Apple’s Expanded Smart Home Lineup Is Still Underfurnished

Apple has long wanted to build the perfect, cohesive ecosystem of software and devices, so you never have to leave its tools to complete a task or control something — which has made its smart-home line up so oddly porous. It should be the company to make smart-home tools easy and stylish, but aside from the overpriced and confusingly named Apple TV — the box that plugs into your TV, not to be confused with Apple’s streaming service of the same name, or a TV made by Apple, which it doesn’t sell but ought to — its smart-home efforts have never quite worked. Not enough has connected cohesively to its HomeKit toolset, and its HomePod smart speakers have never sounded that good, despite their premium prices.Apple has taken a shot at revitalizing this, though, built around its new HomeView hub, with two new first-party products and some new third-party, Apple-endorsed ones. The two most successful products in the line-up are the flashiest — the HomeView hub and Apple TV, which you can read about here and here respectively.To start with, the HomePod mini 2, which at $149 is $20 more than its predecessor, runs Apple’s S10 chip, comes in pink, green, blue, white, and midnight, and otherwise seems pretty similar to the first generation. Its speaker driver is unchanged but it gets some new software upgrades, such as “Sound Glow,” which displays colors drawn from the playing song’s album art on the top of the speaker. Bizarrely, Siri AI will only come to it in a later software update and won’t be included at launch. Maybe the tuning has really improved the way it sounds but otherwise this feels like the most insubstantial upstage for a second generation Apple product, as though it was commissioned when it was realized the company couldn’t pitch itself as moving seriously into the smart-home realm without more smart-home products.One cool new feature, though, is that you can now connect four HomePod mini 2 speakers — or matched pairs of the mini 2 and the second-generation HomePod — to make a surround-sound system with the new Apple TV. The box and four minis together cost $895, which is a lot, but it’s probably the easiest, most convenient surround-sound setup available.But if the new HomePod is a tad underwhelming, the rest of its smart home line-up is even more disappointing, since the company couldn’t be bothered to make those products in-house. Cupertino ran out of energy after the HomeView so it gave the other parts of a smart-home ecosystem over to LG and Schneider Electric.Namely, LG is making a $249.95 video doorbell, $199.95 indoor camera, $299.95 outdoor camera, a $399.95 floodlight camera, and a smart $349.95 deadbolt, and both firms are making $199.95 thermostats and $39.95 room sensors through the partnership. But all of them are designed with Apple’s help and are optimized for Apple products — they pair with a tap from an iPhone and run through Apple’s Home app without a separate account — even though they don’t have Apple logos.Apple presumably could have made products in these categories itself — which would have warranted more premium prices and would have had a far more excited reaction — and it’s not like it didn’t have time, as the HomeView has reportedly been sitting around unopened since Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported its postponement in March 2025, while Apple got Siri AI in workable condition.These feel like rushed lineup filler, when an executive realized Apple couldn’t pitch itself as moving seriously into the smart-home realm without having more smart-home products. They should work fine, but it feels like an older, more impressive Apple wouldn’t have stood by something like this.

Apple’s Expanded Smart Home Lineup Is Still Underfurnished

Apple’s Expanded Smart Home Lineup Is Still Underfurnished

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