By Jason Snell
HomeView review: A late arrival, still showing some seams
I’ve wanted a product like the Apple HomeView for years now. After spending a lot of time with various personal assistant “smart speakers” in my kitchen—some with screens—I’ve never been more certain about the potential of the product category or more disappointed in the reality.
I’ve spent years with Google and Amazon displays in my kitchen, and was never really satisfied. They were slow, their screens weren’t very good, they didn’t integrate well with my home, and Amazon would not stop opting me into new forms of distracting marketing messages.
The HomeView, which has been standing like a tiny, cute sentinel atop the bar in my kitchen for the last week, improves on those other devices in innumerable ways. It’s got a great 7-inch square screen, it’s fast and responsive, and it fits into my home ecosystem.
While it is far from perfect, the HomeView is great at some jobs, and pretty good at others. Where it falls short, it does so while hinting at some great potential that could be addressed with software updates.
The Echo Show was sent back long ago. The Google Nest Home is unplugged and relocated to the tech recycling pile. The HomeView? It’s here to stay, at least in my kitchen.
An Apple device mash-up
The $299 HomeView is a slab-like device that’s 5.73 inches square and 0.39 inches thick, kind of like a tiny, square iPad. It comes mounted either on a perforated cylindrical aluminum base or (optionally) sans base, ready for wall mounting via a series of optional, extra-cost mounts. I tested one with the aluminum base, which makes it look like an extremely tiny iMac.
The hardware is solid and coherent, the screen a pleasure to touch and tilt. In terms of software, though, the HomeView feels like a peculiar amalgam of numerous other Apple products. Its main interface makes it look a bit like an overgrown Apple Watch, complete with customizable “faces” that sometimes resemble actual Apple Watch faces and other times resemble the iPhone’s StandBy mode. Its apps sometimes feel like they’ve escaped from the iPhone or iPad, but at other times they feel more like they’re right off of an Apple TV. And still other “apps” resemble what you might see in your car, since Apple is also using CarPlay to project interfaces from apps running on your iPhone.
Given the fact that this product’s tech stack feels like it was created in a blender, it’s remarkable that it holds together as well as it does—but there are still places where the seams show.
Let’s start with the HomeView’s default “faces”, which are what the device defaults to when it’s not actively being used. Faces are a series of individual pages arranged in a strip that you can swipe through from side to side, very much reminiscent of how Apple Watch faces used to work. Tap and hold on a face and you’ll enter editing mode, where you can customize a face using an interface that is right out of watchOS or the new editable StandBy mode on the iPhone Duo.
Some faces feel very much like they’re from the Apple Watch—simple clocks with the occasional widget that’s a single line of text very much in the style of a watch complication or a simple iPhone lock screen widget. There’s also a pretty animated clock and a lighthearted clock face featuring Snoopy animations. My favorite is undoubtedly the Photos face, which lets you choose a set of items, albums, or collections from your iCloud Photos library, all of which will be shuffled through, very much like an iPhone lock screen or the Apple Watch’s widget face. It is delightful to walk into my kitchen and see a picture of my family.
Other HomeView faces are much more complex, offering dashboards to control Apple Home items, a live view of a HomeKit-compatible security camera, or even a custom Modular face you can populate with widgets from the device or from your iPhone.
In many ways, these faces are the core of the product. They are the images you want to look at, yes, but they’re also the dashboards you can use to quickly interact with items in your home. And this is where HomeView’s software comes up a bit short.
The layouts aren’t flexible enough, for starters. Simple faces like photos work a charm, but more complex faces are kind of a mess. I’d like more options about what items to place on a face, and where to place them. The HomeView seems like the perfect device to use as a control panel for my smart-home devices, but the Home Modular face is strangely limited. For example, I can only use it to turn dimmable lights on to full brightness. To dim a light, I have to open the Home app, select the item in there, and then swipe up or down on the dimming interface.
It’s great that you can view iPhone widgets on the HomeView just as you can on the Mac, but it’s a bit frustrating that it will only display the small square widget style. Presumably because of the Apple Watch roots of some of these faces, there’s a surprising lack of digital clocks. In fact, in some face views you can create a face featuring a clock, but if you delete it, you can’t add it back. I admit to being frequently baffled about what I was able to add and customize, and what I wasn’t, when trying to build faces.
