Humanoid robots are one of those dreams that sometimes feel like we’re on the precipice of realizing. Boston Dynamics has its Atlas robot, and Tesla is pursuing robotics, while companies like Mercedes, Amazon, and BMW are or will be testing robots for industrial use. But those are all very expensive robots performing tasks in controlled environments. In the home, they might still be far off.
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Apple’s next nebulous idea: smart home robots
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25484054/STK469_WWDC_2_2024_E.jpg "Apple’s next nebulous idea: smart home robots")
Enter Apple. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has said its robotics projects are under the purview of former Google employee John Giannandrea, who has been in charge of Siri and, for a time, the Apple Car. With the car project canceled, Vision Pro launched, and “Apple Intelligence” around the corner, is that the next big thing?
According to his information, any humanoid Apple robot is at least a decade away. Still, simpler ideas may be closer — a smaller robot that might follow you around or another idea involving a large iPad display on a robotic arm that emotes along with the caller on the other end with head nods and the like.
Many, if not most, homes are dens of robot-confounding chaos.
A mobile robot is tricky, though; what in the world would Apple do with a home robot that follows me around? Will it play music? Will it have wheels, or will it walk? Will I be expected to talk to AJAX or SiriGPT or whatever the company names its chatbot? Or, given Apple’s rumored OpenAI deal, some other chatbot?
For that matter, what form will it take? Will it fly? Will it have wheels? Will it be a ball? Can I kick it?
Its form factor will be at least as important as its smarts. Houses have stairs, furniture that sometimes moves, clothes that end up on the floor, pets that get in the way, and kids who leave their stuff everywhere. Doors that opened or closed just fine yesterday don’t do so today because it rained. A haphazard kitchen remodel 20 years ago might mean your refrigerator door slams into the corner of the wall by the stairs because why would you put the refrigerator space anywhere else, Dave? But I digress.
Based on what little detail has trickled out, Apple’s robotics ideas seem to fit a trend of charming novelty bots we’ve seen lately.
One recent example is Samsung’s Bot Handy concept, which looks like a robot vacuum with a stalk on top and a single articulating arm, meant to carry out tasks like picking up after you or sorting your dishes. There’s also the cute ball-bot, Ballie, that Samsung has shown off at a couple of CES shows. The latest iteration follows its humans and packs a projector that can be used for movies, video calls, or entertaining the family dog.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s $1,600 home robot with a tablet for a face, Astro, is still available by invitation only. It is charming, in a late 90s Compaq-computer-chic aesthetic sort of way, but it’s not clear that it’s functionally more useful than a few cheap wired cameras and an Echo Dot.
LG says its Q9 “AI Agent” is a roving smart home controller that can guess your mood and play music for you based on how it supposes you’re feeling. I’m very skeptical of all of that, but it has a handle, and I do love a piece of technology with a built-in handle.
I still want a sci-fi future filled with robotic home assistants that save us from the mundane tasks that keep us from the fun stuff we would rather do. But we don’t all live in the pristine, orderly abode featured in Samsung’s Ballie video or the videos Apple produces showing its hardware in personal spaces. Many normal homes are dens of robot-confounding chaos that tech companies will have a hard time accounting for when they create robots designed to follow us or autonomously carry out chores.
There are other paths to take. Take the Ring Always Home Cam, which will be very noisy judging from the demo videos, but it could also be useful and even good. While putting aside the not-insignificant privacy implications for a moment, it seems promising to me mostly because of the mobility and that it’s only designed to be a patrolling security camera.
That kind of focused functionality means it’s predictable, which is what makes single-purpose gizmos and doodads work. After some experimentation, my smart speakers are where they hear me consistently or are the most useful, and I can put my robot vacuums in the rooms I know I’ll keep clean enough that they won’t get trapped or break something (usually).
The robot vacuums I have — the Eufy Robovac L35 and a Roomba j7 — do an okay job, but they sometimes need rescuing when they find my cat’s stringy toys or eat a paperclip (which are somehow always on the floor even though I never, ever actually need one or even know where we keep them).
I have a kid, see, and preparing the way for them in other parts of the house is just adding more work to the mix. That’s fine for me because the two rooms in their charge are the ones that need vacuuming the most, so they’re still solving a problem, but it waves at the broader hurdles robotic products face.
And it’s not all that clear that AI can solve those problems. A New York Times opinion piece recently pointed out that despite all the hand-wringing about the tech over the last year and a half, generative AI hasn’t proven that it will be any better at making text, images, and music than the “mediocre vacuum robot that does a passable job.”
