The HomeView is a very good first smart display from Apple: powerful enough to run my smart home but simple enough for anyone in it to use. If you’re an Apple household and want it for any of its core jobs, you’ll be pleased, and at $299 it’s very competitively priced. But it’s not the full-fledged family organizer some households might want; Skylight’s Calendar still owns that niche.
Apple may have lagged behind the competition on introducing a smart display, but the HomeView checks a lot of boxes that make it a very powerful option for iPhone users. It's also more elegantly designed than all of its main competitors. The ability to automatically distinguish between different family members, and for Siri to pull in personalized context for each person, makes this a useful home hub. When you factor in the cooking assistance, smart home compatibility and FaceTime chops, the HomeView can easily become the command center for any household. Just be sure to keep your iPhone (or iPad) handy if you want to make the most of it.
Historically, Apple has generally not been first to any particular category, but when it enters a market - MP3 players, phones, tablets, etc. - it’s generally learned from the mistakes of the competition, and delivered a device that outshines everything else on the market.The HomeView is not that. While the physical design of the device is lovely, its software does not live up to the same standard. It can do far less than rival smart displays from Amazon, and Siri is still a less capable home assistant AI than Alexa+ or Gemini.
The device feels like a promising first-generation product. Its hardware is beautiful. Its software is responsive and intuitive. But despite its potential, in its current form it’s essentially a $300 iPhone accessory that plugs into a wall.Whether you should buy one depends mainly on how invested you are in Apple’s ecosystem. If everyone in your family uses an iPhone or iPad, and you subscribe to Apple Music, Apple TV, and more, then the HomeView will be a very nice addition. But if you have some Android or Spotify users in your family, you might want to consider something else.
I admit it; I’ve fallen in love with the Apple HomeView, but I still don’t know how to feel about that. It’s a helpful device that works well with my other Apple devices, but it’s expensive. I’m a champion of keeping the smart home affordable and interoperable, so it’s hard to justify spending $300 on a smart display that encourages you to lock into the Apple ecosystem.
If you’re well integrated into Apple’s ecosystem, have HomeKit devices or are planning on picking any of the new Home Collection accessories, the HomeView is worth it, even with a $299 entry price. As Apple’s first smart display, it functions better and more smoothly than an equivalent $200 Amazon Echo Show 8 or $100 Nest Hub (2nd Gen), though you’re paying the Apple premium.
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.
Gast
