After years of half-measures with HomePod speakers and the Home app, Apple is making a serious push into the smart home with the launch of HomeView.
The new 7-inch Liquid Retina display hub (available for countertop or wall mounting) is Apple’s biggest dedicated smart-home device yet. It combines Apple Watch-style interfaces for controlling lights, locks, and thermostats with a home screen for apps like FaceTime and Messages, plus camera feeds, recipe projection, and facial recognition for up to six users.
Timed for a market in flux as AI-capable assistants arrive, the device leans on upgraded Siri AI and Apple’s privacy focus while working with existing HomeKit and Matter accessories—positioning Apple to compete more directly with Amazon and Google during an open upgrade cycle.
Daniel Howley for Yahoo Finance:
“Most smart speakers and hubs in homes today are low-cost devices that can’t run AI at the edge, so they are ripe for replacement,” Counterpoint Research research director Mohit Agrawal said in a note following Apple’s Welcome Home event on Tuesday.
“Amazon and Google have only just begun refreshing their hardware for Alexa+ and Gemini, so the upgrade cycle is wide open, and Apple wants to win it,” he added.
Apple is framing both its Siri AI and its privacy stance as two key benefits of the HomeView. Siri AI will allow you to control smart home devices with your voice, make FaceTime calls, and ask broad world-knowledge questions.
The new hardware provides users with a long-awaited Apple-built solution for controlling smart home devices. To date, customers have had to wrangle a collection of do-it-yourself options, such as using iPads as wall-mounted command centers.
HomeView changes that, with Apple noting that the device will work with existing Apple Home and Matter-compatible accessories.
“Generative AI has raised expectations for conversational ease and genuinely useful assistance, and Siri has consistently lagged,” Forrester vice president and principal analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee said in a press statement.
“The critical question is whether the new Siri capabilities can close that gap and make Apple’s home experience as intuitive and compelling as its best products,” he explained.
If Apple’s strategy to take smart home share from Amazon and Google succeeds, it could provide a boost to the company’s bottom line while helping to ensure increased lock-in among its customers.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re still struggling to convince ourselves we need this – we already have the Home app on our iPhones and iPads, music on our HomePods, Apple Watches on our wrists, etc. – but, maybe for the average Joe and Jane, this product will somehow appeal to them?
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