You have three delivery dates on your calendar this month: October 30, November 13, and Meta’s promised October window. As the boxes arrive, the question is what is actually inside each one, because some contain the agent and some contain hardware still waiting for one.
Apple is releasing two devices this month. The Apple HomePod mini 2 lands on October 30 for $149. If you open that box, you will find a speaker, but you will not find the agent you were promised. The hardware is ready: five colors, the S10 chip, richer audio, and a light-up top that pulses with the music. The missing piece is the one in the release headline. According to the company’s own press release, Siri AI is “coming to HomePod mini 2 in a future software update.” There is no date attached to that update, so you are buying a piece of hardware today and waiting for the intelligence to arrive later. A footnote in the release confirms that “Siri AI will be available later as a free software update.”
Then there is the Apple HomeView, which arrives on November 13 for $299. This box does contain the assistant, with one significant caveat. The footnote in the press release states that “Siri AI is available in beta in HomeView software version 27.2.” The device itself is a 7-inch screen that recognizes up to six faces, with camera and microphone data walled off in Secure Exclaves on the A18 chip, and it will not ship in the EU at all while Siri AI is unavailable in iOS there. This is also the box many buyers are visibly waiting for: as we noted in our pre-order wait times reporting, delivery estimates for the silver tabletop model now run November 23 through December 1 in New York, with some other U.S. locations pushed to November 30 or later. The wall-mounted model still holds the November 13 launch date.
Both Apple devices also carry a shared footnote about what comes next. Apple states that “Certain Apple Intelligence features that rely on server-side models are subject to daily usage limits. Expanded access to such features will be available for a fee in the future.” The metering language is Apple’s own, and expanded access is promised for a fee later.
Meta presents the inverse situation: the agent exists, but the shipment does not. The TechCrunch Muse Gadgets report notes that Meta announced the Muse Home Link on October 2. According to the report, which cites Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, the company produced 5,000 of these USB-C-powered devices and is giving them away for free to Muse subscribers, and Friedman said the device “would be ready to ship a few weeks” out. Home Link is the most home-native of the three on paper: a small dongle that lets Muse join your home network and talk to the smart devices on it, including speakers and smart TVs. As of October 20, Day 20 of the October window, there are zero confirmed shipments. Claim terms reported by secondary outlets describe a U.S.-only, one-per-subscriber giveaway with Meta notifying claimants when the device is available to ship, and no individual ship dates have been published.
If you want an agent that is actually in the market today, the only one on the shelf is the Google Home MCP, available since September 16 behind a $20-a-month Premium Advanced tier. It is the only agent in this ledger you can turn on this week, and it comes with a monthly bill attached. As we explored in our coverage of privacy architectures, the choice between these systems also decides how your data is handled once the agent is finally running.
Short version: this month you are buying hardware, not agents. If the goal is a working home agent before December, the only one actually in market is Google’s paid tier. Every other box arriving this month is a down payment on a future software update, a beta, or a shipment notice that has not arrived. If waiting for features to be patched in or chasing delivery windows sounds miserable, the honest advice is to hold off until the software catches up to the hardware.