Apple’s HomeView is my new favorite smart display — but not my daughter’s

The HomeView nails everything I want from a smart display. It’s superb at controlling my smart home; it’s an excellent hands-free kitchen companion, a good speaker, and a gorgeous digital photo frame. It’s also the first Apple smart speaker with Siri AI, which is an improvement, if still slow at times. But Apple has fallen into the trap that hampers other smart displays I’ve tested: not content with doing its core functions well, it tries to do more, and that’s where the friction creeps in.
.

HomeView is both a smart display everyone in your home can use and an extension of your iPhone

The special Apple sauce here is that HomeView is both a smart display everyone in your home can use and an extension of your iPhone or iPad, providing access to your texts, calendar, and reminders when your phone is at home and on the same Wi-Fi network. This makes it a communal device with personal data, and switching between the two is where HomeView stumbles. Clunky authentication checks and being sent to my iPhone too many times interrupt the hands-free experience. Not to mention that I could easily read my 15-year-old daughter’s text messages, and vice versa.

Her verdict? “I’ll just use my iPhone.” But my largely tech-averse husband fell in love with HomeView, and immediately asked for one for his office.

7

Verge Score

$290

The Good

• Speedy smart home control
• Excellent guided cooking
• Siri AI is helpful in the home
• Gorgeous customizable faces
• Great sound for its size

The Bad

• I could read my daughter’s text messages
• Siri AI can be slow
• The app / widget situation is funky
• Wall mounts cost (a lot) extra

For households deep in the Apple ecosystem, especially those with younger kids who only need access to lights and music and aren’t interested in your text messages, this may be the first smart display your whole family will actually use. But for some, the idea of their texts appearing on a large screen in the middle of the kitchen will send them running.

Apple is late to the game here. Amazon and Google have had smart displays for close to a decade. But the company has debuted with a product that elevates the category in nearly every way — with a few quirks.

Polished and surprisingly small

The HomeView is much smaller than I expected, but it’s a great size for my needs. The star of the device is a 7-inch square touchscreen that displays a gorgeous collection of “faces” that I can customize to fit wherever I put it — the kitchen counter, bedside table, or the wall. It comes in tabletop and wall-mounted versions, and both cost $299, making it Apple’s least expensive screened device after the Apple Watch SE.

The tabletop HomeView fits neatly on my kitchen counter and is light enough to move around for cooking, or when my husband wants to check his schedule over breakfast. The long USB-C cable allows plenty of maneuverability, though after a few days of spinning, it did get a bit twisty.

1/8

The screen is clear and bright and looks good in most lighting situations. It’s large enough for reading messages, following a recipe, and video calling while in the kitchen. It’s super responsive, too, showing no lag or stuttering. There’s also a Center Stage camera above the display for taking a FaceTime call while moving around, staying in frame in every corner of my small kitchen. Callers could hear me clearly, although the farther away I was, the more tinny it started to sound.

Sound is very good for the size, with speakers on both the display and in the base of the tabletop model. It’s close to a HomePod Mini 2, not as room-filling, but with a touch more bass. Playing music on the wall-mounted model wasn’t as much of a downgrade as I expected in a device with one less speaker; it was richer and cleaner than on the Echo Show 15 wall-mounted in the same entryway. Siri responded well to voice commands using the device’s microphones, and as long as I remembered to put my phone face down if it was nearby, Siri replied from the correct device.

The one hardware miss is physical buttons: there aren’t any. When I want to adjust the volume quickly or mute Siri, I have to tap the display or pull out my phone.

I have a good spot on my kitchen counter for HomeView, but if you don’t, wall mounting is an option. Apple sent me two mounts for this review, both from Schneider Electric: a USB-C wall mount ($59.99) with a 2-meter / 6.5-foot cable and neat cable management, and a hardwired AC mount ($79.99). There will also be a power-over-Ethernet option for $129.99. The USB-C mount is easy to install: just two screws in the wall, then the display snaps on with magnets so strong that no one will accidentally knock it off the wall.

However, the wall-mounted HomeView ends up costing more than the tabletop version because it’s priced the same but doesn’t include a mount or a power adaptor. You have to buy those separately, and with Apple’s $39 brick, you’re starting at around $400 (until the inevitable third-party options arrive). That’s an extra $100 for a device with fewer speakers. It’s a weird move; Apple should have included a wall mount and adapter or dropped the price.

Superb in the smart home

HomeView nails the smart display essentials: controlling my smart home, monitoring my video doorbell, providing hands-free help in the kitchen, playing music and podcasts, and displaying photos.

