When you walk into your kitchen next Monday morning, the smart home landscape will have shifted. Apple’s rumored “Welcome home” event on October 13 is expected to put the HomePad front and center — a roughly 6-inch square display that runs homeOS and promises to make Siri AI the brain of your house. There is just one problem: the brain is not ready yet.
The full Siri conversational agent control for HomeKit is reportedly delayed until late 2026 or early 2027. On launch day, the HomePad is expected to offer notification summaries and camera search — the ability to ask “who was at the door” using natural language queries against HomeKit Secure Video feeds. That is useful. But it is not the conversational, multi-step agent experience Apple has been signaling. The screen arrives before the voice.
This gap matters because of what Apple is asking you to pay for it. The HomePad is rumored at around $350 (Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman; Apple has not confirmed pricing). Pre-orders are reportedly set for October 16. For that price, you get a device that requires an iPhone for setup, speaks only to HomeKit, Matter, and Thread ecosystems, and leans on on-device processing plus Apple’s Private Cloud Compute to keep your data out of the cloud. It is a premium, privacy-first bet — and LG is expected to back it with co-developed accessories including a video doorbell, thermostat, and indoor camera.
Now compare that to what Meta launched a month earlier. On September 8, Meta introduced Muse, a personal AI agent with three tiers: free, $20 per month for “Power,” and $100 per month for “Maximum.” Muse handles email, books travel, processes payments through Stripe, and monitors home security cameras. It already works across web, iOS, Android, and WhatsApp.
Then, on October 2, Meta went further. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs, announced Muse Home Link — 5,000 ESP32-C5 USB-C dongles shipping in late October or early November. The hardware costs active US Muse subscribers nothing. The SDK is open-source under Apache 2.0, sitting on GitHub with over 1,700 stars. The dongle itself runs locked firmware that cannot be reflashed, which creates an interesting paradox: open-source software on hardware you cannot touch. Still, the playbook is recognizable. Open-source the SDK, give away the dongle, and let developers build the ecosystem you will not build yourself.
The pricing architecture tells the real story. Apple wants $350 for hardware that acts as a curated, closed gateway to Siri. Meta wants $0 for hardware that acts as a bridge to a broader agent that also handles your email, travel, and payments. Google, meanwhile, charges $20 per month for Gemini for Home on existing Nest speakers, with conversational voice and searchable camera history bundled into its Premium Advanced tier.
Three companies, three fundamentally different bets on what the consumer will tolerate. Apple bets you will pay a premium for privacy and curation. Meta bets you will accept a broader agent in exchange for openness (and the data that comes with it). Google bets the subscription model can carry the load.
This is not just a product comparison. It is an architectural collision we have been tracking. The smart home architecture shift piece identified three competing visions for where AI lives — distributed, centralized, or democratized. Home Assistant 2026.10 shipping with native MCP showed the open-source path gaining real capability. And our Muse Home Link analysis laid out the Android-playbook angle — Meta commoditizing hardware to capture the software layer.
The question for October 13 is not whether the HomePad is good hardware. It almost certainly will be. The question is whether a $350 device with a delayed conversational agent can compete in a market where Meta is giving away bridges and Google is bundling the same capability into a $20 subscription. Apple’s privacy-first architecture is a genuine differentiator — but it is also a constraint. Every capability that depends on cloud processing has to pass through Apple’s privacy layer first, and that takes time. Time the HomePad may not have.
All details about the HomePad’s features and pricing remain unconfirmed claims until Apple makes them official on October 13. The Siri conversational agent delay is confirmed across multiple reports. What happens when the screen arrives before the brain — and your competitor already shipped both — is the thing worth watching.