It’s a big year for Apple firsts. The company launched the first MacBook Neo, unveiled its first folding iPhone in September, and installed a new CEO for the first time in 15 years. Now comes the Apple HomeView, Apple’s first smart display.
Rivals like Google and Amazon have made countless screen-enabled smart speakers since voice assistants invaded the home a decade ago. But Apple stuck with a smaller smart home ecosystem centered on its HomePod speakers, even removing the iPad as a hub device a few years ago, which forced users to buy an Apple TV or HomePod to get started. Maybe that’s why it hasn’t found much success in the home.
Announced Tuesday at an event in New York City, the 7-inch smart display arrives alongside several other new smart home devices as part of Apple’s bid to revitalize its lagging ecosystem. The HomeView costs $299 and comes in two versions—a speaker base and a wall-mounted display—both priced the same. Preorders are live, with sales kicking off on November 13.
Courtesy of Apple
A Big Apple Watch
The first thing I thought of after seeing the Apple HomeView in action is that it looks like a blown-up Apple Watch. The 7-inch square screen has multiple “faces” you can swipe through, exactly like the smartwatch. You can even customize the face’s colors and add different complications for more glanceable information.
The faces can range from a clock, your favorite photos of friends, family, or pets (you can even use shared albums) to weather updates and, yes, Snoopy animations. Swipe up for the home screen, which is more like an iPhone or iPad, with apps neatly arranged alongside widgets. Except the HomeView doesn’t run iOS or iPadOS—it runs the generically named HomeView software.
It doesn’t have an App Store. Instead, Apple has a curated selection of apps, including FaceTime, Messages, and Safari. A handful of third-party media apps like Spotify are available, and developers can bring over existing CarPlay apps. If your iPhone already has one of these CarPlay apps installed, it can automatically appear on the HomeView after setup. (There are no video streaming apps like YouTube, Netflix, or Disney+, but if those companies choose to make their apps available on the CarPlay framework, they will show up on the HomeView; for now, you'll have to consume videos by using the Safari browser.)
To get the most out of the HomeView, you need an iPhone with Apple Intelligence support (an iPhone 15 Pro or newer)—you can’t set it up with an iPad.
The aluminum hardware, powered by Apple’s A18 chip, comes in four colors: silver, starlight, rose pink, and space gray (Apple color-matches the woven cable, too). The standard HomeView has a speaker base with a screen that tilts manually up or down for angled viewing, but you can also buy a wall-mountable version. The latter offers three mounts to choose from, one of which is DIY-friendly and has a visible power cord that needs to run to an outlet. The other two are designed for professional installers, either hardwired or connected via Power over Ethernet (PoE).
Technically, the primary speakers—two full-range drivers—are built into the screen. But the standard HomeView has a base that houses a down-firing woofer and two force-canceling passive radiators for stronger bass. It sounds pretty good based on a very limited listening experience, and can fill a large room quite well. The wall-mounted variant won’t have that extra oomph but Apple claims it tunes the audio for wall placement.
The 7-inch Liquid Retina display has familiar elements, like True Tone, which adjusts the screen’s color temperature to match the room’s lighting. The ambient light sensor can also reduce display brightness from 500 nits to 0.3 nits, which is the lowest brightness Apple has ever engineered on a screen. That’ll be helpful if you place the HomeView on the nightstand.
That is, if you're comfortable placing a camera-equipped display in the bedroom. A 12-megapixel Center Stage camera and four-microphone array sit on the front, but they aren’t just for FaceTime calls. The camera handles facial recognition, allowing the software to adapt to whoever is looking at the screen. Apple says all of this data stays on device.
“Trust is becoming increasingly important with rising consumer expectations around privacy and security,” writes Anshika Jain, principal analyst at Counterpoint, in an email to WIRED. “In fact, Apple could actually benefit from its privacy-first approach.”
You can add up to six iCloud accounts, and the user interface will adapt to each person, like Google’s Pixel Tablet. That means your wife can tint every app icon green and have no widgets on her home screen, but if you stand in front of the HomeView, it’ll switch to your setup. You won’t be able to view other household members’ sensitive messages and personal information. For this personal content to show up, you don’t just have to stand in front of the HomeView—your iPhone needs to be on the same Wi-Fi network and must have been recently unlocked.
The HomeView can also recognize voices, which helps if Dad asks Siri AI to “Play music.” It will play from Dad’s music library and his preferred music app, rather than another iCloud user’s music. If you have multiple HomePods or HomeViews, you can manage your speaker groups in the HomeView’s interface.
The HomeView also supports Apple’s Handoff tech, so you can bring your iPhone close to send a Safari recipe to the smart display, or have it continue the podcast you were listening to on your commute. In the middle of a FaceTime or phone call? Put your iPhone near the HomeView, and it’ll transfer it over.
Betting on Siri AI
Like any smart display or smart speaker, Siri AI powers the HomeView. It is, after all, the main way to interact with the device (though yes, there’s a keyboard you can pull up to type). Apple spent a great deal of time revamping Siri this year, finally launching a more capable assistant in iOS 27.
Siri AI on the HomeView understands your personal context from your iPhone, so if you ask it to play a song your friend Eric recommended, it’ll know right away what you mean by looking at your Messages history. You can ask when your brother Jeff will likely arrive at your home from the airport on Thursday, then set a schedule for Siri to turn on the coffee maker 15 minutes before his estimated arrival. All of this can be done with natural language, meaning you don’t have to say specific commands for Siri AI to understand you.
Courtesy of Apple
One neat trick is the HomeView’s ability to convert recipe pages from Safari into digestible content. Load a recipe, and it will let you view the ingredients or “Start Cooking,” no need to read three paragraphs of the author’s relationship to the stew. It automatically converts the recipe into step-by-step instructions, even auto-populating timers for relevant steps so you can start individual timers as you progress.
Naturally, the HomeView is also designed to control all of your smart home devices, too. You can create a widget for any device you have added in the Home app to quickly control it on the HomeView. And if you swipe to the left from the home screen, you’ll see the “Camera” face, which shows a live stream of connected security cameras (you can view nine feeds at once).
Much like the upcoming iPhone Duo folding phone, Apple is late to market. The company is betting on tight iPhone integration, glanceable Watch-like software, and a more context-aware Siri to make the HomeView feel more like a screen you’ll actually want on your counter. Everything hinges on whether Siri can hold up its end of the bargain—and the voice assistant doesn’t exactly have the best track record.
“The greater challenge is to make AI useful for everyday interactions,” Jain says. “Apple must provide a more capable Siri experience and ensure seamless control across its entire product range in order to stand out from the competition.”