With the many reports about Apple making a smart home display with a robotic arm, the company seems pretty serious about the smart home market. A potentially new addition into the bitten fruit brand’s effort into said market may be a smart doorbell that works with its Face ID facial recognition tech.
As part of the weekly Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg claims that the idea behind the smart doorbell and its Face ID implementation is the same as the company’s iPhones. That is, when the Apple smart doorbell automatically scans for faces of residents when someone approaches, followed by the automatic unlocking of the door.
Naturally, this means that the Apple smart doorbell will need to be connected with smart locks made by other third parties. With that in mind, the company may partner with a specific brand “to offer a complete system on day one”. On that note, Philips launched its own series of smart locks that work with palm recognition, among other more conventional methods, earlier this year. Though the report notes that this is still in its early stages, with nothing expected to be coming to market “before the end of next year at the soonest”.
With that being said, there’s a chance that Apple’s top level execs may can the project before it goes any further. The newsletter notes that the brand may not necessarily want to risk being associated with break-ins when Face ID suffers its “less than one-on-a-million chance” of misfiring, and unlocking for the wrong person. This is in the same way that the brand cancelled its near decade-long smart car project out of fear of being associated with accidents.
(Source: Bloomberg)
