Apple has finally done it. After years of HomePod speakers and persistent rumours about a screen-toting speaker, the company has launched Apple HomeView, a 7-inch smart display designed to be the centre of your home. It arrives on 13 November for $299/£299 in both tabletop and wall-mounted versions, and it’s taking on Google’s Nest Hub Max and Amazon’s Echo Show – devices that have sat on kitchen counters for years.
I spent some time with HomeView at Apple’s Home event in New York, and the short version is that if you’re already baked into the Apple ecosystem, it’s a delightful bit of kit. Handoff, recipes, and Siri AI all work beautifully together, and the design adds polish to a category typically known for plastic and material-covered bases. It isn’t without fault, though. There’s no physical privacy switch, the camera can’t double as a home security cam, and many popular smart home products, Ring doorbells and my Nest doorbell among them, won’t play ball.
It’s a looker, and it’s smart too
Let’s start with the design, which is lovely. Apple might be a tad late (a casual 9 years, but who is counting) to the smart display party, but it’s at least arrived best dressed. HomeView pairs a 7-inch Liquid Retina display (meaning it’s LCD, not OLED) with a domed aluminium speaker base, joined by a stainless-steel hinge so you can tilt the screen. Oddly, it doesn’t rotate; you’ll have to spin the whole device to move it, but overall, it’s cute and smaller than you’d think.
For Apple fans, it’s a clear nod to the old iMac G4 (meant as a compliment), and the entire device has solid build quality and a premium feel. The colours are great too, in Silver, Starlight, Rose Pink, and Space Grey, each with a matching cable because no one wants a white cable when they can have Rose Pink. They’re soft enough to blend into most interiors rather than demanding too much attention, which is what you’d want from something living on a kitchen counter or bedside table. The wall-mounted version comes only in Space Grey and Silver, and it has no base, but the screen and aluminium frame are identical to the table version.
The interface is smart, too – more so than it first seems. HomeView can recognise up to six people by face, though it’s not using Face ID. Instead, it’s designed to recognise users from a distance, rather than requiring them to be as close as they might be with Face ID on an iPhone. Once HomeView recognises you, a swipe up from the bottom of the screen brings up your personalised home screen that will be familiar to Apple users, complete with apps like Messages, Calendar, and Reminders, plus your widgets and customisations.
Recognition is fast, too – it seamlessly clocked the registered users in my demo, showing personalised information for each user as they entered the built-in camera’s field of view. As a user moved away, personalised content such as messages and calendars disappeared. If a second user came into view, a prompt appeared at the top of the display asking whether to switch; if so, their home screen would appear on the HomeView.
The screen also adapts to your distance, showing simpler information from across the room and more detail as you get closer, while the brightness can drop as low as 0.3 nits on the bedside table so it won’t blind you in the middle of the night. It’s also worth noting that personalised content, like messages, will only be displayed when a user is recognised, their iPhone is close by, and it has been unlocked recently. What defines ‘recently’, you might wonder? I was told it’s currently around a good night’s sleep, designed so you can go to bed and see useful information on the HomeView on your bedside table in the morning without having to unlock your phone first. This may change over time based on feedback, but for now, if you unlocked it within the last few hours, that counts.
Handoff is the star, but Siri AI shines too
Where HomeView shines is in how it communicates with other Apple devices. Handoff is arguably one of the best examples of this, and from what I saw during my demos, it was a smooth transition – a bit like the opening and closing animation of iPhone Duo. It works by holding your iPhone near the HomeView display, and whatever you were doing jumps across, whether that’s listening to a song (or BBC Radio for those in the UK), enjoying a FaceTime call, or viewing a recipe.
The recipe feature is particularly good. Find a recipe in Safari (either on HomeView itself or hand it off from your iPhone), tap Start Cooking to use the cooking mode, and HomeView turns it into step-by-step instructions, with a separate tab for ingredients. It will also highlight any times in each step, and a quick tap lets you set a timer that then appears at the top of the HomeView display – similar to Dynamic Island on iPhone but without the ability to use it as a secondary display – maybe a missed opportunity. You can have multiple timers going at once, though.
Siri AI – Apple’s new, more conversational and more contextually aware assistant – is very clever and useful on HomeView, too. It’s not a surprise this device was delayed until Siri AI was actually ready. You can go back and forth with it naturally, it has broad world knowledge, and with a paired Apple Intelligence-compatible iPhone it can pull personal context from your iPhone, too, from your Calendar to your Messages. Conversations started on HomeView carry on in the Siri app on your other devices, too, as they do in CarPlay and on Apple Watch when using Siri AI.
Guest mode is also well thought out. Visitors (or non-Apple users) don’t need an Apple Account to use HomeView, and you can tailor what they’re allowed to do – play music, see shared photos, control the smart home – without them ever getting near any of your personal information. There are also options to turn on settings like restricting explicit content, while the screen faces on HomeView are customisable in terms of colours and fonts – just like Apple Watch, so you can match it to your décor. There’s also a Photos face that turns HomeView into a digital photo frame, albeit a very expensive one if you don’t do anything else with it.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a great start
There are a few notable omissions. The first is the absence of a physical privacy switch or camera shutter. Apple says camera and microphone data is processed in Secure Exclaves on the A18 processor, which even Apple can’t access, and you can turn off the microphones and face recognition with software toggles. But many people will still want the peace of mind that comes from physically cutting off a camera that lives in their kitchen, and Google and Amazon both offer that on their displays.
The 12MP Centre Stage camera is also limited. It seems like it will be great for FaceTime, based on what I’ve seen (as you would hope), keeping everyone in frame as they wander around. As I mentioned earlier, though, the HomeView doesn’t rotate left or right, so the Centre Stage camera can only do so much to keep you in the frame.
You also can’t use it to look in on your home remotely the way you can with the Nest Hub Max, which feels like another missed opportunity. There is a Mirror feature that allows you to see yourself before you head out the door, though, which is fun, especially with its 2x zoom button. If you were hoping to take a selfie, the computer says no to that too. That feature is purely a digitised mirror.
But the biggest sticking point will likely be compatibility. HomeView works with Works with Apple Home and Matter accessories, plus Apple’s new Home Collection of devices – a video doorbell, security cameras, thermostats and a lock, designed in partnership with LG and Schneider Electric, but much existing smart home kit is left out, especially with HomeView offering no dedicated App Store to get around that. That includes Ring doorbells and my own Nest doorbell – so the Home Camera face, which can stream up to nine feeds at once, isn’t much use if your existing smart home set-up isn’t invited to the party.
Should you buy one?
For those already living in Apple’s world, HomeView will be a great addition to a household looking for a smart display that can be both a shared device and a personal one – I can really see my family enjoying this (though my kids will question the black bars around their favourite shows, most of which will need to be watched via the Safari browser). It’s also the cheapest way to get Siri AI for anyone thinking that just buying an iPad and having a separate speaker like the HomePod mini 2 would offer more flexibility in terms of apps and smart home control.
If your home runs on Ring, Nest or Alexa, and you’re specifically looking at this for a smart home hub, it’s a harder sell, and the lack of a physical privacy switch is an odd omission for a company that talks about privacy as much as Apple does. HomeView looks and feels premium, though, the colours are charming, and its integration with your iPhone results in an experience that is slicker than most other smart displays. If your smart home is built on HomeKit and Matter, that’s a bonus and makes for an even simpler recommendation, but I will need to test properly to find out how well it fits into a home and whether it will have a permenant place on my kitchen worktop.
HomeView is now available to pre-order for $299/£299, with both versions on sale from 13 November – though not in the EU, where Siri AI isn’t currently available.
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