Apple Unveils HomeView: The $299 Smart Hub Powered by Siri AI
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Apple just kicked off its boutique “Welcome Home” event with a slate of new product announcements, and as expected, the star of the show is the HomeView — its long-awaited smart home hub.
In a newsroom announcement, Apple describes HomeView as “a new way to enjoy entertainment, stay connected, and manage the home,” immediately suggesting that this is about more than just controlling your lights. As expected, it’s basically a small iPad for the home, although support is presently limited to a selection of built-in apps — as predicted, there’s no App Store for the HomeView yet, and Apple isn’t even talking about the underlying operating system.
As things stand right now, HomeView will provide access to Messages, FaceTime, Calendar, Reminders, and Find My, while also offering full support for the Apple HomeKit ecosystem, letting users monitor security cameras and control accessories. However, HomeView’s real superpower is support for Siri AI and Apple Intelligence, and as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggested earlier this week, Apple chose the name to emphasize that this isn’t primarily intended to be a device you interact with via a touchscreen.
“Apple HomeView is designed to be shared by everyone in the home yet feel completely personal to each user,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “It recognizes your face to shift from a household screen to your own experience, fills the room with incredible sound, keeps you connected to the people who matter most with FaceTime, and makes it easy to control your smart home. And it’s powered by Apple Intelligence with Siri AI at its core, drawing on personal context from your iPhone to help you find what you need and get more done, all while keeping everyone’s information private and secure.”
HomeView features a camera for facial recognition, and can be configured to recognize up to six users to not only show them their personal content when they walk up to it, but also provide a personalized Home Screen layout. This is the kind of multi-user access we’ve been wishing for on the iPad for years.
There’s also a default guest mode to allow shared photo albums and music to be accessed by anyone in the home, allowing anyone to call up a playlist on Apple Music from the HomeView much like they would from a HomePod.
The HomeView also goes beyond mere wallpapers, with a collection of Apple Watch-style faces that display information at a glance or simply show fun animations, like the classic Snoopy faces. These also appear to be similar to what’s been hinted at for the upcoming iPhone Duo, which looks like it will provide a similar experience in its new StandBy mode.
The predictions of an A18 chip inside also appear to have been spot-on, which will allow the HomeView to handle Siri AI for everything from home control to answering general knowledge questions.
Interestingly, Apple even says expressive voices will be supported — a feature that otherwise requires an A19 Pro or newer chip — but the implication is that this will somehow leverage a user’s paired iPhone, as Apple notes it requires “iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro models, iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro models, or iPad models with the M4 chip or later with a minimum of 12GB of unified memory.”
This suggests expressive voices may not be available in “guest” mode, as Apple says it’s part of the user’s personal iPhone customization that effectively creates a seamless Siri AI experience between their iPhone and the HomeView when they’re interacting with their own profile. Requests made to Siri AI will even be synced into the Siri app.
On the entertainment side, Apple includes Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple News, and Apple TV, while also mentioning that it supports “compatible third-party audio and video apps.” It’s unclear what that means, although Apple suggests that some require “a paired and compatible iPhone nearby.”
There will be two separate models of HomeView available. Both feature the same 7-inch Liquid Retina display, with the tabletop version featuring a domed speaker base with the display connected via a stainless steel hinge for tilt adjustment. It’s available in silver, starlight, rose pink, and space gray.
It’s unclear what the speaker quality will be like. From looking at it, it feels like Apple doesn’t want to undermine its HomePods, but Apple says the tabletop model includes a “custom-engineered acoustic system” with “room-filling Spatial Audio”. That setup pairs two full-range drivers inside the display with a down-firing woofer and two force-canceling passive radiators packed into the base. We’ll have to wait and see what that translates to in terms of actual acoustics.
A separate wall-mounted HomeView model is more minimalist — a simple square display with downward-firing speakers that Apple says still offer “rich audio.” Apple has partnered with Schneider Home to offer three purpose-built mounts, along with options for self-installation or professional installation. This one comes only in space gray and silver.
Perhaps the best news about the HomeView is the price, which comes in well below what early rumors had suggested, even in the midst of Apple hiking its prices everywhere else. Both HomeView models will sell for $299, and are available for pre-order in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, the UK, and the US starting today, with orders expected to arrive on Friday, November 13.
Apple is also selling the wall mounting hardware from Schneider Home. The Power Mount USB-C Wall Connector starts at $59.95 and Power Mount AC Wired starts at $79.95 and can be ordered starting today, while the Power Mount PoE Wired will be available starting in early 2027 for $129.95.
