Now here’s what an Apple smart display should look like

When the first renderings of a supposed HomePod with a screen hit the interwebs, I was not a fan. 

The look was pretty basic: a full-size HomePod with a circular display embedded in its top, which would have offered little more than, say, a couple lines of text and maybe an album cover, or perhaps a glance at the weather. Ugh. 

Hoping for something a little more appealing, I asked Dall-E to draw up some “HomePod with a screen” designs, but they were all variations of a screen on top of the speaker or embedded in the side. 

What I was really hoping for was a HomePod with an angled screen that was attached to—rather than embedded in—the body of the speaker, something like, I dunno… an old iMac G4? 

Well, it could be that Cupertino is thinking along the same lines, with Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reporting that the first HomePod with a display may, indeed, boast a design inspired by that classic iMac G4 look. 

To be clear, it doesn’t sound like the upcoming screen-equipped HomePod would have an arm like the iMac G4 did. That would likely come later, in the form of a pricier HomePod along the lines of Amazon’s third-gen Echo Show 10 with its motorized screen. 

Instead, Apple’s first smart display could have a smaller screen the size of “two iPhones side by side” that’s “positioned at an angle on a small base, making it reminiscent of the circular bottom of the iMac G4 from a couple of decades ago,” Gurman writes.

Even better, the new HomePod may be inexpensive enough to toss a few in your shopping cart for distribution around the house, Gurman adds. 

While such a screen wouldn’t rival that of the Echo Show 10’s (or the iMac G4’s, for that matter), it would certainly be large enough to double as a small digital photo frame, as well as serve up basic smart home controls, à la StandBy mode for iOS. If the new HomePod supports Apple Intelligence, too (Gurman says it will), all the better. 

Now that’s something I’d actually buy, perfect for replacing the aging Google Nest Hub Max in my kitchen that occasionally argues with the Siri-enabled HomePod sitting next to it. 

That old Google display hangs around in our otherwise HomeKit-dominated household because it works great as a photo frame, but if an iMac G4-like HomePod arrived, well….