9to5Mac is reporting that Apple has two new Home products launching soon, a new Apple TV 4K and a new HomePod Mini. The new Apple networking chip, the N1, which recently debuted in the iPhone 17 lineup, is expected to also appear in both these new gizmos. With the iPhone 17 phones shipping to customers in the last week, folks have been testing the new networking silicon and it looks like a winner. Apple has been working for many years to eliminate the need for third party chips in their products and with this year’s release of the C1 cellular module and this N1 network chip, they’re pretty close to that goal.

But what surprises could we see with the new Home devices? Back in 2021, the second generation AppleTV 4K arrived with support for ARC and eARC and the ability to send all audio to a HomePod stereo pair. In practice, that meant you could get fantastic audio from the AppleTV and from your Xbox. Stereo HomePods sound pretty good, but this setup stops at two speakers. For genuinely immersive sound, you just can’t beat speakers physically behind you. Sonos has been doing wireless surround sound systems for a while now, but Apple never seemed willing to go beyond the two speaker configuration to compete with Sonos.

I started to wonder if this was a technical limitation. Currently, when you pair HomePods with an AppleTV, the HomePods create a dedicated wireless network to the AppleTV. The HomePods stop using your home’s wifi directly and route all traffic through the AppleTV. The assumption is the dedicated wifi is part of Apple’s secret sauce to ensure very low latency pushing audio wirelessly to the speakers. That’s critical for ARC/eARC where audio from an Xbox needs to route through the AppleTV, over the wireless, and come out of the speakers with imperceptible lag compared to what’s happening on screen. It’s amazing to me that this is possible at all. I suspect that whatever magic is involved is limited to two speakers. Adding two more HomePods as surround channels may be too much to ask of the current hardware.

Cue the shiny new N1 networking chip! Could the new chip have some optimizations to make this easier? In touting the iPhone 17 networking upgrades, Apple called out improvements in Personal Hotspot and AirDrop. Those are both local ad-hoc sort of networking features, somewhat similar to the way AppleTV talks to HomePods. There aren’t a lot of technical details on the N1 chip, but perhaps they’re packing enough power to handle four or even 6 connections for streaming speakers. I’m optimistic we’ll finally see a real Apple alternative to a Sonos surround sound system, but I think I’ve said the same every year since 2021. Fourth time is the charm!