After years of phone-centric habits, Apple’s new smart home device points toward a more ambient future, according to hands-on first impressions from The Wall Street Journal’s Nicole Nguyen.
HomeView is a $299, seven-inch square tablet and speaker designed for smart home control, hands-free FaceTime calls, and interaction with the recently revamped Siri AI assistant. As Nguyen notes in her reporting from New York City, the device’s clearest advantage over long-standing rivals from Amazon and Google is its deep access to data already on a user’s iPhone.
The square screen sits on a compact speaker base (with a wall-mount option also available), letting it function as a shared household hub that can personalize the experience. It uses facial recognition to identify up to six people and surface individual content — such as messages, calendars, or widgets — while keeping personal information protected behind that recognition (or an iPhone unlock as a fallback). Siri AI, powered by Apple Intelligence, can draw on personal context from linked Apple devices for more helpful responses about schedules, messages, music, or home controls, while supporting features like recipe guidance, timers, and multi-camera live views for compatible HomeKit or Matter devices.
Apple positions the product as both central to the home and private for each user, with pre-orders open now and availability starting November 13th in select countries. Early looks from the event emphasize the design’s adaptability for counters, nightstands, or walls, along with room-filling audio and glanceable interfaces that shift based on distance.
Nguyen’s hands-on account highlights the integration edge while the broader product introduction underscores privacy and ecosystem strengths. At the same time, the closed nature of the setup — requiring Apple devices for full personalization and limited third-party flexibility — means households outside the ecosystem may see fewer benefits than those already invested in iPhones and related gear. Whether the combination of Siri AI, facial recognition, and iPhone data access is enough to draw users away from established smart displays remains to be seen once the devices reach real homes.
MacDailyNews Take: At just $299, it’s relatively inexpensive to just take a flier on one and see how much use it gets in our household.
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IF Apple had a brain they would have offered a AppleTV with a built in FaceTime Camera and the software that is in the Continuity Camera feature that is very cool, but totally kludgy and nobody uses it because he have to futz with the phone and make a few false move every time you try to make a call. The best feature of this software is how the iPhone camera can capture the whole room or find the speaker and zoom in on them gracefully. So the software is already there all that is needed is a camera built into an AppleTV which is always in the right place by the TV. It would be brilliant and it would immediately make FaceTime calls HomeFaceTime calls that display on your big screen instead of the tiny phone screen. Family conferencing with Apple simplicity. But they are too stupid to do this killer feature.
“they would have offered a AppleTV with a built in FaceTime Camera and the software that is in the Continuity Camera”
I agree
So something with touch screen is the same price as apple tv which is a streaming box.
Apple is seriously messed up.
Homeview serves no real purpose and Apple TV is vastly overpriced by double for nothing more than a streaming box.
I think Timmy bailed because he can see the writing on the wall for his product road map.
If there is ever a time for an actual keynote, explaining a product; it would be when you introduce a NEW product category to market. The lack of the keynote on the product, now makes the consumer dig to find out the possibilities and potentials. Hopefully they create an informative video, and not a sitcom type video in use. Explaining all its features. What is coming soon. What the vision is. How it will improve your life. THAT is missing from this release so far.
They’ve already done those types of videos during keynotes and didn’t deliver. Now they’re delivering the hardware and Siri that SHOULD fulfill the promises they already made. They don’t need to explain everything, they need to ship a product that works. We all know how to use iOS and iPad OS, this is the kiddie version of that focused above all on the Home. I don’t want another keynote, I want this to work as advertised and I expect it to. My space gray unit has been pre-ordered. My only wish would have been for Apple-branded cameras, doorbells etc.