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- Hacker News
- Too little, too late. Seeya, Appleberry!
- > expected to use a low-frame-rate camera alongside facial recognition and infrared sensors to identify people and pets around the home.
Thanks for letting us know that it's mainly the surveillance device. The advanced one.
by zx8080 - > It could also create limitations for customers who expect a security camera to provide footage after a break-in, package theft, or other incident. How Apple’s wider security system would handle those situations remains unclear.
What would be the main advantage of this design? My understanding is that it captures image frames, retains them in RAM, and processes them with a CPU without saving them to a flash (or an SSD). Even if an attacker manages to compromise the camera, there wouldn't be historical data to retrieve. But couldn't an attacker with sufficient access read the frames currently in RAM and possibly capture footage while maintaining the access? Could hardware isolation prevent this even if some of the camera's software were compromised?
It feels like it's becoming harder to strike the right balance between privacy and the actual utility that the device is supposed to provide.
by coef2 - Why use a camera and the optical spectrum at all when WiFi can do imaging well enough to recognize people? [0]
Xfinity currently offers WiFi motion detection with their gateways. [1]
[0] Ordinary WiFi can now identify people with near perfect accuracy https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260522023127.h...
- sound like they are trying.
Unfortunately apple devices collect EXTREME amounts of telemetry, you are opted-in by default, and much of it is impossible to opt-out of.
by m463 - I'm intrigued by the concept.
I'm not so sure users are worried about a local device storing local video though. It's the cloud, when your video data leaves your home, that people are unhappy with.
With so-called smart TV's recording audio, pushing to the cloud, I suspect Apple believes consumers are becoming twice-shy about a device that records at all. Like, how am I supposed to believe you that the data stays local?
But then if the device has a camera/mic. at all, I'm not sure how we are supposed to believe you that it's not storing the recording at all—only post-processing and deleting right away.
(It reminds me though of a thought-experiment device described in a Scientific American article from the 80's—sorry, I'll have to exhaustively scour to find the issue. It described a hypothetical device with a camera that you point at a thing and the device says, "Chair"—if you had pointed it at a chair—or "Couch", etc. Such a thing can of course exist today with little more than pixels from the CCD being passed to a local "AI" where they are processed and dropped out of memory.)
by JKCalhoun - > switch lights off when a room becomes empty
How is this getting investor money, and how are consumers seeing this as something worth paying for?
It's just not hard to flip the light switch when you leave the room, and you don't need an all-seeing eye uploading everything that happens in your house to a massive corporation.
I can't believe this is a feature that gets the hype that it does. It's almost as cliche as the example of making a dinner reservation.
by SoftTalker