Apple has missed an opportunity by not introducing a product like Facebook Portal by combining different aspects of the Apple TV and HomePod with FaceTime
M.G. Siegler / 500ish : Tweets: @mgsiegler , @500ish , and @msliwinski Tweets: M.G. Siegler / @mgsiegler : @Techmeme https://twitter.com/... @500ish : Apple TV should own the living room with FaceTime. And the Facebook Portal market with HomePod. And yet... https://500ish.com/... Michael Sliwinski / @msliwinski : So true. @mgsiegler is right. What a missed chance! Apple's Missed ‘FacePod’ Opportunity https://500ish.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Writing in May 2020, M.G. Siegler argues Apple left an opening by never shipping what he calls a 'FacePod': a single device fusing the Apple TV box, HomePod speaker, and FaceTime camera to own both the living room and the video-chat niche Facebook targeted with Portal. Portal arrived in 2018 at $499 but carried baggage from day one — a tone-deaf debut from a company with a poor privacy reputation — and its software foundation was shaky too, with Facebook reportedly failing to build its own voice recognition technology amid staff churn.
The kicker in the related coverage: roughly a year after the column, Bloomberg reported Apple was indeed in early stages of developing exactly this product — an Apple TV/HomePod combination with a FaceTime camera and smart-home functions — suggesting the 'missed opportunity' framing anticipated Apple's actual roadmap.
First-order effects
- Facebook Portal remains the only major-brand dedicated video-chat device in the market, competing against a fragmented Apple lineup where FaceTime lives on phones and Macs rather than on the television or speaker Apple already has in the living room.
- Apple's Apple TV and HomePod stay siloed products, each selling separately into a category Portal defined with a screen-plus-camera-plus-speaker form factor.
Second-order effects
- If Apple ships the combined device Bloomberg sources describe, Portal loses its differentiation as the premium living-room video chat option, forcing Facebook to compete on price or retreat from consumer hardware.
- A converged Apple TV/HomePod/FaceTime product would give Apple another hardware anchor for services like TV+ — which critics have already flagged as strategically weak given its lack of back-catalog and device-sales dependency.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward living-room hardware consolidating around all-in-one hubs — display, speaker, camera, and smart-home control in one SKU — squeezing out single-function boxes and speakers.
- Video calling migrating from personal devices to shared household fixtures would make the living room a communications platform, raising the same privacy stakes that dogged Portal's launch for whoever wins the category.
The trend: Living-room devices are converging from separate boxes and speakers into single camera-equipped communication hubs, with Apple moving late toward a product Facebook defined first.