All of this is really unsurprising when you consider that this is an interface welded together from disparate parts of other Apple products, but it feels like it needs some more tweaking and attention for it to fully come together.
Apps, but no App Store
Swipe up from the bottom of any face and you’ll find yourself in the HomeView’s app view, its equivalent of an iOS home screen. You can customize this view to drag icons around and even add widgets. This screen is designed to be personalized to you—it shows your picture and welcomes you by name, all because you train the HomeView on your appearance (via its included webcam) as well as voice, and link it to your iPhone, which needs to be on the same wi-fi network and have been unlocked relatively recently. HomeView uses all of those hints to decide if it’s you who’s swiping up. If it doesn’t recognize you, it’ll put up a more generic interface without any linked iPhone apps.
There are some “real” Apple apps on the HomeView: Music, Safari, Home, FaceTime, Weather, Find My, Calendar, Messages, Timers/Alarms/World Clock (all escapees from the Clock app), Reminders, and Settings all offer functionality that’s not far from what you’d get on an iPhone.
Also appearing in the same app view are things that look like apps but are not the same as the onboard apps that every person can see. These are items pushed from your paired iPhone, and they’re actually the CarPlay extensions of iPhone apps (running on the paired iPhone of the person HomeView has determined is using the device, via face/voice/device recognition) in CarPlay’s audio and video categories. So, for example, Instapaper appears on my HomeView—but only its CarPlay interface, which offers to read stories out loud. The New York Times app is there, but just to play its podcasts. Libby will offer me audiobooks. Overcast and Apple Podcasts will play my podcasts, and the Apple TV app will play TV shows (in an extreme letterbox on this square screen).
Using CarPlay to let iPhone apps run (in a way) on HomeView was a stroke of genius. The feature works pretty well and it allows Apple not to clutter the device with an App Store or force developers to write new versions of their apps for yet another platform. That said, I do wonder if there might be a better path forward for HomeView that does allow developers to write more full-featured apps if they wish, either via CarPlay (outside of the audio and video categories) or by allowing iPhone apps to install a HomeView version of themselves, which is how most Apple Watch apps are installed. (There are already reports that Apple may be adding support for AI voice assistants via CarPlay in the future.)
Or consider recipe apps as a category. They don’t really make sense in CarPlay, but they sure do on this device. Apple has built a clever recipe view into Safari on the HomeView that displays recipes with clear ingredients lists, cooking steps, and even hyperlinks to quickly create timers. Unfortunately, I keep all my recipes in Mela, a very nice app that seemingly is unavailable on HomeView. Maybe recipe app developers will find a way to get their content on the HomeView, perhaps via the web, but it would be nice if they had the option to somehow bring their users’ data to this device directly. The clever CarPlay hack only goes so far.
Siri speaker with a screen
If Mark Gurman’s reports are to be believed, Apple has had the HomeView hardware ready for quite a while, but felt it was unable to release it because of the 2024 failure to launch of numerous Apple Intelligence features. Now that Siri AI has arrived, HomeView is finally ready to blast into stores.
Powered by an A18 processor, the HomeView supports Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, and when paired with an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone or iPad, it’s capable of using that device to search through your personal context to answer your questions. Just as is true everywhere else, when Siri AI works on the HomeView it can be spectacular. I have asked targeted questions about items in long-ago Messages threads or on my Calendar and it has managed to unearth the answer without me having to do a lick of work. It’s vastly better at general world-knowledge questions than the old Siri. That said, Siri AI isn’t as reliable as it should be, both in general and on the HomeView. Sometimes it just seems to go off in its own world and not respond, or respond accurately. Other times, it works just as advertised. Apple’s challenge (and this goes way beyond the HomePod) is to make Siri AI work more reliably.
I also had some bizarre, HomeView-specific issues with Siri AI. After I paired my iPhone with the HomeView, every command I gave it to play music was instead routed to Broadcasts, a third-party app on my iPhone (with a CarPlay connector, to be fair) that I use to stream live podcasts. I had to delete Broadcasts entirely in order to get Music playback to work properly. Once I did that, everything settled down, but I still have no idea why Siri got so hung up on an app that couldn’t offer albums or playlists or anything else I was looking for.
