Apple made its long-rumored move into the smart home hub category official on Tuesday, unveiling HomeView alongside refreshed versions of the Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini at its “Welcome Home” event in New York. The launch is also a personal milestone of sorts: it’s the first major hardware event for John Ternus, who took over as Apple’s chief executive on September 1 after 25 years at the company, most recently as the executive running hardware engineering. Ternus inherits a company investors have been watching more closely for hardware growth as its services business faces regulatory pressure, and a new product category gives him something fresh to point to.
HomeView is a 7-inch Liquid Retina display, sold in a tabletop version with a domed aluminium speaker base and stainless steel tilting hinge, and a separate wall-mounted version, both priced at $299 in the US. The tabletop model comes in silver, starlight, rose pink and space gray, while the wall-mounted version ships in space gray and silver. It runs on an A18 chip and uses a front-facing camera to recognize up to six different household members by face, switching automatically between a shared household screen and a personalized one. Pre-orders opened Tuesday, with the device arriving November 13.
Siri AI finally makes way in Apple’s home setup
The headline feature is Siri AI, an entirely new, more conversational version of Siri built on Apple’s next-generation Apple Intelligence. When paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone or iPad, it can pull in personal context from Calendar, Messages and other apps to give more useful answers, and conversations started on HomeView sync via iCloud so they can continue on an iPhone, Mac, Apple Watch or Vision Pro. Apple’s Greg Joswiak, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, framed the pitch simply: HomeView is “designed to be shared by everyone in the home yet feel completely personal to each user.”
Beyond the assistant, HomeView functions as a household command center — FaceTime calls with Center Stage, Intercom, Apple Music with animated lyrics, Apple TV, Apple News and Apple Podcasts, plus control over accessories and scenes from Apple’s new Home Collection accessory line, which adds outdoor cameras, temperature sensors and access management into the same screen.
The new Apple TV 4K, its first update in four years, is a more substantial overhaul than usual. It gets an A19 chip that Apple says delivers up to 50% faster CPU performance and twice the graphics performance of its predecessor, three built-in far-field microphones so people can talk to Siri without touching the remote, and an updated Siri Remote with Find My support and Precision Finding. Apple is also leaning on it as a smart home hub in its own right, using Apple Intelligence to generate camera activity descriptions and summarize notifications inside the Home app. It’s priced at $299, in a single 128GB configuration, and also ships November 13. Bob Borchers, Apple’s vice president of worldwide product marketing, called it the company’s “most immersive home theater experience yet.”
The HomePod mini refresh is where the Siri AI story gets more complicated. The new $149 speaker, up $50 from the original 2020 model, gets an S10 chip for better sound and the ability to recognize sounds like a smoke alarm and alert a user’s phone, a feature Alexa devices have had for years. But Apple has confirmed that Siri AI itself won’t be available on the new HomePod mini at launch; it’s coming later through a software update, with no date given. That’s a notable gap in a launch built almost entirely around the promise of a smarter Siri everywhere in the home, and it lands on a different schedule than the rest of the lineup: the new HomePod mini ships October 30, two weeks before HomeView and the new Apple TV 4K.
All of this is part of the Cupertino giant’s push into creating a complete home devices category. Apple is entering a smart display category where Amazon and Google have had products for years, and analysts have previously pointed out that the harder problem was never the hardware — it’s getting people to actually wire up a smart home in the first place. There’s also an irony sitting underneath the entire Siri AI push: Apple has previously confirmed it enlisted Google’s help this year to get Siri’s underlying capabilities up to scratch, meaning the assistant central to Apple’s pitch for its own hardware ecosystem has a rival’s fingerprints on it.
Whether that matters to the people actually buying a $299 screen for their kitchen counter is a different question than whether Apple can build one. Tuesday’s event answered the second question. The first one plays out over the next few months, starting with how many of these pre-orders convert into shipped November devices.