Apple HomeView review: Smart display for your home

The HomeView is Apple’s first smart display. It’s Apple’s answer to devices like the Amazon Echo Show and Google Nest Hub, and a sign that the company wants to take smart homes more seriously. Like those devices, HomeView aims to be the centre of your smart home. But even if your home isn’t very smart (like mine), the HomeView, at S$399, can still find a place in your dwelling. 

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Design

As far as smart displays go, the HomeView makes a strong case for being the most stylish. Essentially, it’s a small display attached to a round aluminium base. It has a strong resemblance to the iconic iMac G4, which is no bad thing. 

Measuring just 14.5cm wide and about 17cm tall, it’s a compact little thing too. The first time I laid eyes on it, I was surprised by how small it was. It also comes in four colours: Silver, Starlight, Rose Pink, and Space Gray. The colours are quite mild. Starlight, in particular, is very close to Silver. At any rate, the unobtrusive colours, coupled with the HomeView’s diminutive size, should make it an easy fit into most people’s homes.

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The screen is a 7-inch Liquid Retina display. It uses an IPS LCD panel and has a square aspect ratio and a resolution of 1088 x 1088 pixels. Its pixel density count is 220 pixels per inch. It’s a decent display that looks good when viewed in isolation, but it’s noticeably off the mark in terms of sharpness and colours compared to the ones you find on modern iPhones, iPads, and Macs. 

Maximum brightness is 500 nits, and since the HomeView lives indoors, I’ve found it to be sufficient. Apple is keen to point out that this display can go down to just 0.3 nits, which it said was a conscious design decision because it wanted the HomeView to also work as a bedside accessory. Indeed, I didn’t find it distracting to sleep with, and this is coming from someone who loves blackout curtains and sleeping in absolute darkness.

The display attaches to the base via a stubby polished stainless steel arm that lets users adjust the amount of tilt on the screen. Though the amount of tilt adjustment is sufficient, it’ll be great if it could also adjust for height. 

You can also get the HomeView as a wall-mounted unit, but in that form it loses the base (which houses speakers), and you’ll need a separate power solution for it. It makes for a very clean setup, but it’s probably best for homes that are being built or in the midst of renovation. 

How does it sound?

The primary use case of the HomeView surely should be as a speaker, and it excels in that role. The display houses two custom full-range drivers, while within the base is a custom down-firing woofer. For something this small, it’s incredible how loud it gets. It’s surely enough to fill the living rooms of most apartments, and will have no problems providing music for parties and get-togethers.

The sound signature of the HomeView should be familiar to anyone who has owned AirPods. It’s a slightly V-shaped sound with elevated bass, slightly recessed mids, and somewhat neutral treble. The bass response is impressive for its size. It’s impactful and clean as long as you stay sensible with the volume control. Go past 80% volume, however, and distortion starts creep in, and the bass response has a tendency to become loose.

Clarity is good, and there’s palpable texture and detail to the sound. For something of this size and price, the audio performance is remarkable. If I had to rank Apple’s smart speakers, I’d say the HomeView performs better than HomePod mini 2, but isn’t up there yet with the larger and pricier HomePods.

What can it do and how does it work?

The HomeView is powered by the A18 chip and runs a software that is best described as a mix of iOS and watchOS. It’s a whole new thing, and yet if you have an iPhone or Apple Watch, you’ll know instinctively how to navigate it, get to menus, and customise it. 

One thing I must point out is that it doesn’t have its own App Store, so there’s no way to manually install apps on it. Instead, apps that support the CarPlay framework will automatically appear on HomeView. This might be tricky if you rely on third-party apps. Spotify, for instance, is available, but there’s no Netflix or Messenger, just to name a few.

The screen defaults to “faces” when you are not interacting with it, and these faces resemble the faces you get on Apple Watches. There are 10 to choose from, and they are all customisable to varying extents.

My favourites are Photos, Weather, and Modular. Photos turns the HomeView into a giant high-quality digital photo frame, while Weather – you know – shows weather info. Modular houses four customisable widgets which you can change to show the information you want. I find it useful to show the world time, and the weather forecast of the place I’m going to be travelling to. 

Apple primarily markets the HomeView as a device to manage your smart home, and indeed, if you have lots of HomeKit-compatible devices, it can be helpful in managing and controlling them. Some will point out that you can already do that on your iPhone or iPad, and they would be right, but the iPhone and iPad are personal devices; the HomeView is handy because it lets everyone in the home access and control these devices. 

With Siri AI, HomeView can also act as your personal assistant. Apart from managing and controlling your smart home devices, you can use Siri AI to recall messages, create reminders, set timers, create notes, and a lot more. I know Siri hasn’t had the best couple of years, but it’s really quite good and useful now. As an example, I was able to get it to look through all my hotel bookings and create a note that lists all of their check-in and check-out times.

Since Siri now understands personal context, privacy is naturally a major concern. Happily, there are protections put in place. You can register up to 6 users on the HomeView, and for any query that requires access to personal information, HomeView must detect the user either by face or voice. Additionally, their paired iPhone or iPad must have been recently unlocked and connected to the same Wi-Fi network. I put this to the test by asking my kid to open my Messages app on the HomeView after I had just accessed it and walked away. She couldn’t.

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What else can it do?

The HomeView has a special recipe mode that can help with cooking. If you open a recipe on Safari, you can hand it off to the HomeView; it will take that recipe and break it down with step-by-step instructions. Additionally, if the instructions require a timer, it can even generate it for you. Finally, since Siri AI now has world knowledge, you can ask it to suggest substitute ingredients if you are missing any. I don’t cook, but I can see how all of this can be helpful.

So, to sum things up, here’s a list of things HomeView can do:

• Manage HomeKit-compatible smart home accessories
• AI assistant
• Music and podcast player
• Cooking assisannt
• Digital photo frame
• Watching videos
• Facetime calls 
• Timers and alarms
• Intercom to other Apple home devices
• The 12MP Centre Stage camera can be used for fit checks
• Sound recognition lets HomeView detect alarms when you are away
• Built-in temperature and humidity sensors can be paired with air-conditioning and dehumidifiers

Final thoughts and buying advice

The HomeView is an attractive, interesting ,and competent device, but it’s also one that doesn’t appear to have a very clear or strong use case. 

Anyone who has tried setting up smart home devices and creating scenarios and automations will know that it’s not a straightforward task. It involves trial and error, and if they already have a system that works, I cannot see them giving that up to accommodate the HomeView in their smart home setup. For smart homes, the HomeView only makes sense if you are already deep into the Apple Home ecosystem.

And if you don’t have smart devices around the house, what can you use the HomeView for? It certainly has many uses, but none of them are particularly compelling. It can be used as a speaker for music or podcasts, but how many people will pick it over the cheaper and smaller HomePod mini 2 or the better-sounding standard HomePod? It can play videos, but why gather around it to watch on its small square screen when a TV exists? You can use it for FaceTime calls, but then you could also do the same on your iPhone, iPad, or even Mac. For most use cases I can think of, most people will have something else that does a better job.

It’s not without its merits, but they are arguably pretty niche. I like it by my bed, where it can double up as a speaker to unwind before I sleep and an alarm clock to help me wake up. It’s an excellent digital photo frame too. I also think it makes for a cool desk accessory, or simply a piece of home decor. S$399 is probably a lot to pay for any of these things, but then homes are deeply personal and private places, and if the HomeView can spice up your living space and brighten your mood, who am I to tell you otherwise? 

Availability and pricing

The Apple HomeView costs S$399 and is available to pre-order now. It goes on sale tomorrow. You can find it on Lazada, Shopee, and the Apple Online Store.