light in a bedroom that's been repurposed as a home office (replacing a very old dual screw-bulb center of ceiling fixture on the octagon box), and I don't know if there's any actual savings in the new unit. The previous thing had two "same size/shape as an incandescent" 11 or 12 watt white LED "bulbs" in it, the new unit is specced at 28W. It provides a more evenly distributed light and has a toggle switch to choose between three different color temperatures.
At $0.11 per kWh if say it's 30W and I leave it on 24x7 for a month it's 22.32 kWh, or about $2.5 of electricity a month. Multiply by three for like $7.5 a month if this was a California electric rate. In the longer run I'd like to have a way to turn it on and off automatically not so much to save money, but to have a way to turn off all the house lights in one toggle in home assistant when going to bed, just for the convenience of it.
Across my house, I think I have about a kilowatt or two of LED lights, mostly in the form of ceiling cans at 16W each. Running everything full brightness would thus be about $0.30-$0.50 per hour. It’s the paradox that the same rooms probably would have used the wattage with the old incandescents, it just would have had a lot more shadowy corners.
Do you grow any plants in your home? An average family home will have around a tenth of that energy consumption if you turn on all the lights. 200 watt tops. That is 25 LED bulbs of 8 watt.
Yeah even at 16W per bulb that's over 60 bulbs. Either a big house or a very very bright one.
Yes almost 60 sounds right, and I keep the dimmers at about 50% usually since it’s a small condo. But it also very /evenly/ illuminated. The builders chose this, not me. Your typical incandescent hallway or stairwell probably used to have 1-2 lights (60-120W) to cast enough light to get around. Now that same hall in modern LED style might have 4-6, because it eliminates shadows, not because it makes it brighter in a given spot. Same for the kitchen—it probably used to have one central 100W light and 50W over sink, and now a modern style build in the same space might have at least 6 LED ceiling lights+6 under cabinet lights
How small? Under 900sqft? I've got 70W (20x 3.5W) in ny living room and it is quite bright at 100%, I usually dim to around 20-50%.
About 1700sf with taller than normal ceilings. It’s unnecessary bright in the evening, but blends with sunlight in the day. I feel like our brains must interpret light differently depending on the angle it reaches the eye. I used to rent a place that was 900sf with normal ceilings, which had 4 of those tiny sort of ones in the living room, and it was painfully bright in the way they concentrated the light into spots so we never used them (unfortunately they didn’t have dimmers)
I realized I did accidentally almost double my final number, so 500-1000W would be more accurate for the way this condo was built (depending on which extra lamps we are including—does every understair closet light count or just the main rooms, at the low end estimate)
You obviously don't have teenagers at home :)
So your teenager doesn't flip the light switch. The LED bulb now continues to draw 8 watt of power. That is less than what a security camera that monitors room activity draws.
It's just a feature that's been available on other smart home platforms for years.
The fact that a camera is involved is what is jarring, I think. There's plenty of less creepy ways to achieve what other smart home platforms do, which makes one wonder what else it is being used for. If we are to trust them, the camera won't record... until the terms of service update and it gets buried in legalese and surprise, everyone gets opted into having all of the camera's sensors constantly beaming to a cloud for myriad purposes.
it has also been available on apple home for 10 years
About 10 years ago I was browsing Home Depot and found an electronic Bluetooth enabled egg carton. It paired with a mobile app to let you know you were out of eggs. Don’t know what the target market for that product was either.
That's actually kind of sick, I'd buy it for the novelty
Really depends on your home layout. More new homes are open layout so the light switch may be further away.
But ya, it's not that hard, the only place I've found a motion sensor to be useful was in the garage.
Motion sensor is not the same as a presence sensor. Presence sensors often include a PIR sensor in addition to several other sensors to detect if someone is in an area.
The problem was solved back in the 80s, long before cloud computing.
https://youtu.be/Ny8-G8EoWOw?si=Z9HUQbfZoPmCBxO3
This could also be achieved so many other ways for a fraction of the price
What investor money? This is purportedly an internal project by a large tech company. And what hype? This is speculative article based on second-hand leaked information.
Well, fair point. The investors are the people buying Apple stock I guess. But this is what they're chosing to promote as a benefit for the trillions being spent on GPUs, servers, data centers, power, water, and all the rest of it? Turning off the lights when you leave the room?
Apple isn’t real big in the data center space either. The described feature doesn’t take a ton of horsepower, I’d bet it’s done locally.
It’s pretty difficult, at least my for my kids.
sound like they are trying.
Unfortunately apple devices collect EXTREME amounts of telemetry, you are opted-in by default, and much of it is impossible to opt-out of.
I so sorely lost faith in Apple when they started serving ads in Maps. I know they're trying to be privacy preserving. But a compromised value isn't a value, it's a guideline.
