It’s been a busy 24 hours for Apple. On top of announcing the new Apple TV 4K and a bunch of LG-built smart home products, it wanted a slice of the smart home pie all to itself. Enter the Apple HomeView, a new take on the smart home hub that just about every tech company is producing these days. Of course, it’s got Siri’s AI smarts.
Plop it on the desk, or mount it to the wall — it’ll do the same job. It’s essentially just one big Apple Watch that your house gets to wear instead of you, and keeps the whole home connected and accessible from one screen. It’ll recognise up to six different people in your household, and automatically adjust the experience for every one.
Home is where the Apple HomeView is
The primary interface is the 7in Liquid Retina display that’ll reach as high as 500 nits of brightness, or fall as low as 0.3, depending on the situation. Using Apple silicon and real-time system sensors, the screen will adjust automatically depending on how far away the user is. Volume will also get a boost the further away you are.
The model resting on its speaker base might be the superior variant with how portable it is (it’d look great on a nightstand). Apple reckons HomeView has a “custom-engineered acoustic system” with two full-range drivers in the display. There’s also a downward-firing woofer and two force-cancelling passive radiators built into the base. Then there’s the built-in 12MP f2.4 ultra-wide camera to handle FaceTime like you’re in Back to the Future.
Read More: Apple unveils the new Apple TV 4K, but it’ll cost you double what the last one did
It’s certainly cool from a hardware perspective, but Apple’s punting HomeView’s Siri AI capabilities as the real deciding factor. Like the Apple TV 4K, HomeView features the smarter Siri that’ll try to find a solution to your vocal requests. Apple says you can “ask Siri about virtually any topic and get an answer.” Like any other chatbot, Siri is liable to hallucinate at any moment, so take its replies with a grain of salt.
It’ll hook up with just about any of Apple’s other smart home products, and make managing them all easier. That’s the plan, anyway. Whether Apple can live up to its promises remains to be seen when HomeView arrives on 13 November. Pre-orders are open in the States now, with an asking price of around R5,000 ($300).
