Apple’s HomeView Is the Best Smart Display Yet — but You Still May Not Need It

Apple’s former hardware chief and new CEO, John Ternus, is on a tear. Last month he unveiled the biggest change to the iPhone in its history with its first folding model, the Duo, and mere weeks later, Apple has added another new product category to its range with the much-anticipated HomeView: Apple’s first smart display, and center of its new smart-home line.In short, it’s a small, thick-bezeled 7-inch LCD square touchscreen that runs a whole new Siri-centric operating system — which is basically a blown-up version of watchOS. You can have it on your kitchen counter or living room table, courtesy of its domed aluminum speaker base, or mounted on the wall. Using it, not only can you pull up recipes, play music, and choose smart-home controls — through voice or the touchscreen — but you can also see individual information relevant just to you.Hidden within the thick black bezels — which will age poorly but reduce mis-presses — is a 12-megapixel front camera, and when you approach it, the device uses AI to recognize up to six household members by face, logging in just for them. There’s no Face ID here, but when you look at the device, you can see useful information in your messages, calendar, emails, and so forth, all connected to your Apple Account and devices — but when you step away and your child looks at it, that information is replaced with theirs, and their device preferences. Why they didn’t use this on the Duo instead of Touch ID is anyone’s guess.Guests can use the HomeView to control accessories, set timers, and play music but won’t have personalized information or see anyone else’s. To increase security, Apple also checks whether a person’s paired iPhone or iPad is on the same Wi-Fi network and was unlocked recently when checking a face.The usefulness of this depends on the nascent Siri AI being the smart personal assistant Apple wants it to be, leveraging its unique combination of having lots of users’ data but all of it being private. It’s not quite there yet, and that’s a bit of a problem as this whole device is built around it and the HomeView doesn’t have an App Store. If you use Safari as your browser and have all your accounts synced up with Apple’s native email and calendar apps, that’s fine, but as a Notion Calendar user with Quiche as my iPhone browser and mymind for bookmarks, that’s tough.Better Siri integrations could help solve this in the future, but unless I’m missing something, if I have a specific recipe bookmarked in an app, there’s no way this tablet — the perfect cooking companion — would be able to pull it up for me without just searching around.From a hardware perspective, it does look like the best thing in this space. It’s smaller than the Google Nest Hub or Amazon’s Echo Show 8, and though it’s more expensive — $299 compared to $99.99 and $179.99 — it has the nicest hardware, and won’t blast ads constantly like the Echo Show. The 7-inch rounded-square screen is an LCD but has variable brightness from 0.3 nits up to 500 nits — meaning you could use it on your nightstand, as an expensive alarm clock — and its aluminum body contains an A18 chip from the iPhone 16, four microphones, and three speakers: two full-range drivers in the display and a down-firing woofer with two force-canceling passive radiators in the base. The wall-mounted version loses the base’s woofer and radiators and is the same price, oddly. It also only comes in space gray and silver, whereas the stand version also gets “starlight” and “rose pink.”In short, the stand version is probably the most compelling version yet of a device category I don’t really understand the point of. Because, yes, it’s pretty and reasonably priced and quite capable, but if I want a large screen for recipes, watching videos, and so on, then I will use a tablet — which is bigger, mobile, at higher resolution, and with keyboard support — and there’s no Siri or home-control function that you can do on this device that you can’t on the actual center of your Apple ecosystem, your iPhone. This will probably be another home device destined to go largely unused except for getting up the occasional recipes and setting timers — but if you are in the Apple ecosystem, it’s the best version of that yet.

Apple’s HomeView Is the Best Smart Display Yet — but You Still May Not Need It

Apple’s HomeView Is the Best Smart Display Yet — but You Still May Not Need It

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