Given the generative AI boom and rumors that Apple is working on a HomePod with a screen, a cheerful, stationary smart display that obsequiously turns its screen to face me all the time seems at least vaguely within the company’s wheelhouse. Moving inside the house and interacting with objects is a trickier problem, but companies like Google and Toyota have seen success using generative AI training approaches for robots that “learn” how to do things like make breakfast or quickly sort items with little to no explicit programming.
It’ll be years, maybe even decades, before Apple or anyone else can bring us anything more than clumsy, half-useful robots that blunder through our homes, being weird, frustrating, or broken. Heck, phone companies haven’t even figured out how to make notifications anything but the bane of our collective existence. They’ve got their work cut out for them with homes like mine, where we’re just one busy week away from piles of clutter gathering like snowdrifts, ready to ruin some poor robot’s day.
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AI researchers have recently been asking themselves a version of the question, “Is that really Zuck?”
As first reported by Bloomberg, the Meta CEO has been personally asking top AI talent to join his new “superintelligence” AI lab and reboot Llama. His recruiting process typically goes like this: a cold outreach via email or WhatsApp that cites the recruit’s work history and requests a 15-minute chat. Dozens of researchers have gotten these kinds of messages at Google alone.
For those who do agree to hear his pitch (amazingly, not all of them do), Zuckerberg highlights the latitude they’ll have to make risky bets, the scale of Meta’s products, and the money he’s prepared to invest in the infrastructure to support them. He makes clear that this new team will be empowered and sit with him at Meta’s headquarters, where I’m told the desks have already been rearranged for the incoming team.
Most of the headlines so far have focused on the eye-popping compensation packages Zuckerberg is offering, some of which are well into the eight-figure range. As I’ve covered before, hiring the best AI researcher is like hiring a star basketball player: there are very few of them, and you have to pay up. Case in point: Zuckerberg basically just paid 14 Instagrams to hire away Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.
It’s easily the most expensive hire of all time, dwarfing the billions that Google spent to rehire Noam Shazeer and his core team from Character.AI (a deal Zuckerberg passed on). “Opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost,” Wang wrote in his note to employees this week. “In this instance, that cost is my departure.”
Zuckerberg’s recruiting spree is already starting to rattle his competitors. The day before his offer deadline for some senior OpenAI employees, Sam Altman dropped an essay proclaiming that “before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.” And after Zuckerberg tried to hire DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, he was given a larger SVP title and now reports directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
I expect Wang to have the title of “chief AI officer” at Meta when the new lab is announced. Jack Rae, a principal researcher from DeepMind who has signed on, will lead pre-training. Meta certainly needs a reset. According to my sources, Llama has fallen so far behind that Meta’s product teams have recently discussed using AI models from other companies (although that is highly unlikely to happen). Meta’s internal coding tool for engineers, however, is already using Claude.
While Meta’s existing AI researchers have good reason to be looking over their shoulders, Zuckerberg’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale is making many longtime employees, or Scaliens, quite wealthy. They were popping champagne in the office this morning.
Then, Wang held his last all-hands meeting to say goodbye and cried. He didn’t mention what he would be doing at Meta. I expect his new team will be unveiled within the next few weeks after Zuckerberg gets a critical number of members to officially sign on.
Apple is accustomed to being on top of the tech industry, and for good reason: the company has enjoyed a nearly unrivaled run of dominance.
After spending time at Apple HQ this week for WWDC, I’m not sure that its leaders appreciate the meteorite that is heading their way. The hubris they display suggests they don’t understand how AI is fundamentally changing how people use and build software.
Heading into the keynote on Monday, everyone knew not to expect the revamped Siri that had been promised the previous year. Apple, to its credit, acknowledged that it dropped the ball there, and it sounds like a large language model rebuild of Siri is very much underway and coming in 2026.
The AI industry moves much faster than Apple’s release schedule, though. By the time Siri is perhaps good enough to keep pace, it will have to contend with the lock-in that OpenAI and others are building through their memory features. Apple and OpenAI are currently partners, but both companies want to ultimately control the interface for interacting with AI, which puts them on a collision course.
Apple’s decision to let developers use its own, on-device foundational models for free in their apps sounds strategically smart, but unfortunately, the models look far from leading. Apple ran its own benchmarks, which aren’t impressive, and has confirmed a measly context window of 4,096 tokens. It’s also saying that the models will be updated alongside its operating systems — a snail’s pace compared to how quickly AI companies move.