Apple put a Thread radio and Matter controller in the HomeView, so it acts as an Apple Home hub, the first with an always-on screen. The Home app is infused throughout the device’s software, giving you multiple ways to control connected smart lights, thermostats, locks, and cameras. This is where HomeView shines. It can connect to any HomeKit or compatible Matter smart device, and it’s impressively fast at controlling them, turning on the lights in my entryway as quickly as a regular light switch. It also offers tons of options for customizing its controls.

I set up the device’s Smart Home face with a large button to turn the lights on and off in the hallway it was in, plus smaller buttons for my Goodnight and Good Morning scenes, along with a live view of the Aqara video doorbell, and controls for my front door lock and Nest thermostat. In the morning, as I walk past, I hit the Good Morning scene and the house wakes up; then I do the reverse at night. Even better, my husband, who has never once opened the Home app, now turns on the lights from the HomeView every morning.

The Camera face, which streams up to nine HomeKit Secure Video cameras at once, is also very fast, and when someone rings the video doorbell, HomeView pulls up a live feed instantly. I can then unlock the door right from the display. I love that I can add multiple Smart Home and Camera faces in different configurations, giving me swipeable access to all the controls I want.

Smart home is my favorite use case, but I also loved cooking with HomeView. You can pull up a recipe on your phone and, using Handoff, send it to the HomeView, which brings up a guided cooking experience. This feature elicited several “Wow, that’s really cool” reactions from visitors (and my editor!).

It was easy to follow the on-screen steps while cooking, as well as use Siri AI for help. While viewing a Creamy Tuscan Chicken recipe, I tapped the cherry tomatoes and said, “Siri, what can I substitute for this?” It suggested some useful options and some not-so-good ones (cucumbers?). I also liked how the HomeView automatically inserted timers into steps like “Cook the chicken for about 8 minutes on each side.” Tapping the timers popped them up into Live Activities at the top of the screen, making it easy to switch back and forth between them and the recipe.

This switching with Live Activities also works for phone calls and music, two things I used HomeView for a lot. Answering a call on the large display while cooking is much easier than reaching for my iPhone, and the audio is loud and clear, so I could keep cooking while chatting from anywhere in the room.

Music and audio playback are great; it’s nice to see album art while blasting Taylor Swift, and the screen makes it easy to pause, skip, or navigate to a new song, album, or playlist. The built-in speaker is good, but I prefer to AirPlay to compatible speakers, and I like that the HomeView remembers which I used last so I don’t have to select them each time.

There are some disappointments. The HomeView has a built-in temperature and humidity sensor, like its HomePod siblings, but it can’t use its onboard 12MP camera as a motion sensor to trigger an automation. HomeView can also only control devices compatible with Apple Home, so that means no Ring doorbells or Nest cameras (without workarounds), or categories like lawnmowers or appliances that Apple Home doesn’t support. I also couldn’t get it to run some of the Siri shortcuts I use to have the voice assistant control unsupported devices. When I say “Hey Siri, feed Smokey” to any of my HomePods, they can trigger my Aqara pet feeder, but HomeView told me it couldn’t do that.

Apple Home still isn’t powerful enough for advanced home setups with complicated automations or a robust home energy management system; if that’s you, you’re probably already using Home Assistant or Homey and could bring your setup into a HomeView. Which you may want to do, because HomeView’s simple, intuitive interface is great for everyone else in your home. For example, my long-suffering spouse, who just wants a way to turn on the smart lights or adjust the thermostat without pulling out his phone, asking a smart speaker, or having me do it for him.

A little too personal

The other big promise of HomeView is to act as a family hub, with everyone’s personal data easily accessible on a communal device in the home while staying separate for privacy. HomeView uses face and voice recognition to show up to six household members their calendars, messages, and calls — in theory, only to them when they’re in the home. If you have an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone, it can also answer personal context requests.

In practice, HomeView recognized me instantly, and I could swipe up from the home face to read my texts and access my calendar without any delay. But when it came to switching between profiles, it was too easy to access family members’ personal content. When I tested it with my teenage daughter, HomeView let me stay on her profile and scroll through her texts several times — even though it recognized me and popped up a prompt asking if I wanted to switch.

While this didn’t happen every time, it happened often enough to be a problem, mostly when I used the device right after her. There’s a grace period where the device stays on your content even after you’ve moved away; and if I hopped onto the device within five seconds or so of my daughter leaving, I could sometimes scroll for up to 10 seconds before it checked again and locked me out. (This was purely for testing purposes and with her consent!)