But again, when it works, it’s great. I was able to ask the HomeView what that painting is “where the guy from the French Revolution is dead in a bathtub,” and not only did it answer correctly that it’s Jacques-Louis David’s “Death of Marat,” it pulled up the painting for me to look at on the HomeView screen. My HomePod could never.
Beyond Siri, the HomeView is pretty versatile as a media device. It will play audio itself, via its speakers and (on the model with the cylindrical base) an extra downward-pointing woofer. It sounds… fine? It sounds like a kitchen speaker. The HomeView’s speaker is not going to win any awards from audiophiles, but it’s absolutely good enough to do the job when you’re making pizza, drinking some wine, and rocking out to the hits of the ’80s. (Ask me how I know.)
HomeView also integrates well with AirPlay, so if you do have other speakers, HomeView can play to them, too. And it’s an AirPlay receiver, so if you want to play audio or video on the HomeView that originated on another Apple device, it’s up to the challenge. (This is useful if you want to, for example, watch a college football game on YouTube TV, which does not have a video CarPlay app. Of course, you’ll be watching it extremely letterboxed, but it does work!)
The star of HomeView’s playback versatility may be its support for Handoff, which is extremely present on this device, perhaps even to a fault. Get an iPhone close to a HomeView and both devices will show a ripple on screen, and your phone will ask you to either throw whatever you’re consuming over to the HomeView, or suck back whatever is playing on the HomeView onto your iPhone. I used this feature to toss music, podcasts, AirPlay from random apps, and even web pages (via Safari) from my iPhone to the HomeView, and pulled music I was listening to on the HomeView back to my iPhone. My only real complaint is that it kept triggering when I came even vaguely close to the HomeView with my phone, though it was easy to just opt not to transfer anything either way.
There were some other quirks. The HomeView does FaceTime, and does a pretty nice job thanks to its 12-megapixel Center Stage camera. But it struggled to connect to a multi-person FaceTime call when I handed it off from an iPhone, and after a brief two-person interlude, the call failed completely. Occasionally attempts to play audio via a CarPlay-based app (Overcast) would claim to succeed, but no audio would be audible until I switched to playing audio from a different app (Music) and then moved back to Overcast.
I’m willing to chalk all this up to this essentially being the 1.0 version of the HomeView software experience, as well as a side effect of Apple’s ambition in fusing together so many disparate aspects of its ecosystem in this product. It’s all a little bit messy.
A view into Apple’s home
So after years of waiting for Apple’s take on the smart speaker, was it worth it? To be clear, I would rather have not waited this long—and I’m pretty sure that’s true of Apple, as well. But here we are, and at $299 for the self-standing model, it strikes me as being a pretty great deal if you’re someone who is immersed in the Apple ecosystem and wants a little helper to answer questions, show pictures, play music, control devices, and otherwise just be a nice companion in the kitchen (or wherever else you might want one in your home).
The wall-mounted model, while also priced at $299, is a worse deal—in that it lacks a woofer and requires an additional purchase of a mounting assembly, meaning it’s got fewer features and ultimately costs more. I’m a little baffled why Apple didn’t offer a basic wall mount for that price, but it didn’t, and it makes that product a worse deal. (That said, I’m still interested in buying one, as I’d really like to put a panel on my wall that allows anyone in my home to control my smart-home stuff even when I’m not around.)
My real issues with the HomeView aren’t with its hardware, which is solid and functional and kind of adorable when spotted from any angle other than screen-on. It’s with the software, which has an impressive array of features welded on from various other Apple products—but can really show the seams. Apple’s use of CarPlay to support media apps on the device is clever, but it’s a little buggy and the device still feels limited. The recipe browser is cute, but I have all my recipes in an app that’s entirely walled off from the HomeView, and that’s a bummer.
The product also really lives or dies by its “faces,” and the current ones are either pretty-but-not-useful or useful-but-not-pretty. (I can’t believe you can’t dim a light from a face screen.)
Still, solid hardware and a decent array of services are a start. HomeView (and its successors) has a real chance to fill the homes of avid iPhone users everywhere, so long as Apple works to improve the flexibility and polish of its software.
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