Apple’s smart home push has well and truly arrived under new boss John Ternus, with the HomeView landing as the second major announcement of his tenure, just weeks after the iPhone Duo dominated the media cycle during his opening keynote.
The Apple HomeView looks to be Apple’s answer to the Google Nest Hub and Amazon Echo, pairing a 7-inch Liquid Retina display with a domed speaker base, and a stainless steel hinge that you can gracefully tilt towards you on a kitchen bench or nightstand.
The benefits are seemingly endless for a suped-up iPad with Apple’s most advanced AI-powered Siri assistant. So let’s start in the kitchen, then, where I imagine the majority of units sold will end up.
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For anyone who fancies themselves as something of a home chef, the Apple HomeView turns web recipes into step-by-step instructions with hands-free timers so you’re not smearing butter across your iPhone.
With Center Stage, too, Apple’s new video calling software, the HomeView will follow you around the room and keep you in frame when someone inevitably calls right in the middle of food prep, so you can stay connected with friends and family and not burn the veggies.
When dinner’s ready, Intercom calls the whole house, reaching every room as well as the iPhones and Apple Watches of whoever’s ignoring you upstairs.
Personalisation continues to emerge as a driver for modern Apple products, especially with a shared product that could sit in the communal family room.
Each recognised user gets their own Home Screen with their own calendar and reminders, while shared photo albums turn the display into a frame that family elsewhere can keep topped up.
Apple’s “profoundly more capable and conversational assistant” Siri AI ties it all together and is live from day one.
The company is calling it “an entirely new version of Siri powered by the next generation of Apple Intelligence and advanced Apple silicon,” which can draw on your Messages, Calendar, and Apple Music. Conversations you start on HomeView also carry over to the Siri app on your other devices.
And whilst I imagine there will be plenty of Apple fans queueing up to install the HomeView, whether neatly placed in the living room, or now affixed in a hallway for the wall-mounted version, it’s important to address the shiny new elephant in the room.
The trouble starts with the name, which describes exactly what the device does: it looks at your home.
HomeView recognises up to six people by their faces (and personalises the user experience based on who interacts with it), and its Flow face reacts to movement in the room. It can even identify familiar faces, pets, packages, and vehicles at the front door with a compatible camera (and an iCloud+ subscription).
Plenty of people will see the smart home as an invitation for surveillance technology to set up shop in the living room. So Apple has built what it considers the most serious privacy system in the category, starting with Secure Exclaves on the A18 chip that process camera and microphone data separately from the rest of the system.
Crucially, Apple says HomeView’s software, apps, the user, and Apple itself can’t access what happens inside them. Messages and Calendar content only appears when HomeView recognises your face, and your paired iPhone is nearby and recently unlocked. Siri requests are handled on-device or through Private Cloud Compute, too, where Apple says data is neither stored nor made accessible to anyone.
Both models cost $449 and reach stores on Friday, 13 November, with the tabletop version available in silver, starlight, rose pink, and space grey, and the wall version in space grey and silver only. Pre-orders are open now.