The Core Dump

The Core Dump is the personal blog of Nic Lindh, a Swedish-American pixel-pusher living in Phoenix, Arizona.

[By Nic Lindh on Monday, 08 September 2014]

Apple might enter the home integration field

Nic thinks home integration could be Apple’s next major category. Read on to find out why.

[Post-keynote update] Well, I’m certainly no Nostradamus. Sigh. And effing U2 to rub salt in the wound. [/Update]

As usual this time of the year, the nerdosphere is all-aflutter with predictions about tomorrow’s big Apple event, with the most common speculation being two new, larger, iPhones and the long-awaited and mysterious wearable device.

(As an aside here, kudos to Apple for their Kremlin-level security—apart from the predictable iPhone parts from the supply chain, nobody has anything concrete…)

But take a step back and think about Apple’s core competency: Find a technology that’s out there and has the potential to become huge but is mired in neckbeardery.

The first home computers—huge potential, but required soldering; the first PCs—huge potential, but required mastery of command-line arcana to accomplish anything useful; MP3-players—huge potential, but required headache-inducing amounts of technical jiggery-pokery to get your songs actually on to the devices; smartphones—huge potential, but required endless patience and button-mashing to accomplish magical things like syncing your contacts.

There’s a massive market out there ripe for exactly this kind of swooping in and making the technology useful and attractive to normal people: Home automation. The technology is out there, it’s just hidden in needless complications and über-nerd-think. Make it usable by—and attractive to—normal humans, and there’s billions of dollars to make as well as the opportunity to improve peoples’ lives.

Plus, think about it: Apple built a house by the conference center. Hmmm? Might that be useful to show off their home integration technology?

Or, I could end up looking like an idiot tomorrow…

You have thoughts? Send me an email!