The other time we could reliably read each other’s content was when we were sitting side by side at the kitchen counter near the device. If my daughter was using it, walked away, and sat on the couch behind us, I could scroll through her messages for as long as I wanted because the camera still saw her in the room and didn’t switch to me, even though I was closer to it.

Swiping out of Messages to a face and leaving the room was the most reliable way to protect our stuff — but it wasn’t foolproof. (Watch my video review for more on this.)

I was impressed at how well HomeView switched between us on busy mornings. (Yes, my household does sometimes resemble that HomeView ad, minus the hole in the counter.) My daughter asked when her school project was due, then I jumped in to ask when to leave for the airport. HomeView answered each of us correctly, pulling from our respective calendars and texts — though we had to swivel the screen to face us, since it didn’t always recognize us by just voice. We could have used our phones, but HomeView’s large screen and louder speaker made hands-free use easier.

HomeView was stricter with phone calls than text messages, ringing only when I was directly in front of it. When my phone rang while I was on the other side of the counter, HomeView stayed silent until I spun it around.

This flow scuppers my hopes of using it as a family phone or putting it by my bed so I could banish my iPhone (and TikTok) to the living room at night. This is because it doesn’t show text notifications and won’t ring if it can’t see me, meaning I might miss a late-night call or text from my college-age son or teenage daughter.

Siri AI lands in the home

Tying all of these features together is Siri AI, which can answer general knowledge questions, control smart home devices, play music for you, and tap into personal context. I also didn’t have to repeat the wake word constantly; the Siri bubble animation on the screen clearly indicates when it’s still listening, so I could keep talking. Siri AI on the HomeView is an improvement over the older Siri on the HomePods, especially for controlling my home, and it’s mercifully much less verbose than its competitors. But it can be frustratingly slow to pull up personal context answers, sometimes makes mistakes, and regularly errors out. It is still in beta, so hopefully things will improve.

For smart home requests, Siri is very fast, since those run locally. It now responds to conversational requests like “dim the lights in here,” then “make it a bit dimmer,” making it easier to control devices. After it executes a voice command, it shows the accessory on the screen for additional control, which is handy.

I could also create automations with voice, such as “Hey Siri, open the shades in my office at 8AM every morning” and chain commands like “turn on the lights in here and in the mudroom.” But these only work with one device type at a time, so I couldn’t control lights and the shades with one ask.

I found Siri AI Personal Context handy in several instances, and it’s a feature that makes HomeView stand out from the competition — neither Alexa nor Google offers anything as deep. But here Siri can be slow, because it relies on pulling from your phone, and it struggles with anything taxing, like multiple requests in a row from different people. It frequently exclaims, “Uh oh, something’s wrong,” and gives up.

Then there was the time Siri tried to send my husband in the wrong direction. He asked it about his weekend schedule, and it read out the events in his calendar at the Georgia Bushcraft Fall Gathering he was heading to. When he asked how long it would take to get there, it confidently told him one hour and 47 minutes. He then asked it to show him directions, and it couldn’t because it didn’t actually know the address. Siri had guessed the location based on something in the event that said “Dogwood Stage,” and had made up the travel time. The gathering was actually a five-hour drive away. The event’s address was in his email, but Siri didn’t connect those dots.

When he prompted it to check his email, it found the correct address and calculated the drive time, but couldn’t pull up the route because there’s no Maps app on the HomeView. He asked it to send the route to his phone, and it said: “Done.” But all it sent him was a message with the drive time, no map attached. When he made the same request on his iPhone, it worked great. “It’s like your iPhone, but not as good” isn’t a great pitch here.

Despite these hiccups, I did find myself using Siri AI on HomeView a lot more than I do on my phone, where touch is my first and easiest instinct.

Beyond the basics

Beyond the core functions of a smart display, HomeView starts to struggle.

The built-in apps and widgets, which include Music, Calendar, Weather, Timers, Safari, and Intercom, work well. But if you want to use any other apps or widgets, they have to come from your phone, with some strange restrictions. They only work when your phone is at home, and only audio and video apps that support CarPlay and iPhone widgets that are compatible with the Mac show up. Because widgets point to apps that aren’t on the HomeView, they only work for glanceable info at best — tapping most of them gets you nowhere.

