2026-11-12 22:00:00
I’ve wanted a product like the Apple HomeView for years now. After spending a lot of time with various personal assistant “smart speakers” in my kitchen—some with screens—I’ve never been more certain about the potential of the product category or more disappointed in the reality.
I’ve spent years with Google and Amazon displays in my kitchen, and was never really satisfied. They were slow, their screens weren’t very good, they didn’t integrate well with my home, and Amazon would not stop opting me into new forms of distracting marketing messages.
The HomeView, which has been standing like a tiny, cute sentinel atop the bar in my kitchen for the last week, improves on those other devices in innumerable ways. It’s got a great 7-inch square screen, it’s fast and responsive, and it fits into my home ecosystem.
While it is far from perfect, the HomeView is great at some jobs, and pretty good at others. Where it falls short, it does so while hinting at some great potential that could be addressed with software updates.
The Echo Show was sent back long ago. The Google Nest Home is unplugged and relocated to the tech recycling pile. The HomeView? It’s here to stay, at least in my kitchen.
The $299 HomeView is a slab-like device that’s 5.73 inches square and 0.39 inches thick, kind of like a tiny, square iPad. It comes mounted either on a perforated cylindrical aluminum base or (optionally) sans base, ready for wall mounting via a series of optional, extra-cost mounts. I tested one with the aluminum base, which makes it look like an extremely tiny iMac.
The hardware is solid and coherent, the screen a pleasure to touch and tilt. In terms of software, though, the HomeView feels like a peculiar amalgam of numerous other Apple products. Its main interface makes it look a bit like an overgrown Apple Watch, complete with customizable “faces” that sometimes resemble actual Apple Watch faces and other times resemble the iPhone’s StandBy mode. Its apps sometimes feel like they’ve escaped from the iPhone or iPad, but at other times they feel more like they’re right off of an Apple TV. And still other “apps” resemble what you might see in your car, since Apple is also using CarPlay to project interfaces from apps running on your iPhone.
Given the fact that this product’s tech stack feels like it was created in a blender, it’s remarkable that it holds together as well as it does—but there are still places where the seams show.
Let’s start with the HomeView’s default “faces”, which are what the device defaults to when it’s not actively being used. Faces are a series of individual pages arranged in a strip that you can swipe through from side to side, very much reminiscent of how Apple Watch faces used to work. Tap and hold on a face and you’ll enter editing mode, where you can customize a face using an interface that is right out of watchOS or the new editable StandBy mode on the iPhone Duo.
Some faces feel very much like they’re from the Apple Watch—simple clocks with the occasional widget that’s a single line of text very much in the style of a watch complication or a simple iPhone lock screen widget. There’s also a pretty animated clock and a lighthearted clock face featuring Snoopy animations. My favorite is undoubtedly the Photos face, which lets you choose a set of items, albums, or collections from your iCloud Photos library, all of which will be shuffled through, very much like an iPhone lock screen or the Apple Watch’s widget face. It is delightful to walk into my kitchen and see a picture of my family.
Other HomeView faces are much more complex, offering dashboards to control Apple Home items, a live view of a HomeKit-compatible security camera, or even a custom Modular face you can populate with widgets from the device or from your iPhone.
In many ways, these faces are the core of the product. They are the images you want to look at, yes, but they’re also the dashboards you can use to quickly interact with items in your home. And this is where HomeView’s software comes up a bit short.
The layouts aren’t flexible enough, for starters. Simple faces like photos work a charm, but more complex faces are kind of a mess. I’d like more options about what items to place on a face, and where to place them. The HomeView seems like the perfect device to use as a control panel for my smart-home devices, but the Home Modular face is strangely limited. For example, I can only use it to turn dimmable lights on to full brightness. To dim a light, I have to open the Home app, select the item in there, and then swipe up or down on the dimming interface.
It’s great that you can view iPhone widgets on the HomeView just as you can on the Mac, but it’s a bit frustrating that it will only display the small square widget style. Presumably because of the Apple Watch roots of some of these faces, there’s a surprising lack of digital clocks. In fact, in some face views you can create a face featuring a clock, but if you delete it, you can’t add it back. I admit to being frequently baffled about what I was able to add and customize, and what I wasn’t, when trying to build faces.
