tvOS 17.4 beta reveals Apple is close to releasing a HomePod with a screen

It’s been rumored for some time that Apple is working on a HomePod with a screen, as part of its wider push into the smart-home space. And that launch just got a bit closer, with the discovery of a reference to an unreleased product in new beta software.

The Apple news site 9to5Mac made the discovery Tuesday. A device given the codename “Z314” is referred to in the third beta of tvOS 17.4 beta 3 as being capable of running the operating system. Needless to say, no such device has been released before now. Among current Apple products, tvOS is run by Apple TV and HomePod, although the latter uses an adapted version with no visual interface.

Aside from simply revealing that the product exists, the code suggests that it has reached “an advanced stage of development,” as 9to5Mac puts it. Internal and production versions of the device have been built and tested, the site explains. For comparison, the HomePod and HomePod mini had pre-release codenames of B238 and B520 respectively, while the iPads have had codenames beginning with J, K, or P; there haven’t been any Z-family codenames before, hinting that this could be a completely new category of device.

9to5Mac further reveals that the Z314 device features an A15 Bionic chip, which matches the 6th-gen iPad mini and has also appeared in numerous iPhones. It’s more powerful than a chip that would be expected to appear in a standard (i.e. screen-free) HomePod; the 2023 HomePod uses an S7 Apple Watch processor.

Last year the widely respected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted that a HomePod with a display would launch in the first half of 2024. For all the latest news on this project, keep an eye on our regularly updated rumor roundup.