Sunday Reboot: HomeView is an interesting smart home experiment

In this week's Sunday Reboot, Apple's HomeView is an interesting smart home launch, but it will probably play better in some countries than others.

Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get next week underway with a good first step.

Smart home truths

Apple's big smart home event was a big one in many ways. Sure, we kinda expected the HomePod mini 2 and the Apple TV 4K updates, but the HomeView launch hit hard.

To be frank, Apple announcing a whole new product is a major event, but doing so in an entirely new direction is seismic. Making a smart home management device is a big move for the company.

We can certainly understand the point of the device. It's meant to be the center of your smart home, and a way to help you manage your life too.

I'll be honest. I wasn't expecting much from the HomeView.

The rumors said it would be basically a HomePod with a display, and that's pretty much what we got. It's a smart screen that is very much Apple in ethos, in a market that has existed for a very long time and has been dominated by Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

However, there are certainly some design choices that make me question how necessary the device really is.

For a start, it's not an iPad on a fancy stand. Sure, it's got a large touchscreen, but you are severely lacking in what kind of apps you can use with it.

This is not a general-purpose device. It is very much intended to handle smart home stuff, and not much else beyond that.

Of course it will work with smart doorbells so you can see who is at the door stealing your Amazon deliveries. Sure, you can use it as a FaceTime station, much like the old-fashioned "landline" households used to maintain before mobile phones became a thing.

Playing music is also useful, but it's weird that it's a device that can handle video but you can't install Netflix on it. There's the argument that users have enough devices to access that sort of thing, but the lack of an App Store feels weird.

That could always change in the future. But, for the moment, it's a weird app existence that is centered around CarPlay of all things.

It may be so hamstrung that some users may just use an old iPad on a stand in their kitchen instead. That's an entirely possible thing to do with an old model going spare, but considering Apple basically stopped an iPad from being a home hub since iPadOS 16, you need either a HomePod or an Apple TV to be the hub instead.

There's also the puzzle over pricing. For some reason, you're paying $299 for the standard with-base version and the same amount for the wall-mounted model, without that base included at all.

Not only don't you have that base, which includes extra speaker components for a fuller sound, but you have to pay even more for the mount.

It's a weird case of paying more to get less.

Maybe I'm being down about it because I know that first-generation Apple launches are baby steps for a trillion-dollar company. The device for walking so that the follow-up can run.

The second version could be a much more useful device, if Apple plays its cards right.

Space, or the lack of it

I've been asked whether I would buy the HomeView, and the answer is sadly, no. Even if money were no obstacle, it's a product that doesn't quite fit into my current smart home existence.

It's not because the ecosystem would reject it. I already have an Apple TV 4K, two HomePod minis, and a collection of smart plugs and lights working in the Home app.

The real problem is the house itself. Or possibly the country.

I live in the United Kingdom, which isn't known for massive houses. A 2019 survey into the size of homes across England revealed the average dwelling's floor area was 94 square meters, or 1,012 square feet.

In some parts of the world, that sounds like not a lot of space, and you'd be right. In the United States, you'd be looking at an average floor space of about 1,800 square feet.

The amount of space in your home dictates many things, including how many rooms it has and the size of those rooms. In the UK, that means you're going to find that houses have much smaller rooms in general than in the United States.

In my case, the house I live in has a total floor plan of about 850 square feet of space to play with, across two floors.

It's a typical semi-detached with a living room, dining room, and kitchen downstairs, with two reasonably sized bedrooms, a small bathroom, and a "box room" bedroom that can barely fit a full-sized single bed.

That is a lot of rooms fitting into not a lot of space.

Brits do dream of having a large home, but the prospect of open-plan living is one that exists only on the inevitable rerun of Friends.

What this means is that the HomeView is going to have a tougher time being sold in the UK than in the United States.

The design is very much geared towards homes with more available space. This house doesn't provide that at all, and we have to seriously consider what stuff we already have before adding something new to the mix.

Then there's the argument of mounting it on the wall. Sure, that's entirely a possibility in some households, but it will depend very heavily on where it is placed.

This house has a smart thermostat in the hallway, which I only physically interact with if I'm occasionally passing it or need to change its batteries once a year. If I want the temperature to go up, I just speak out and hope an iPhone, iPad, or HomePod can hear me and change the temperature for me.

It's a smart device with a display, in a high-traffic spot in the house. Yet I'd rather interact with it using the Home app instead of directly.

If I want to control things manually, or check the doorbell camera, or change the color of lights, I can easily do so from the iPhone that I always have in my pocket. I'm not going to get up to go to the HomeView to do it, especially if I'm comfortable on the couch.

I'm afraid that the HomeView would exist and get minimal real use if it were mounted that way in this house. I'd be no better off than using an iPhone and the Apple TV 4K as the hub, just as it is now.

For many reasons, the HomeView just isn't viable in this particular household, and probably would be an extravagance for most people in the UK, too.

While I would wait for the second device to come out, which would usually fix issues raised in the first, I may even give that a miss based on current rumors.

I already lack space as it is. Do I really need to bring a robot arm into the equation?

It's not hard to imagine families in the United States enjoying the new robotic character, spinning around to face whoever's speaking at the time like a lamp crossed with an excited golden retriever.

I just can't think of the same thing working in the cramped conditions of typical UK housing.

Besides, the cats would have a field day with it.

Last week's Sunday Reboot discussed the expected launch of the OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro, and the impossible dream of macOS on an iPad Pro.