All of this is really unsurprising when you consider that this is an interface welded together from disparate parts of other Apple products, but it feels like it needs some more tweaking and attention for it to fully come together.
Swipe up from the bottom of any face and you’ll find yourself in the HomeView’s app view, its equivalent of an iOS home screen. You can customize this view to drag icons around and even add widgets. This screen is designed to be personalized to you—it shows your picture and welcomes you by name, all because you train the HomeView on your appearance (via its included webcam) as well as voice, and link it to your iPhone, which needs to be on the same wi-fi network and have been unlocked relatively recently. HomeView uses all of those hints to decide if it’s you who’s swiping up. If it doesn’t recognize you, it’ll put up a more generic interface without any linked iPhone apps.
There are some “real” Apple apps on the HomeView: Music, Safari, Home, FaceTime, Weather, Find My, Calendar, Messages, Timers/Alarms/World Clock (all escapees from the Clock app), Reminders, and Settings all offer functionality that’s not far from what you’d get on an iPhone.
Also appearing in the same app view are things that look like apps but are not the same as the onboard apps that every person can see. These are items pushed from your paired iPhone, and they’re actually the CarPlay extensions of iPhone apps (running on the paired iPhone of the person HomeView has determined is using the device, via face/voice/device recognition) in CarPlay’s audio and video categories. So, for example, Instapaper appears on my HomeView—but only its CarPlay interface, which offers to read stories out loud. The New York Times app is there, but just to play its podcasts. Libby will offer me audiobooks. Overcast and Apple Podcasts will play my podcasts, and the Apple TV app will play TV shows (in an extreme letterbox on this square screen).
Using CarPlay to let iPhone apps run (in a way) on HomeView was a stroke of genius. The feature works pretty well and it allows Apple not to clutter the device with an App Store or force developers to write new versions of their apps for yet another platform. That said, I do wonder if there might be a better path forward for HomeView that does allow developers to write more full-featured apps if they wish, either via CarPlay (outside of the audio and video categories) or by allowing iPhone apps to install a HomeView version of themselves, which is how most Apple Watch apps are installed. (There are already reports that Apple may be adding support for AI voice assistants via CarPlay in the future.)
Or consider recipe apps as a category. They don’t really make sense in CarPlay, but they sure do on this device. Apple has built a clever recipe view into Safari on the HomeView that displays recipes with clear ingredients lists, cooking steps, and even hyperlinks to quickly create timers. Unfortunately, I keep all my recipes in Mela, a very nice app that seemingly is unavailable on HomeView. Maybe recipe app developers will find a way to get their content on the HomeView, perhaps via the web, but it would be nice if they had the option to somehow bring their users’ data to this device directly. The clever CarPlay hack only goes so far.
If Mark Gurman’s reports are to be believed, Apple has had the HomeView hardware ready for quite a while, but felt it was unable to release it because of the 2024 failure to launch of numerous Apple Intelligence features. Now that Siri AI has arrived, HomeView is finally ready to blast into stores.
Powered by an A18 processor, the HomeView supports Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, and when paired with an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone or iPad, it’s capable of using that device to search through your personal context to answer your questions. Just as is true everywhere else, when Siri AI works on the HomeView it can be spectacular. I have asked targeted questions about items in long-ago Messages threads or on my Calendar and it has managed to unearth the answer without me having to do a lick of work. It’s vastly better at general world-knowledge questions than the old Siri. That said, Siri AI isn’t as reliable as it should be, both in general and on the HomeView. Sometimes it just seems to go off in its own world and not respond, or respond accurately. Other times, it works just as advertised. Apple’s challenge (and this goes way beyond the HomePod) is to make Siri AI work more reliably.
I also had some bizarre, HomeView-specific issues with Siri AI. After I paired my iPhone with the HomeView, every command I gave it to play music was instead routed to Broadcasts, a third-party app on my iPhone (with a CarPlay connector, to be fair) that I use to stream live podcasts. I had to delete Broadcasts entirely in order to get Music playback to work properly. Once I did that, everything settled down, but I still have no idea why Siri got so hung up on an app that couldn’t offer albums or playlists or anything else I was looking for.
