Apple Readies HomeView Smart Home Hub as Yandex Data Centers Suffer Drone Strikes

Apple Unveils HomeView Smart Home Strategy

Apple is preparing a renewed push into the smart home market centered on a new product called HomeView, a countertop display hub with a speaker base. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the HomeView will ship in mid-November and come in four colors: space gray, silver, starlight, and pink. A wall-mounted version will be available in space gray and silver only.

The HomeView will be powered by a standard A18 chip and will not include an App Store. Instead, it will run a limited set of Apple apps with Siri and connected accessories at the center of the experience. Apple chose the name HomeView over HomePad because the company wants users to look at the display and control it primarily with voice, rather than suggesting an iPad-like touch experience.

Alongside HomeView, Apple is updating its Apple TV and HomePod mini. The new Apple TV will feature an A19 chip, up from the A15, and may include built-in microphones for hands-free Siri AI without the remote. A refreshed remote with a speaker for Find My is also being tested. The new HomePod mini will use an S10 chip, up from the S5, and come in midnight, green, white, blue, and pink. Both devices are on track to arrive on October 30, with preorders opening the week of the announcement.

Apple is also partnering with LG and Schneider for second-party accessories as part of its smart home ecosystem. The company is positioning the launch as much about protecting the iPhone as outfitting the home.

Ukrainian Drone Strikes Cripple Yandex Data Centers

Ukrainian drone strikes have damaged or shut down three of Yandex's five large Russian data centers in four days, causing widespread disruption to services including Yandex Cloud, YandexGPT, YandexPay, YandexGo, YandexMusic, and YandexTaxi. The most recent strike completely shut down the Vladimir facility, which has a capacity of 50 MW and was designed for 2,880 IT racks.

An earlier strike on the Sasovo site damaged infrastructure housing two of the three supercomputers used to develop Yandex's AI models. Cloudflare data shows Yandex Cloud traffic dropped approximately 33 percent below the previous week's levels following the attacks. Network monitoring groups report that Russian bot traffic has dropped dramatically, with some metrics showing it nearly eliminated overnight.

The strikes come in response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers. Yandex has not provided a timeline for full service restoration, though some users report partial recovery of certain applications.

Qualcomm CEO: AI Companies Target 100B-Parameter LLMs on Phones by 2028

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon says AI companies are increasingly asking the chipmaker to support running 100-billion-parameter large language models locally and continuously on smartphones by 2028. Amon noted that some AI companies are beginning to design their own phones and are engaging with Qualcomm on hardware requirements for on-device AI workloads.

The comments signal a growing industry shift toward local AI processing on mobile devices, with implications for DRAM supply and device cost structure.

TSMC Holds Serious Talks with Texas Officials

Executives at TSMC responsible for overseas operations met with Texas officials in the first half of 2026 to begin more serious discussions about expansion. The talks represent a shift from more than a decade of on-and-off conversations about the company's international manufacturing footprint.

Sources: Techmeme