Lock Up Your Kids, Folks. Apple May Be Building a Humanoid Robot.

Ever since Honda’s backpack-wearing robot nerd ate shit in front of millions while ascending a staircase, I’ve been skeptical of humanoid robots. It was only a matter of time until one of the other omnipresent mega corporations would try their hand at building one.

Naturally, because their robot voices are already in our homes in the form of voice assistants, I’d long wondered whether it’d be Apple, Google, or Amazon who embarked on a quest to bring a humanoid consumer robot into peoples’ homes.

Amazon has been testing out humanoid robots to work in its warehouses for a couple of years since they can treat them as awfully as they want without them unionizing or demanding basic rights and dignity like pesky human workers. But these aren’t consumer robots aimed for sale to you and me.

And Google did recently toss another $350 million in funding for Apptronik’s quest to build a humanoid robot, but since it’s not in-house I have to give this win to Apple. If Apple pulls through and sees the project to completion. It’s a big “if.” Remember the Apple car?

will apple actually bring it to market?

We heard the first murmurings of this project from a longtime industry insider and veteran Apple analyst. “Apple is exploring both humanoid and non-humanoid robots for its future smart home ecosystem, and these products are still in the early proof-of-concept (POC) stage internally,” wrote Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at the TF International Securities (a financial services group in the Asia-Pacific region), on X this past Wednesday.

“While the industry debates the merits of humanoid vs. non-humanoid designs, supply chain checks indicate Apple cares more about how users build perception with robots than their physical appearance (so Apple uses anthropomorphic instead of humanoid), implying sensing hardware and software serve as the core technologies,” Kuo added.

What on Earth will they call it? My vote is Rob-bot. “Essentially, POC is Apple’s testing ground, verifying whether product ideas and core technologies are viable before formal kick-off,” wrote Kuo. “The timeline from POC to formal kick-off varies.

“Given current progress and typical development cycles, Apple’s robot mass production likely won’t start until 2028 or later. Interestingly, Apple has been unusually open about sharing some of its robotics research during the early POC stage—possibly to attract talent.”

Will the Apple humanoid robot ever see the light of day? And if it doesn’t, do you think it’ll spend eternity driving around purgatory in the Apple car? My journalist’s intuition says yes, beyond a doubt. The future sure is fuckin’ weird.