But again, when it works, it’s great. I was able to ask the HomeView what that painting is “where the guy from the French Revolution is dead in a bathtub,” and not only did it answer correctly that it’s Jacques-Louis David’s “Death of Marat,” it pulled up the painting for me to look at on the HomeView screen. My HomePod could never.
Beyond Siri, the HomeView is pretty versatile as a media device. It will play audio itself, via its speakers and (on the model with the cylindrical base) an extra downward-pointing woofer. It sounds… fine? It sounds like a kitchen speaker. The HomeView’s speaker is not going to win any awards from audiophiles, but it’s absolutely good enough to do the job when you’re making pizza, drinking some wine, and rocking out to the hits of the ’80s. (Ask me how I know.)
HomeView also integrates well with AirPlay, so if you do have other speakers, HomeView can play to them, too. And it’s an AirPlay receiver, so if you want to play audio or video on the HomeView that originated on another Apple device, it’s up to the challenge. (This is useful if you want to, for example, watch a college football game on YouTube TV, which does not have a video CarPlay app. Of course, you’ll be watching it extremely letterboxed, but it does work!)
The star of HomeView’s playback versatility may be its support for Handoff, which is extremely present on this device, perhaps even to a fault. Get an iPhone close to a HomeView and both devices will show a ripple on screen, and your phone will ask you to either throw whatever you’re consuming over to the HomeView, or suck back whatever is playing on the HomeView onto your iPhone. I used this feature to toss music, podcasts, AirPlay from random apps, and even web pages (via Safari) from my iPhone to the HomeView, and pulled music I was listening to on the HomeView back to my iPhone. My only real complaint is that it kept triggering when I came even vaguely close to the HomeView with my phone, though it was easy to just opt not to transfer anything either way.
There were some other quirks. The HomeView does FaceTime, and does a pretty nice job thanks to its 12-megapixel Center Stage camera. But it struggled to connect to a multi-person FaceTime call when I handed it off from an iPhone, and after a brief two-person interlude, the call failed completely. Occasionally attempts to play audio via a CarPlay-based app (Overcast) would claim to succeed, but no audio would be audible until I switched to playing audio from a different app (Music) and then moved back to Overcast.
I’m willing to chalk all this up to this essentially being the 1.0 version of the HomeView software experience, as well as a side effect of Apple’s ambition in fusing together so many disparate aspects of its ecosystem in this product. It’s all a little bit messy.
So after years of waiting for Apple’s take on the smart speaker, was it worth it? To be clear, I would rather have not waited this long—and I’m pretty sure that’s true of Apple, as well. But here we are, and at $299 for the self-standing model, it strikes me as being a pretty great deal if you’re someone who is immersed in the Apple ecosystem and wants a little helper to answer questions, show pictures, play music, control devices, and otherwise just be a nice companion in the kitchen (or wherever else you might want one in your home).
The wall-mounted model, while also priced at $299, is a worse deal—in that it lacks a woofer and requires an additional purchase of a mounting assembly, meaning it’s got fewer features and ultimately costs more. I’m a little baffled why Apple didn’t offer a basic wall mount for that price, but it didn’t, and it makes that product a worse deal. (That said, I’m still interested in buying one, as I’d really like to put a panel on my wall that allows anyone in my home to control my smart-home stuff even when I’m not around.)
My real issues with the HomeView aren’t with its hardware, which is solid and functional and kind of adorable when spotted from any angle other than screen-on. It’s with the software, which has an impressive array of features welded on from various other Apple products—but can really show the seams. Apple’s use of CarPlay to support media apps on the device is clever, but it’s a little buggy and the device still feels limited. The recipe browser is cute, but I have all my recipes in an app that’s entirely walled off from the HomeView, and that’s a bummer.
The product also really lives or dies by its “faces,” and the current ones are either pretty-but-not-useful or useful-but-not-pretty. (I can’t believe you can’t dim a light from a face screen.)
Still, solid hardware and a decent array of services are a start. HomeView (and its successors) has a real chance to fill the homes of avid iPhone users everywhere, so long as Apple works to improve the flexibility and polish of its software.