I’d be surprised if any serious developers use these Apple models, although I can see them being helpful to indie devs who are just getting started and don’t want to spend on the leading cloud models. I don’t think most people care about the privacy angle that Apple is claiming as a differentiator; they are already sharing their darkest secrets with ChatGPT and other assistants.
Some of the new Apple Intelligence features I demoed this week were impressive, such as live language translation for calls. Mostly, I came away with the impression that the company is heavily leaning on its ChatGPT partnership as a stopgap until Apple Intelligence and Siri are both where they need to be.
AI probably isn’t a near-term risk to Apple’s business. No one has shipped anything close to the contextually aware Siri that was demoed at last year’s WWDC. People will continue to buy Apple hardware for a long time, even after Sam Altman and Jony Ive announce their first AI device for ChatGPT next year. AR glasses aren’t going mainstream anytime soon either, although we can expect to see more eyewear from Meta, Google, and Snap over the coming year.
In aggregate, these AI-powered devices could begin to siphon away engagement from the iPhone, but I don’t see people fully replacing their smartphones for a long time. The bigger question after this week is whether Apple has what it takes to rise to the occasion and culturally reset itself for the AI era.
I would have loved to hear Tim Cook address this issue directly, but the only interview he did for WWDC was a cover story in Variety about the company’s new F1 movie.
- AI agents are coming. I recently caught up with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi ahead of his company’s annual developer conference this week in San Francisco. Given Databricks’ position, he has a unique, bird’s-eye view of where things are headed for AI. He doesn’t envision a near-term future where AI agents completely automate real-world tasks, but he does predict a wave of startups over the next year that will come close to completing actions in areas such as travel booking. He thinks humans will need (and want) to approve what an agent does before it goes off and completes a task. “We have most of the airplanes flying automated, and we still want pilots in there.”
- Buyouts are the new normal at Google. That much is clear after this week’s rollout of the “voluntary exit program” in core engineering, the Search organization, and some other divisions. In his internal memo, Search SVP Nick Fox was clear that management thinks buyouts have been successful in other parts of the company that have tried them. In a separate memo I saw, engineering exec Jen Fitzpatrick called the buyouts an “opportunity to create internal mobility and fresh growth opportunities.” Google appears to be attempting a cultural reset, which will be a challenging task for a company of its size. We’ll see if it can pull it off.
- Evan Spiegel wants help with AR glasses. I doubt that his announcement that consumer glasses are coming next year was solely aimed at AR developers. Telegraphing the plan and announcing that Snap has spent $3 billion on hardware to date feels more aimed at potential partners that want to make a bigger glasses play, such as Google. A strategic investment could help insulate Snap from the pain of the stock market. A full acquisition may not be off the table, either. When he was recently asked if he’d be open to a sale, Spiegel didn’t shut it down like he always has, but instead said he’d “consider anything” that helps the company “create the next computing platform.”
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As always, I welcome your feedback, especially if you’re an AI researcher fielding a juicy job offer. You can respond here or ping me securely on Signal.
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Finding a reliable tennis partner who matches your energy and skill level can be a challenge.
Now, with Tenniix, an artificial intelligence-powered tennis robot from T-Apex, players of all abilities have a new way to practice and improve.
Tenniix brings smart technology and adaptability to your training sessions, making it easier to get the most out of your time on the court.
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Tenniix, the AI-powered tennis robot (T-Apex)
What is Tenniix? Meet the AI tennis robot transforming practice sessions
Tenniix is an AI-powered tennis robot that is compact and weighs only 15 pounds, which is much lighter than traditional ball machines. Despite its small size, it serves balls at speeds of up to 75 mph, with spins reaching 5,000 RPM, and holds up to 100 balls at a time. The robot’s movable base allows it to deliver shots from different angles, keeping practice sessions dynamic and engaging.
TENNIS PRO ERIN ROUTLIFFE EXPLODES OVER LACK OF ‘ROBOTS’ AT AUSTRALIAN OPEN
A player lifting the Tenniix, an AI-powered tennis robot, out of the vehicle. (T-Apex)
NO TENNIS PARTNER? NO WORRIES WITH THIS AI ROBOT
AI tennis coaching: How Tenniix delivers realistic, pro-level practice
One of the standout features of Tenniix is its AI-driven coaching. The robot has been trained on over 8,000 hours of professional tennis data, allowing it to adjust its shots based on your position and playing style. This gives you a realistic and challenging experience every time you step on the court. Tenniix offers a wide variety of training modes, with more than 1,000 drills and three skill levels, so you can focus on everything from timing and footwork to shot accuracy.
