Google Acquisition of Nest Labs for $3.2B (January 2014): Has Apple signaled at all that they are considering investing in the home automation space?

There have been a ton of patents filed by Apple that suggest they are taking the space seriously. They can afford to hold off and see how the space matures them grab / grow at the right time. The internet of things is still the realm of early adopters for at least another 18 months.

My answer to this 2011 Quora question... "Apple (company): What will Apple come up with next?" ...was Home Automation (). I noted back then that Apple has always placed the individual person at the centre of design and that "expanding the centrality of the person to include his/her home would be more consistent with Apple's approach with their customers." I was a little early, but they have now announced their entry into the field: HomeKit (https://developer.apple.com/homekit/). From the Apple website: "HomeKit is a new framework for communicating with and controlling connected devices in a user’s home. Apps can enable users to discover devices in their home and configure them, or you can create actions to control those devices. Users can group actions together and trigger them using Siri." For the reasons I stated in my 2011 Quora comment, I believe that Apple with own home automation.