2026-11-12 03:00:00
Flying home robots like Amazon’s Ring drones, how close we’d let AI agents like Claude Duet and Muse get, the body trackers we wear and what we’ve learned, and our thoughts on the whole Nvidia thing.
2026-11-12 02:00:00
I have never owned an Apple Watch. And apart from trying a watch on here and there for demo purposes, I’ve never really worn an Apple Watch, not for an extended period anyhow. And up until the Apple Watch Series 12’s unveiling earlier this year, I expected that to remain the case for years to come.
This is no knock specifically on the Apple Watch, incidentally. I could say the same thing for a Galaxy Watch, a Pixel Watch, even just a regular old wristwatch. I don’t like wearing things on my wrist. Even if you slap one of those ID bands you sometimes wear at concerts or other public venues on me, I’ll spend half my time mindlessly pawing at my arm, trying to shake off whatever’s on my wrist.
How committed am I to the No Wristwatches Ever bit? For much of my life, I carried around a pocket watch, and it was only partially because I was adopting an affectation. Once the iPhone came along, providing a slightly more advanced clock to carry around in my pocket, the pocket watch went back into the dresser drawer for good.
So why is the Apple Watch Series 12 finally the device that’s going to break this anti-watch stance I’ve adopted? Well, I may not like wearing things on my wrist, but I dislike not being able to hear things even more. And the Audio Intelligence features on the latest Apple smartwatches seem like a promising solution for problems caused by my dodgy hearing.
As a gentleman whose odometer passed the half-century mark a few years back, I’m in relatively good shape in most areas. Unfortunately, those areas do not include my hearing, which has been in steady decline since my 20s. Things aren’t so bad that I need a hearing aid to go about my business, but depending on the setting, making heads or tails out of what someone is saying can prove challenging.
When my wife tries to tell me something from an adjoining room, there’s a 50-50 chance I’ll have no idea what she’s talking about. If you’re speaking while facing away from me, you might as well be in a cone of silence. And in noisy settings — a crowded restaurant, a busy commuter train or heaven forfend a concert — I’m going to do a lot of nodding politely and smiling to cover for the fact that I haven’t heard a word anybody’s said.
It’s not the worst affliction to have in the world. There’s an out-of-kilter signal-to-noise ratio out there in the world, and not being able to hear a lot of it filters out much of the latter. But yes, there are times I need to hear what’s being said to me and plaintively asking “Would you mind repeating that?” only helps so much. That’s where the Apple Watch Series 12 and its Live Rewind feature come into play.
Announced by Apple at its September product event, Live Rewind is a feature coming via the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 that provides a transcript of anything that someone has said to you in the last 15 seconds. You activate the feature by double-pressing the Digital Crown on your watch; you also have to enable the feature in the Watch app by selecting Siri and tapping Live Rewind followed by turning on the Double Click Digital Crown Setting.
With an Apple Watch 12 on my wrist — the Ultra’s too fancy for the likes of me — I can glance at the display when I didn’t quite make out all the details of what someone just told me. Didn’t quite catch what the nurse at my mom’s care facility just said? Missed the particulars of some instructions my wife gave me as she was heading out the door? Did the bartender rattle off the beers on tap just a bit too quickly? Now the Apple Watch and Live Rewind hold the answers to life’s mysteries.
Live Rewind, which is part of the watchOS 27.3 beta, is just one of the Audio Intelligence features that take advantage of the built-in microphone and S11 chip found on Apple’s latest watches. Siri Recap, also part of the watchOS 27.3 beta, can provide you with AI-generated summaries of conversations you’ve had during the day. Sound Recognition and Music Recognition are already part of watchOS 27 — the former notifies you when it detects alarms, doorbells and sirens while the latter is essentially Shazam on your wrist. All four features are a boon to those of us who don’t hear as well as we used to.
Naturally, the idea that the latest Apple Watches are always listening and taking notes is going to raise some concerns — legitimate ones, too. The people whose conversations get summarized by Siri Recap or whose words are being repeated back to you via Live Rewind didn’t consent to any of this, so a very strong argument could be made that these features are crowding in on people’s privacy.
