Last week, Apple launched the HomeView, its first smart home screen thing, which is affixed to a speaker and rather obviously meant to compete with Amazon’s Echo Show and Google’s Nest Hub. The HomeView is basically Apple realizing it needs to be in this space and not cede it to its competitors without a fight.
But it’s not a perfect product. It seems to be designed to be appealing only to people who have all of the other Apple products, and somehow didn’t buy any smart home devices from other ecosystems. That niche probably does exist and may be larger than you’d expect, but the HomeView has some rather obvious shortcomings, including the fact that its screen doesn’t swivel. According to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple seems very aware of that and is already working on an improved version.
This HomeView might launch as the HomeView Ultra or Max or 360 and will have a larger 9-inch screen affixed to a robotic arm, hence solving the lack of swivel of the current HomeView. Interestingly, Gurman says the HomeView is a pretty old product, which was literally sitting in warehouses for “the better part of a year”, just “waiting for the software to catch up”.
That explains its huge bezels, A18 chip, and 8GB of RAM. It’s said to have been delayed first until spring 2025, then summer, then fall, then spring this year, and so on. The 9-inch HomeView is currently planned for release in 2027 or 2028, according to Gurman, and it’s codenamed J595. It will identify who’s speaking to it and the screen will follow you around thanks to its metal arm. It will unsurprisingly be more expensive than the HomeView, but by how much isn’t clear yet.
