Apple’s reportedly developing a smart home camera that doesn’t record video

With Apple rumored to launch a smart home hub next month, it could come with a privacy-protecting security camera too.

Apple’s rumored push into smart home tech could include a smart home security camera that only gives users text event descriptions instead of video footage. Mark Gurman said in the first episode of the Power On podcast that the camera will be part of “a new Apple smart home ecosystem,” alongside Apple’s rumored smart home hub :

They’re also building home security products, both first-party and third-party home security products. And the biggest thing is a program called J450. And this is an offshoot and a companion product to the J490 smart home display. And these are little cameras that you can put around your house. They have very low frame rate. It looks like a cylinder. It looks like a metal giant, you know, chapstick. And what does that mean? No video recording. So it’s a sensor that cannot actually pull in real video footage. It’s analyzing your environment in your home and around your home simply using AI.

Gurman also mentions that the camera uses “a very similar technology” to what Apple’s reportedly developing for a pair of AirPods with cameras that leaked earlier this year .

Instead of using something like mmWave for presence sensing, using an image sensor with AI embedded that processes everything on-device, like these Sony IMX500 sensors , could work without passing images that would need to be stored and secured. Apple Home currently has a “Detect Activity” setting for HomeKit Secure Video cameras that stops video streaming and recording, but continues tracking motion, similar to what Gurman describes.

He goes on to add that the smart home camera will have facial recognition for things like detecting when someone enters a room, but, “You’re not getting anything but text descriptions. There’s nothing you can do with it. There’s no video recording.”