Tenniix, the AI-powered tennis robot being carried (T-Apex)
WILL 3D TECH CHANGE SPORTS FOREVER?
Smart and simple: How to control Tenniix with voice, gestures or your phone
Controlling Tenniix is simple and intuitive. You can use voice commands or gestures to change spin, speed or shot type without interrupting your practice. Tenniix also features convenient app controls, letting you select training modes, adjust settings and review session data right from your smartphone for a fully customized and trackable experience. The robot’s modular design means you can start with the model that fits your needs and upgrade as your skills improve. With a built-in camera and AI chip, Tenniix analyzes your shots and provides instant feedback, helping you track your progress over time.
Tenniix, the AI-powered tennis robot (T-Apex)
SKYROCKET TO A HEALTHIER LIFESTYLE WITH THIS GEAR IN 2025
Advanced tracking and movement: How Tenniix adapts to your game in real time
Tenniix uses a combination of visual tracking and ultra-wideband sensors to know exactly where you and the ball are on the court. Its motorized base moves smoothly to deliver a wide range of shots, from high lobs to fast groundstrokes, at different speeds and spins. The battery lasts up to four hours, which is enough for a solid training session.
Tenniix, the AI-powered tennis robot (T-Apex)
BEST FATHER’S DAY GIFTS FOR EVERY DAD
Practice like the pros: Train against Nadal-style shots with Tenniix
Another feature that sets Tenniix apart is its ability to mimic the playing styles of tennis greats like Nadal and Federer. This helps you prepare for matches by practicing against shots and spins similar to those you’ll face in real competition. Coaches and players have noted how Tenniix creates realistic rallies and adapts to different skill levels, making training both efficient and enjoyable.
Tenniix, the AI-powered tennis robot (T-Apex)
Portable, smart and backed by support: Why tennis players love Tenniix
Tenniix is easy to carry and set up, making it convenient for players who want to practice anywhere. With thousands of shot combinations and drills, your workouts stay fresh and challenging. The smart technology, real-time tracking and instant feedback help make every session productive. Each robot comes with a one-year warranty and reliable customer service.
WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?
Tenniix, the AI-powered tennis robot (T-Apex)
Tenniix models and pricing: Which AI tennis robot is right for you?
There are three Tenniix models to choose from. The Basic model is priced at $699, the Pro at $999 and the Ultra at $1,499. Each model offers a different set of features, with the Ultra version including advanced options like the movable base and enhanced vision system. Tenniix was launched through a Kickstarter campaign, giving early supporters a chance to back the project and receive the robot at a special price.
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Tenniix, the AI-powered tennis robot (T-Apex)
Kurt’s key takeaways
Tenniix feels less like a machine and more like a smart tennis partner who’s always ready to help you improve. Whether you want to polish your technique or get serious about your game, it offers a flexible and engaging way to train. If you’re looking for a training partner that adapts to you, Tenniix is worth checking out.
Would you rather challenge yourself playing against a robot like Tenniix, or do you prefer training with a human opponent? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/Contact.
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Google has confirmed that it plans to shut down Android’s Instant Apps later this year, attributing the decision to “low” usage of the functionality.
Instant Apps were introduced in 2017, and allow developers to create mini versions of Android apps that load, well, instantly. Users can try apps and demo games from the click of a link, without having to fully install them. That makes the experience easier for users to navigate and provides developers with more ways to find new audiences.
Android Authority first reported that Google is moving on from the feature, which came to light after developer Leon Omelan spotted a warning about the change in Android Studio:
“Instant Apps support will be removed by Google Play in December 2025. Publishing and all Google Play Instant APIs will no longer work. Tooling support will be removed in Android Studio Otter Feature Drop.”
Google spokesperson Nia Carter confirmed the decision to The Verge, explaining that Instant Apps simply haven’t been popular enough to continue supporting.
“Usage and engagement of Instant Apps have been low, and developers are leveraging other tools for app discovery such as AI-powered app highlights and simultaneous app installs,” Carter says. “This change allows us to invest more in the tools that are working well for developers, and help direct users to full app downloads to foster deeper engagement.”
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