Apple Just Debuted Its First Smart Home Display

Apple announced its first dedicated smart home display at an event called Welcome Home, and the device it revealed is called HomeView. At $299, it features a 7-inch square Liquid Retina display, an A18 chip, a 12-megapixel FaceTime camera with Center Stage, spatial audio speakers, a temperature and humidity sensor, and support for Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 6.0, Thread, and Matter, making it compatible with the widest possible range of existing smart home devices. It comes in two configurations: a tabletop version with a dome-shaped speaker base in four colors including silver, starlight, rose pink, and space gray, and a wall-mounted version available in silver and space gray. Both versions cost $299. Wall mounts are available separately from $59. Pre-orders opened the same day as the announcement, with devices shipping November 13. The most distinctive feature is how it handles multi-person households: HomeView uses the FaceTime camera to recognize which family member is standing in front of it and automatically pulls in that person's calendar, messages, reminders, and preferences from their paired iPhone or iPad, personalizing the home screen without any manual input. Up to six people in a household can be recognized independently.

The device runs dedicated home-focused software built around Siri AI, Apple's enhanced Siri powered by Apple Intelligence, which can handle natural conversational requests, answer general knowledge questions, control connected smart home devices, and pull in personal context from a paired device. The Home Modular face gives quick touchscreen access to lights, locks, thermostats, and smart home scenes. The Home Camera face can display up to nine live video feeds simultaneously from compatible security cameras and video doorbells. A shared photo album feature turns the display into a living photo frame that household members and remote family members can contribute to from anywhere. The display brightness ranges from 500 nits at maximum to 0.3 nits at minimum, making it suitable for use as a nightstand clock without disturbing sleep. Apple also announced a new HomePod mini at $149 alongside the HomeView, which includes Siri AI support for users who prefer a speaker-only option without a display. The HomeView is Apple's direct entry into the smart display category previously dominated by Amazon's Echo Show and Google's Nest Hub, and it is the most significant Apple home hardware announcement in several years. It is not available in the European Union at launch because Siri AI is not yet available there. For everyone else, it ships in five weeks.

Source:https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/13/tech/apple-homeview-siri-ai