Apple's Siri AI home hub is in employee testing, eyeing October
Apple's first AI-era hardware is quietly living in its own employees' houses, and Zhipu is selling Chinese enterprises a privacy switch with a few visible holes in it.
Apple is testing its long-delayed home hub in employees' homes and aiming to ship it between October and early 2027, according to Mark Gurman's Power On newsletter. The device, known internally as J490, is a roughly square screen that either sits on a stand — Gurman describes it as looking like a HomePod mini cut in half — or mounts to a wall. It runs a new operating system built around Siri AI, pairs with an iPhone for setup, and borrows interface pieces from iOS, tvOS and watchOS: its own home screen, widgets, clock faces. A front-facing camera identifies who is looking at it and personalises what appears — apps, notes, calendar entries, news, music — and Gurman says Apple manages that recognition without a Face ID-grade depth sensor.
Siri is the whole pitch. Apple's reported demos have the assistant searching across a user's devices and accounts, finding a specific photo, resuming a song or podcast a friend sent, and carrying out precise tasks in Notes, Reminders and Calendar. That framing surfaced in John Ternus's first keynote as CEO, where he described the iPhone as an "intelligent personal hub" for the AI era — Gurman reports the presentation was convincing enough that people inside Apple thought he was about to unveil the hub itself. The same newsletter says Apple has started cutting staff at Fitness+ as it reassesses that service.
The hardware has reportedly been finished for months; the delay has been the assistant. Apple shipped iOS 27 this month with its rebuilt Siri AI still labelled a beta, and a device that exists to be talked to inherits every one of those shortcomings at launch. An Echo Show-style screen with a smaller display is not a novel product — what Apple is actually testing in those homes is whether Siri can hold a conversation well enough that anyone wants a second always-listening Apple device in the kitchen. If it can, the hub becomes the beachhead for the home security and robotics plans already circulating for 2027. If it can't, Apple will have shipped a very nice clock.
Zhipu announced that its MaaS platform will add a no-retention mode for enterprise and developer traffic, days after its coding agent was caught uploading whole workspaces. The mechanism is opt-in through the MaaS console: once active, the platform says it will not statically store user inputs and outputs, and data is used only to complete the current call. Zhipu is framing it as the strictest such policy among Chinese model providers — a direct answer to the ZCode episode, where a developer showed the agent packing entire repositories and Git history into an archive only Zhipu could open, prompting an apology in the company's user group.
The exclusions are where this gets interesting. Batch API and File API are explicitly out of scope, because those products need platform-side persistence to work at all, and Zhipu says it may retain data for 30 days or longer where regulations require it or where it is investigating suspected abuse. That is a normal carve-out and a real one: a compliance team reading the announcement will notice that the workloads most likely to contain sensitive bulk data — the batch jobs and uploaded files — are precisely the ones the switch does not cover. Zhipu also promised to open-source ZCode, and did — though only the post-fix version, which we covered this morning in Zhipu open-sources ZCode — but only the version after the fix. Retention is now a feature Chinese labs compete on, and the fine print is the product.
What to watch: whether Zhipu extends the option to Batch and File APIs, and whether other Chinese labs match it before buyers start writing it into procurement terms.
Would a no-retention switch change which model API you build on — or does it need to cover batch traffic too? Tell us in the comments.
