Apple wants a screen in your kitchen, and it's betting Siri can make that useful.
Apple announced HomeView, a 7-inch touchscreen hub built into a speaker base, controlled by a face-recognizing camera and Siri AI. The tabletop version has an aluminum frame, a tilting stainless-steel hinge, and a domed base packing two full-range drivers, a down-firing woofer, and two passive radiators for what Apple calls room-filling Spatial Audio. It runs Apple Intelligence, pulling context from a paired iPhone's Messages, Calendar, and Apple Music to answer requests, and syncs Siri conversations across devices. It also handles FaceTime calls with Center Stage, Intercom messages between family members, and multiroom audio, with a Handoff gesture that picks up iPhone audio when the phone is set down nearby. A wall-mounted version, mountable via Schneider Home hardware, ships in fewer colors and uses separate on-wall audio tuning.
HomeView puts Apple squarely into a category Amazon's Echo Show and Google's Nest Hub Max have occupied for years, but with a twist: Apple is leaning on the long-delayed, more conversational Siri AI it first promised back in 2024 to set the hardware apart. If that upgraded Siri actually works as advertised, HomeView becomes the first real household-wide showcase for it, well beyond a single iPhone.
Apple's own pitch says the hub should feel personal to everyone and private to each person at once. That's a neat trick if it holds up, but it's also exactly the kind of line that reads well in a press release and gets tested the first time three family members argue with it about whose calendar it just read aloud.