Apple's first dedicated smart home hub, the HomeView, is on track to ship in mid-November.
The HomeView was unveiled at Apple's "Welcome home" event on October 13, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports in his Power On newsletter that it will follow the new Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini, which hit stores October 30. The device pairs a display with an A18 chip and comes in two forms: a countertop model with a metal speaker base in space gray, silver, starlight, and pink, and a wall-mounted version limited to space gray and silver. It's built around voice control, Siri specifically, though the screen does accept touch input. Gurman says it will sound better than the new HomePod mini, but it runs only a limited set of Apple's own apps, with no App Store at all.
That last detail is the real story. Amazon and Google built their smart displays around third-party skills and widgets; Apple is choosing to keep HomeView closed, at least at launch, which tells you this is meant as a Siri terminal first and a general-purpose screen a distant second. The name itself gives it away: a thing you glance at and talk to, not a thing you tap through.
Apple has tried a stationary home hub before, informally, by propping up old iPads. HomeView is the first time it's building the hardware on purpose - whether that's enough to catch up to Echo Show and Nest Hub, which have had years and an app ecosystem's head start, is the open question.