Apple HomeView Is Like a Giant Apple Watch for the Home

This 7-inch smart display with an adjustable "face" is a unique blend of iPhone and Apple Watch.

Competitors like Google and Amazon have built countless display-equipped smart speakers since voice assistants invaded the home a decade ago. But Apple has stuck to a smaller smart home ecosystem centered around its HomePod speakers, even ditching the iPad as a hub device a few years ago, forcing users to buy an Apple TV or HomePod to start. Maybe that's why it hasn't found much success at home.

Unveiled at an event in New York City on Tuesday, the 7-inch smart display arrived alongside several other new smart home devices as part of Apple's effort to revive its lagging ecosystem. The HomeView is priced at $299 and comes in two versions – the speaker stand and the wall display – both priced the same. Pre-orders are live and sales will begin on November 13.

The first thing I thought after seeing the Apple HomeView in action was that it looked like an exploded Apple Watch. The 7-inch square screen has several "faces" that you can swipe with your finger just like a smart watch. You can even customize face colors and add different effects for sharper information.

Faces can range from the clock, your favorite photos of friends, family or pets (you can even use shared albums) to weather updates and, yes, Snoopy animations. Swipe up for the home screen, which looks more like an iPhone or iPad, with apps neatly arranged next to widgets. Except HomeView doesn't run iOS or iPadOS - it runs HomeView software.

It does not have an app store. Instead, Apple has a suite of apps, including FaceTime, Messages, and Safari. A handful of third-party media apps like Spotify are available, and developers can offer built-in CarPlay apps. If your iPhone already has one of these CarPlay apps installed, it can automatically appear in HomeView upon startup. To get the most out of HomeView, you need an iPhone with Apple Intelligence support (iPhone 15 Pro or later)—you can't set it up with an iPad.

The aluminum hardware, which supports Apple's A18 chip, comes in four colors: silver, starlight, rose pink, and space gray (Apple's color matches the braided cable). The standard HomeView has a speaker stand with a screen that manually tilts up or down for angled viewing, but you can also buy a wall-mountable version. The latter offers three stands to choose from, one of which is perfect for DIY and has a visible power cord that must be run into an outlet. The other two are designed for professional installers, either hard-wired or connected via Power over Ethernet (PoE).

Technically, the main speakers - two full-range drivers - are built into the screen. But the standard HomeView has a base that has a muted woofer and two passive power-canceling radiators for stronger bass. Based on a very limited listening experience, it sounds very good and can fill a large room well. The in-wall version won't have the extra volume, but Apple claims it will adjust the volume for wall placement.

The 7-inch Liquid Retina display has familiar elements, such as True Tone, which adjusts the color temperature of the screen according to the light in the room. The ambient light sensor can also reduce screen brightness from 500 nits to 0.3 nits, the lowest brightness Apple has ever engineered into a display. It will be useful if you place the HomeView on a nightstand.

There's a 12-megapixel camera center stage and a quad-microphone array on the front, but they're not just for FaceTime calls. The camera performs facial recognition, allowing the software to adapt to whoever is looking at the screen.

You can add up to six iCloud accounts, and the user interface will adapt to each person, like a Google Pixel tablet. This means your spouse can have all apps icon green and have no widgets on their home screen, but if you stand in front of HomeView, it will switch to your settings. You cannot view sensitive messages and personal information of other family members. You don't just have to be standing in front of HomeView for this personalized content to show up — your iPhone must be on the same Wi-Fi network and must have been recently unlocked.

HomeView can also recognize voices, which helps if dad asks Siri AI to "play music." Plays from dad's music library and his favorite music app instead of another user's music from iCloud. If you have multiple HomePods or HomeViews, you can manage your speaker groups in the HomeView interface.

HomeView also supports Apple's Handoff technology, so you can hold your iPhone close to send a Safari command to the smart display or ask it to continue listening to a podcast on your commute. In the middle of FaceTime or a phone call? Place your iPhone near HomeView and it will move to it.

Like any smart display or smart speaker, Siri's artificial intelligence powers HomeView. Anyway, that's the main way to interact with the device (although yes, there's a keyboard you can pull up to type on). Apple has spent a lot of time improving Siri this year and finally released a more capable assistant in iOS 27.

The Siri AI in HomeView understands your personal context from your iPhone, so if you ask it to play a song your friend Eric recommended, it'll immediately know what you mean by looking at your message history. You can ask what time your brother Jeff is likely to get home from the airport on Thursday, then schedule Siri to turn on the coffee maker 15 minutes before his estimated arrival. All of this can be done in natural language, meaning you don't need to tell the Siri artificial intelligence specific commands to understand you.

A simple trick is HomeView's ability to convert recipe pages from Safari into digestible content. Upload a recipe and it lets you view the ingredients or "start cooking" without having to read three paragraphs of the author's relationship with the stew. It automatically converts the recipe into step-by-step instructions, even completing automatic timers for the corresponding steps, so you can start individual timers at the same time.

Naturally, HomeView is also designed to control all your smart home devices. You can create a widget for any device you've added in the Home app to quickly control it in HomeView. And if you swipe left from the home screen, you'll see a "Camera" face that shows a live stream of connected security cameras (you can view nine feeds at once).

Just like the foldable iPhone Duo, Apple is late to the market. The company is betting on tight iPhone integration, visible watch-like software, and a more text-aware Siri to make HomeView more like the screen you'd actually want to feel on your counter. It all depends on whether Siri can hold up its end of the bargain — and the voice assistant doesn't exactly have the best track record.