It’s a mistake to generalize from the HN population.

Most people don’t care about privacy (see: success of Facebook and TikTok). Most people don’t care about subscriptions (see: cable TV, Netflix).

There may be a niche market for a local inference device that costs $1000 and has to be replaced every year or two during the early days of AI, but it’s not a market with decent ROI for Apple.

> Just sell a proper HomePod with 64GB-128GB ram

The same Homepod that almost sold as poorly as Vision Pro despite a $349.99 MSRP? Apple charges $400 to upgrade an M4 to 64GB and a whopping $1,200 for the 128GB upgrade.

The consumer demand for a $800+ device like this is probably zilch, I can't imagine it's worth Apple's time to gussy up a nice UX or support it long-term. What you are describing is a Mac with extra steps, you could probably hack together a similar experience with Shortcuts if you had enough money and a use-case. An AI Homepod-server would only be efficient at wasting money.

Have a team pushing out opitmised open source models. Over time this thing could become the house AI. Basically Star Treks computer.