According to the latest news released by Tianfeng International analyst Ming-Chi Kuo on November 12, Apple plans to launch its smart home webcam product for the first time in 2026. Apple plans to set the annual shipment volume of this webcam to tens of millions units, aiming to provide users with an excellent user experience through seamless connection with the company's existing hardware ecosystem.
There are several speculations about Apple's consumer IPC:
1. Apple is under pressure on the existing hardware headed by mobile phones, and needs to find more growth points. According to the data of Visual IoT's "2024 Visual IOT Consumer Market Analysis Report": In 2023, the global consumer IPC market size will be 55 billion yuan, with shipments of 150 million units and a growth rate of 15.4%. Consumer IPC is a rigid demand market with good volume and increment, and IPC and mobile phones complement each other and can also drive reverse consumption of mobile phones.
2. Whether it is Xiaomi, Huawei or Samsung in China, they are all building their own ecosystem of the Internet of Everything. Once the ecosystem reaches a certain order of magnitude, it can affect the mobile phone market on which Apple depends for survival, so Apple also needs to build more hardware ecosystems of its own.
3. Using consumer IPC as the entrance to layout the smart home market, the market has been speculating that Apple is developing a smart home display for some time. This product is expected to be launched as early as early next year. The product will be equipped with a relatively small screen, which is about the size of two iPhone screens and is approximately square in shape. This product may be relatively cheap, so that it can be more easily popularized to each family, which makes Apple's upcoming homeOS operating system easy to use. IPC can achieve more linkage with smart home screens and mobile phones.
4. In order to find more application scenarios for Apple Intelligence, Apple has already declared all in AI. In addition to AI mobile phones, it needs to seek more carriers to reflect the capabilities of Apple AI, and IPC is a good choice. Vision has always been the most important landing application direction of AI. Vision can not only realize object or event recognition, but also can be an important way of human-computer interaction. Through IPC, more interactions between people and smart devices can be achieved, reflecting the value of AI.
However, for Apple to enter the IPC market, the pressure is not light. There are many domestic and foreign competitors. Each brand has its own market characteristics and advantages. To achieve the goal of annual shipments of tens of millions of units, it is not enough to rely on the Apple brand alone. It is also necessary to have better innovation in the capabilities of the IPC product, especially in the IPC AI capabilities, so it depends on Apple Intelligence.
This paper is from Ulink Media, Shenzhen, China, the organizer of IOTE EXPO (IoT Expo in China)
