There is no double that Apple has had an impact on the Consumer entertainment technology industry. But can Apple have the same impact on items in your home that are not related to entertainment? Including kitchen appliance, smart screens embedded in your mirrors, etc. Could Apple technology have an impact on this huge market potential?
In his article “Four Industries Apple Can Still Disrupt (Part II)”, Mr. Bajarin lists different ways Apple could impact the home appliance industry with their iOS architecture and Siri’s voice UI technology:
- Embed a smart screen and scanner into your refrigerator. Track inventory of your refrigerator items and prepare a shopping list as needed. Potentially, the embedded smart device could automatically place your grocery shopping list order with a local grocery store via the iCloud, who would then deliver the items to your home.
- Embed a smart screen into your bathroom mirror. As you’re getting ready for work, the Apple technology could inform you of the current weather along with a hour-by-hour graphic of the day’s forecast, a summary of current news, etc.. Essentially, it would become your customizable snapshot of the new day events.
What we think at NextGen Digital Home:
As these new smart technologies make their way into our homes, we can only hope that appliance and furniture manufacturers do not tie their products to any one specific vendor. Designing smart technology to be interchangeable would be the best way. Also, I could not imagine buying a home appliance with a life span of 7 – 10 years and expect the internet enabled smart technology included with the appliance to remain static during that time frame. A worse scenario might be you taking your appliance into a local dealer to have malware removed from the smart technology embedded device.