This means the New York Times and Apple News apps that appeared on the device were just podcast feeds, not news apps, and the Ring widget just told me to use my iPhone. A few of the widgets I tested offered some on-screen info, and some could perform one or two pre-programmed actions — there’s potential here, but it’s frustrating on day one. The only video app that works on the HomeView is Apple TV, but the screen is letterboxed to essentially iPhone size, so I wouldn’t recommend anyone buy this for a video-watching experience.

Safari is a workaround, and it’s not a terrible experience. I could browse websites by asking Siri to pull up The Verge or The New York Times in Safari, and I could log in to Netflix and YouTube using the pop-up keyboard. While I won’t be binge-watching the last season of Killing Eve on this, a Gordon Ramsay steak tutorial on YouTube while I cook, works fine but isn’t noticeably better than an iPhone.

There’s also no Maps or Notes app — and I felt their absence. A share sheet and the ability to copy and paste from Safari are also MIA, so sharing a grocery list or texting a link meant going back to my phone. HomeView made me do that a lot, which underscores how many features of this product are an extension of my iPhone rather than a standalone device.

How HomeView compares to the Echo Show and Nest Hub

I use and test all three major smart home platforms — Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Home. After a week with HomeView and Siri AI, I rank Alexa Plus as the best smart home assistant, Gemini for Home as the smartest assistant, and HomeView as the best smart display hardware and personal assistant.

Apple’s 7-inch square screen fits nicely into my home, and while it has similar dimensions to the Nest Hub, it has a smaller footprint. The Nest Hub Max, which launched in 2019, is showing its age and is significantly slower and laggier than HomeView.

The newer Echo Shows 8 and 11 are closer to HomeView in capabilities, but not as snappy. The just-announced Show 16 has a new UI with similar features to HomeView, but Amazon’s penchant for sticking ads on its smart displays has rightly put off many users. The HomeView has no ads.

When it comes to the AI inside, Alexa Plus is the most capable in the smart home. It can run multi-device, multi-room commands in seconds, and you can create complex automations with voice alone. Gemini can also handle more complex multi-step requests and is better with natural language and inferring intent from vaguer statements, like “I’m cold,” which will have it turn up the thermostat.

Where HomeView wins here is Personal Context. Google and Amazon offer similar profile switching, but neither is connected to your phone the way Siri AI is to your iPhone, so they have far less personal information to draw on. (Gemini for Home could certainly access much of it, but Google hasn’t gone there yet).

If Siri AI were a human personal assistant, I’d fire her for being too slow.

Of course, this is also a drawback: you need an iPhone or iPad to have a profile on HomeView. However, guests or visitors can use the smart home controls, timers, weather, Safari, music, and Siri for general knowledge.

Siri AI is also the only one of the three you don’t have to pay for to get the full voice assistant experience. Alexa Plus costs $20 a month or comes with Prime, and Google’s more advanced voice assistant, Gemini Live, is behind a paywall. Apple has said some Apple Intelligence features “are subject to daily usage limits,” with expanded access “available for a fee” in the future, but I didn’t run into any limits during my testing. However, Alexa Plus and Gemini Live are available on older smart speakers and displays; Siri is currently gated to the newest models.

Alexa and Google also support many more smart home devices; I can’t control my Bosch coffee machine in Apple Home, and my Ring doorbell and Nest floodlight camera don’t natively work with HomeView. Which is a shame, as HomeView is the best smart display for cameras I’ve tested. Ring devices work almost as well on an Echo Show, but Nest cams are slow on a Nest Hub, and third-party cameras struggle on both. The catch is only a handful of brands work with HomeKit Secure Video — including Aqara, Eve, and some Anker Eufy and TP-Link Tapo models. Apple’s own cameras, made with LG, arrive next year.

Apple is late, but pretty great

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.

For Apple Home users, the only question is how many do you want?

Where it gets complicated is when it tries to be your iPhone. Siri AI and Personal Context bring something no other smart display currently offers. But potentially seeing each other’s texts will be a deal-breaker for some. Too many tasks send you back to your phone, and if Siri AI were a human personal assistant, I’d probably fire her for being too slow.

This is all fixable: the option to turn off some personal features on the HomeView, a few more functional widgets and apps, and better options for displaying shared personal content like calendars could bring HomeView closer to the family computer I’d like it to be.

Today, HomeView offers enough for its price to be a good choice for anyone with an iPhone or iPad who is intrigued by any of its core features — particularly the smart home. For households already deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem and Apple Home, the only real question is how many are you going to buy?

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

• Jennifer Pattison Tuohy