Apple finally has a name for the thing it has spent two years not shipping. Bloomberg reports it’s called HomeView, and that it starts shipping in November. That’s the actual news this week. Everything else worth saying comes from Apple’s record in the home, which is poor.
Remember the arc: the original HomePod got discontinued, came back as a mini, then came back again at full size, and never once became the speaker people recommended to each other unprompted. Apple TV is the only genuinely good Apple box in a living room, and it’s good largely because it plays video and gets out of the way. The home lineup has never had a center. HomeView is Apple’s attempt to build one.
What we actually know
Not much, and I’m not going to invent a spec sheet. Neither TechCrunch nor Engadget claims to have the final hardware details. What’s established: the name, the November ship window, and a trail of reports going back a couple of years about a display-driven hub that kept slipping. The slippage is the interesting part, because the reason a hub slips is rarely the panel or the chassis.
Siri is the product, not the screen
A home hub lives or dies on its voice layer. That’s the interface you use when your hands are full, which in a kitchen is always. Touchscreens in the home demo beautifully and then settle into disuse; after three weeks you either talk to the thing or you pull out your phone, which you were going to do anyway.
Apple’s voice layer is the weakest of the three major options, and has been for most of a decade. If HomeView ships in November on the Siri we have now, Apple has built an attractive wall-mounted light switch with a camera feed. That can still sell. It just won’t move the category.
The counterargument is Apple’s late-entry greatest hits: iPod, Watch, AirPods. Each of those categories was gated by hardware Apple was unusually good at, miniaturization, silicon, battery, industrial design. The home is a software and interoperability problem. Matter already handed Apple the interoperability half for free. What’s left is the half Apple keeps missing.
The realistic ceiling
November puts HomeView into the holiday quarter against Echo Shows and Nest Hubs that get discounted to under a hundred dollars. Apple won’t play there and shouldn’t try. Its market is the people who already bought HomeKit bulbs and locks because the Home app was on their iPhone, and who have been waiting for something better than a HomePod mini to run them. That’s a few million units of pent-up demand, and it’s enough to call this a commercial success while changing nothing about who owns the smart home.
So it depends on your bar. A profitable product for existing Apple households: likely. The first Apple smart home product that non-Apple people buy: no evidence yet.
Shipping is roughly six weeks out. Nobody outside Cupertino has said which version of Siri is on the box.