Beyond Voice Commands: Unconventional Methods for Managing Your Smart Home

With Apple reportedly preparing a smart home hub that recognises faces and physically follows you around the room, the era of "weird" smart home controls has officially gone mainstream. As How-To Geek's recent roundup of unusual control methods signals, the tinkerer crowd has been scripting this future for years — and the walled gardens are now scrambling to catch up.

The hub that watches back

Bloomberg's reporting, surfaced via HardwareZone, sketches a device Apple is positioning as the command plane for the connected home. The first model — codenamed J490 — reportedly pairs a 7-inch display with a half-dome base suited to countertops, bedside tables or desks. The second variant, J491, is built for wall mounting with a magnetic attachment system. Both reportedly run a new operating system built on tvOS, with interface elements borrowed from watchOS and iOS.

The interesting payload isn't the screen — it's the sensor stack. Facial recognition identifies whoever is standing in front of the display, estimates their distance from it, and dynamically reshapes the layout: calendars, reminders, smart home controls, whatever the recognised user wants to see, in their preferred font size. The same unit is said to handle FaceTime, home security monitoring, and an intercom for room-to-room voice. A launch window between October and early next year is reportedly on the table, with a refreshed Apple TV and an updated HomePod mini expected alongside.

Further out, Apple is reportedly working on a more ambitious version equipped with a robotic arm that physically repositions the display to track users around a room, plus a dedicated in-home security camera.

From the tinkerer's bench

This is where the "weird ways" framing earns its keep. The How-To Geek roundup lands right as Apple pushes its most sensor-heavy hub yet, and the timing is no accident — the tinkerer community has been scripting around these control modalities for years. Presence detection via BLE beacons, voice triggers routed through custom flows, MQTT payloads fired by camera events, webhook chains that turn "someone walked past the hallway sensor" into a lighting scene. None of that is new to anyone running Home Assistant or a Node-RED pipeline.

The catch is the walled garden. Apple's approach funnels everything through a proprietary OS and its own facial recognition stack. For anyone who already owns their automation logic, the J490 looks less like a hub and more like a competing control plane — something you can integrate against, but cannot audit or extend. Useful as a trigger source, dangerous as a brain.

What to track before you commit

A few concrete signals worth wiring into your watchlist:

• The actual launch OS. If it exposes any local API surface or HomeKit bridge flexibility, tinkerers can hook in cleanly. If it's a sealed box, plan your automations around it, not through it.
• The robotic-arm variant. This is the one automation architects should be watching. A display that physically repositions itself opens up spatial automation — lighting tied to which wall you're currently facing, audio zones that follow presence, camera framing that adjusts to room position.
• The in-home security camera. Apple entering this category directly changes the calculus for anyone running their own camera stack. HomeKit Secure Video compatibility will matter; raw RTSP almost certainly will not be on offer.
• Facial recognition as a control primitive. Useful for personalisation, but it is also a new attack surface. Treat the hub like any other sensor-rich device on your network: segment it, monitor its outbound traffic, and don't assume on-device processing stays on-device.

The "weird ways" to control your smart home are not going away — they are being absorbed into the mainstream product roadmap. The playbook stays the same: own your automation logic, keep your protocols open where you can, and treat any new hub as a trigger source rather than the thing actually making decisions.