I’ve been thinking more about the Apple HomeView, beyond my initial reaction on Bluesky:

Yeah, this about sums up my thoughts on Apple’s HomeView. tl;dr: “Meh”. Slightly longer version: even if this thing were sold here, I can’t see where it would fit in my life — or anybody else’s. https://daringfireball.net/2026/10/homeview_thoughts_and_observations1

The problem is the same one I have with all consumer AI devices: users would have to go to a lot of effort and rearrange their lives to make them legible to the device, for no clear benefit to them.

I have a little TRMNL e-ink device in the kitchen, and I use it to display the weather forecast, the family calendar, and other odds and ends. The weather forecast is fine, but the problem with the calendar is getting the other people in the family to update their own data in there. I regularly have questions like this:

ME: $CHILD, are you not supposed to be getting ready for $ACTIVITY about now?

CHILD: huh?

ME: (deep sigh) the calendar says you are supposed to be at $ACTIVITY in half an hour?

CHILD: oh no, that got moved to Wednesday

ME: could you update the calendar so I’ll know too?

CHILD: fiiiiiine (rolls eyes with such force that I can feel it from the kitchen)

Any AI assistant that bases its recommendations or planning on a data source that is frequently incorrect is off to a bad start — and the AI part is a big part of the attraction here, over something like a normal HomePod.

What else can the HomeView do? Run home automation stuff? I only have a couple of lights in Home, and none of them are in the kitchen, so it doesn’t do much for me there either.

The problem we are left with then is the same one that any device will face if it tries to compete with the phone. The HomeView launch video (apart from the issues that everyone has pointed out with how the power cord is routed) does not show anything people can’t already do on their phones. The problem is always the same: people already have the phones, they like them, and one of the things they like is specifically that they are multi-purpose devices

Everything the iPhone replaced

The iPhone replaced music players, cameras, address books, maps, books, and more, and people specifically like that they can carry one device and have all of those functions in their pocket. Any device that is trying to break that meld up again into dedicated single-purpose devices, let alone stationary ones, has an uphill battle ahead of it.

Apple devices have a slightly easier time because they share backend iCloud services with the iPhone, meaning they can hand context back and forth seamlessly. Even so, the fundamental question has to be why someone would walk over to the HomeView and use that, instead of just whipping out the iPhone they already have in their pocket. This is the same hurdle that every device that is not a phone has to clear — and most of them don’t. The Vision Pro is a perfect example: impossibly cool, yanked from several years in the future by the application of lots of effort and even more money — absolutely nowhere in terms of adoption. Even the products that do succeed do so by carving out their own niche, like the Apple Watch for fitness.

And just to double down on the notion that people would walk over to the HomeView, yet another problem this device has is that it has a screen, but it’s no good for any of the usual things that you would want to use a screen for. Its aspect ratio is completely off for watching both landscape and portrait video, not to mention its area. The size is a problem in itself: even in the ad, when people need to read the screen, they lean in close. This is not a device that you can eyeball from across the room.

Even the multi-user nature of the thing is both cool and a drawback. It’s good that the annoying brother cannot see his sister’s messages, but all of them are hogging the device that, let’s not forget, the dad was using to show his french toast recipe.

Awkward FaceTime

So what is the HomeView for? It’s a cool tech demo, but it is not a coherent product. Everything in the launch video looks great until you think about it for a moment. FaceTime video calling? Sure, assuming you only ever do video calls with Apple users, but now you’re stuck hunched over in front of your own kitchen counter, and you can’t even keep on working around the kitchen while you talk because the people on the call can see you.

In the family we have HomePods, Apple TVs, Watches, iPads, a bunch of AirTags, and of course iPhones. If we can’t find a way to include the HomeView in our lives, I think it might have a real positioning problem. But of course, since this thing is “powered by Apple Intelligence with Siri AI”, it is at least for now unavailable in Europe. The fact that every review mentions the noticeable lag of Apple Intelligence interactions would also become quite painful day-to-day.

  1. Yes, I linked to Daring Fireball. Despite the fact that John Gruber doesn’t mind drinking in a Nazi bar, his instincts and track record on Apple stuff are mostly good — except where the EU is involved. ↩