Apple today announced the HomeView, the company's upcoming smart home hub powered by the new Siri. It will be available in desktop and wall-mounted designs and will be available next month.
The standard HomeView model features a floating display design with a rounded aluminum base. The display is hinged and is tilt-adjustable. It will be available in four colors: silver, starlight, rose pink, and space gray, each with a matching cable.
The wall-mounted model only features the display module and will offer a choice of different mounts from Schneider Home. It will only be available in silver and space gray.
The display on the HomeView is a 7-inch LCD with 1088x1088 resolution at 220ppi. The display has a peak brightness of 500 nits and a minimum brightness of 0.3 nits. It supports True Tone to adjust color temperature based on the ambient lighting and has a fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating for the touchscreen.
Both variants feature two full-range drivers within the display unit. The standard model also includes a downfiring woofer and dual force-cancelling passive radiators within the base unit. You get support for Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos, and the system uses computational audio to adjust the audio tuning in real time based on its surroundings. There are also four far-field microphones for voice pickup, and the device can recognize smoke and carbon monoxide alarm sounds.
For video calling, the HomeView has a built-in 12MP f2.4 ultra-wide camera with the Center Stage feature that crops and follows the subject as they move around. For connectivity, there's Wi-Fi 802.11ax with MIMO, Bluetooth 6.0, and Thread networking.
The HomeView is powered by the Apple A18 chip and runs on custom software. It uses the new Siri with Apple Intelligence to process your requests, and users can start a conversation on the HomeView and continue it on one of their other compatible Apple devices like the iPhone or the iPad, or vice versa.
The HomeView can recognize up to six different people in the household and offer customized options as well as information fetched from their respective Apple devices. Things like replying to iMessages and emails are only available to recognized users, but other things like shared iCloud photo libraries or music can be accessed by anyone. Users can also customize the look of the homescreen individually with personalized widgets.
The Apple HomeView is priced at $299 for the standard or the wall-mounted option, with the wall mounts being sold separately. It is available for pre-order today in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, the UK, and the U.S., and from October 15 in Singapore. It will be available for purchase on Friday, November 13. The device will not be available in the EU due to regulations around Siri AI.