Apple’s ‘Personal Hub’ AI Strategy Hints at Upcoming Home Device - Bloomberg.com

Apple has settled on a name for its next thing, and the name is "intelligent personal hub" — which, per Bloomberg's Sept. 20 newsletter, is a strategy "about much more than the iPhone." That is corporate for: the iPhone has had its turn. Somewhere in Cupertino a well-paid room of people agreed that "personal hub" was the phrase to carry the future, and it does have a ring to it — the ring a filing cabinet would have if you glued a speaker to it. The newsletter adds that the strategy "hints at an upcoming home device," which is the elegant way of saying Apple would like a microphone in the room you are currently sitting in.

Meanwhile the same newsletter carries job cuts at Apple Fitness+, where the company is said to be "pondering" the service's future. Pondering is the great management verb of our age: it costs nothing, admits nothing, and can be sustained indefinitely while the people who built the thing are shown the door. The workouts may survive; the humans who made them are, it appears, a rounding error against a services margin. And Apple Pay's launch in India is "imminent" — a lovely word, that, for a news item with no date in it.

So the shape of it: one hub installed in the home, learning your habits, launched with a privacy page and a keynote; one fitness subscription quietly de-staffed; one payments rail cleared at last for the world's largest market. The device is "personal" in the way a butler is personal — it knows your name, your calendar, and precisely the moment you stopped opening the treadmill app. Apple's real product has always been the margin; this quarter the margin is being cut, polished and announced as intelligence. Do enjoy the hub. It will certainly enjoy you.