The number of ads I have gotten lately about buying ads on Apple Maps has me glad I'm not using Apple Maps. It turns out they're just late to the ad game, not opposed to it.
what are you using for a Maps app if not Apple? Google is (probably) much worse and does pretty much all the same things. Even in nav mode it shows a bunch of sponsored pins like chain restaurants or stores.
I've always thought that consumer complaints about Apple in HN only come from a loud and self-important minority, but wow the replies here represent such an infinitesimal market share
TomTom. Only navigation that I can find that has a good offline mode. No ads, just POIs. Best CarPlay interface out of all apps.
NAVITIME
> what are you using for a Maps app if not Apple?
CoMaps. Though that's probably a bit hardcore for most people.
At the end of the day, Google is worse. But Google has a better set of POIs. If Apple is throwing in the towel on privacy, I'm not sure the degrees matter as much as the difference in quality.
OsmAnd
Privacy was simply a marketing scheme, not an actual conviction.
Apple is the only big tech company that is not EXTREMELY incentivized to sell your data.
not the same as collecting your data, especially with ads.
Sadly in current year, whenever tech companies say they aren't going to do something that means they are going to do it in two different ways and try to hide them both.
Amounts of telemetry is pretty vague though. The type and sensitivity of the data is what matters. They can collect gigabytes of crash reports or performance metrics for all I care because that’s not my personal data.
Crash reports contain a lot of personal data. It's not just a bunch of memory addresses. It's also the environment, what you were doing, etc. Performance metrics are even worse. It's what you are doing when it's not crashing.
You can disable analytics sharing in the settings menu of iOS.
"They found the analytics control and other privacy settings had no obvious effect on Apple’s data collection—the tracking remained the same whether iPhone Analytics was switched on or off." (https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...)
Article from 2022.
Why use a camera and the optical spectrum at all when WiFi can do imaging well enough to recognize people? [0]
Xfinity currently offers WiFi motion detection with their gateways. [1]
[0] Ordinary WiFi can now identify people with near perfect accuracy https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260522023127.h...
[1] https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/wifi-motion
> It could also create limitations for customers who expect a security camera to provide footage after a break-in, package theft, or other incident. How Apple’s wider security system would handle those situations remains unclear.
What would be the main advantage of this design? My understanding is that it captures image frames, retains them in RAM, and processes them with a CPU without saving them to a flash (or an SSD). Even if an attacker manages to compromise the camera, there wouldn't be historical data to retrieve. But couldn't an attacker with sufficient access read the frames currently in RAM and possibly capture footage while maintaining the access? Could hardware isolation prevent this even if some of the camera's software were compromised?
It feels like it's becoming harder to strike the right balance between privacy and the actual utility that the device is supposed to provide.
Who knows what the thing will actually look like, but aside from the privacy angle, a design like this could be exceptionally light on battery use.
> expected to use a low-frame-rate camera alongside facial recognition and infrared sensors to identify people and pets around the home.
Thanks for letting us know that it's mainly the surveillance device. The advanced one.
Sure, just like the Apple Watch doesn't "record" audio, it "flows."
"You think your watch records the audio around you? No no no. The audio flows into the Secure Enclave, and flowing is definitely not recording because it’s a different word." (https://leancrew.com/all-this/2026/09/new-apple-watches-have...)
> record: to cause (sound, visual images, data, etc.) to be registered on something (such as a memory card, hard drive, or optical disc) in reproducible form
via https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/record
Seems accurate if the audio captured isn't stored in a reproducible fashion.
It is reproducible. It has to be for their feature to work. They're trying to find some way to communicate to people that the recording is to a ring buffer, and isn't durably saving everything it hears indefinitely. It's an unenviable position to have to find a way to sell your engineering that enables a fairly privacy-preserving implementation of a feature that intuitively feels like it depends on surveillance to a mass audience. Made especially difficult by the environment where most products really are surveilling you even when they don't need to.
Of course, Apple still collects more data than it needs to and abuses users in other ways, so I don't really feel bad for them.
Would you consider a phone call / VoIP a recording? Your voice is being encoded into digital data and put in a small buffer before it can be transmitted to the recipient.
Don't mean to make this sound like a gotcha, but the technical implementation is secondary to how there's no output .wav anyone could play back. I think saying "there's no recording" is a fair and clear to normal people description of what happens.
If the phone company turned bits of it into a transcript for me, yes, I would.
So the conclusion would be that if the software can be modified, it has a writable storage media attached (not necessarily local) and an image sensor and/or mic, it is, was or will be a recording device at some point in time.
You should operate on that assumption, yes, unless you wrote or have reason to deeply trust the code running on it.
Sure. It's the transcript that is stored, isn't it?
could what it produces be used by someone else (lawfully or not) to invade my personal privacy?
that’s really the question to be answered here.
Too little, too late. Seeya, Appleberry!
[dead]
"we're gonna put a camera on a closed-source/closed-firmware device in your living room but it's totally not recording, trust me bro"
Look at the motivations. What would Apple’s be to record you dancing naked to Taylor Swift.