We Tried Out Apple's New HomeView Smart Display

Apple just announced its first smart display.

It's called HomeView, and it's a seven-inch screen

that kind of looks like a blown up Apple Watch.

It costs 299 and it's available for pre-order now.

And it's part of Apple's big push back into the smart home.

So today, at this event in New York City,

it also announced a new HomePod Mini 2

as well as a new Apple TV 4K.

There's also the Apple Home Collection,

which is a bunch of smart home devices it made

in collaboration with LG and Schneider Electric.

The HomeView runs its own operating system

called HomeView Software,

and Apple says it comes in two versions,

a wall-mounted version or one with a base

that adds a little more oomph in the speaker

that's built into the screen.

You can customize the faces just like on an Apple Watch,

even changing the color

and customizing what widgets show up on those lock screens.

And these lock screens can range from snoopy animations,

to weather updates, to even just your family photos.

Swipe into the home screen

and you get a familiar experience very much like an iPhone

or iPad, except there's no App Store.

This is all a curated experience from Apple,

so there's a select number of apps like Safari,

Messages, and FaceTime.

And other apps can exist, for example,

media apps like Spotify or YouTube Music

or Apple Music will show up on this device,

as well as any app that developers are making

for the CarPlay framework.

That does mean right now

that there aren't any video streaming apps

launching on the HomeView,

so there's no Disney+, Netflix, YouTube.

But if those developers chose to make their apps compatible

with the CarPlay framework,

they will show up on the HomeView

as you set it up with your iPhone.

Speaking of, you need an Apple intelligence-equipped iPhone,

which is basically an iPhone 15 Pro or newer

to really get the most out of the HomeView.

The HomeView supports up to six iCloud accounts

and the camera on front will recognize

the person standing in front, and it will change

the display to show their content.

All of this revolves around the new Siri AI experience

that Apple has been building up this entire year

and it launched in iOS 27.

Siri AI is more capable.

It can understand better context from all of your apps,

and it has broader world knowledge, so it should be able

to answer questions the way ChatGPT

or Gemini can answer those.

So that's the HomeView.

It officially goes on sale November 13th.