Apple’s response — both in an Audio Intelligence support document and a white paper on privacy that goes into even greater detail — essentially boils down to the fact that nothing’s being recorded or stored. Instead, the audio is routed through a Secure Exclave on the S11 chip, where it can’t be accessed by anything else, including Apple.
Live Rewind and Sound Recognition do all their processing on device. Siri Recap is sending detected summaries of transcribed audio off-device, but it’s doing that through Private Cloud Compute to maintain privacy. And what you’re getting back isn’t a word-for-word transcript but more of a summary meant to refresh your memory.
That’s all well and good for you and your privacy, but what about the people around you? Live Rewind plays a chime when it’s activated to cut down on the chance of surreptitious listening. Apple also says the feature is supposed to focus on conversations you’re involved in, not eavesdrop on ones taking place around you. And there’s no speaker identification or attribution, though if names come up in a conversation, they’ll be reflected in the summary.
Most of those explanations work for me, to the point where I’d be comfortable that Live Rewind isn’t infringing on people’s privacy. Still, I recognize that technology designed for benign uses can be exploited by bad actors, so that’s something Apple — and Apple Watch owners — are going to have to remain vigilant about.
Of course, all this Apple Watch talk ignores that there’s an alternative out there for those of us with hearing issues — a pair of AirPods Pro earbuds can double as a hearing aid, at least if you’ve got the second or third generation on hand. A Live Listen feature turns your iPhone into a microphone to help you better hear conversations, and it works with a wider variety of AirPods, too.
I’m not quite sure that’s the best solution for my particular needs. For starters, I’d have to upgrade to the AirPods Pro 3, and while that $249 outlay is cheaper than an Apple Watch Series 12, it’s not that much cheaper when you factor in the other capabilities a smartwatch offers. Plus, the hearing aid feature would require me to wear AirPods more consistently, something that strikes me as awkward when I’m out on a social call. Say what you will about wearing something on your wrist — and I’ve said plenty — but at least it feels more natural than keeping your AirPods on during a fancy dinner.
So am I ready to run out and get an Apple Watch now that it has a feature I find truly useful? Not quite — but I’m closer to getting a smartwatch than I ever have been, and Live Rewind certainly is helping me get there. And that’s kind of how technology works.
We don’t buy gadgets and gizmos just to own the latest thing — we buy them because they solve a need in our lives. For a lot of people, the Apple Watch became a more attractive option as Apple built out the health and fitness tracking features that made this device more than just a wrist-sized version of the iPhone. Those users wanted a better picture of their health, and Apple managed to produce something that provided exactly that.
Up until now, I could take or leave those health-monitoring capabilities. But a device that helps me understand what people are saying to me in a noisy room, that’s a watch feature whose time has finally come.
2026-11-11 23:23:56
When I was in Los Angeles getting briefed on the MacBook Pro with PROLED, I asked Apple representatives directly about how they made the Apple logo on the back glow again, given that OLED displays don’t leak light out the back.
They jokingly told me it was “magic,” said that it was actually hard work to do, and refused to get into details.
Okay, I said—I’ll just wait for iFixit to tear one apart.
On old MacBooks, light from the LCD backlight shone through an apple-shaped window in the lid. But the PROLED’s pixels make their own light. So, yes, Apple waited until the first MacBook Pro without a backlight to bring back the backlit logo.
Of course we had to get inside.
The result is pretty much what you’d expect:
Under a taped patch in the middle we found four LEDs, all in a strip along one edge. The light hits a reflective layer and passes through a diffuser, turning four little points of light into one evenly glowing apple. The logo itself has a mirror-like coating that looks shiny with the lights off.
(There’s also a YouTube video of the teardown.)
My favorite aspect of this new easter egg of a feature is that with the light off, you can’t tell that it’s the new MacBook Pro. It doesn’t look like the white logo cut-out of years past; it looks exactly like the mirrored metallic logos of the last decade. Except… then it lights up. Magic indeed.
2026-11-11 23:13:39
In a long-overdue move, Apple has brought down the hammer on its “Apple Support Community” forum. As Joe Rossignol at MacRumors reports:
Apple’s full notice added to the site: “The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state. You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site. We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.”
It is the end of an era. Apple offered an online discussion forum for user-to-user technical support since 1998, when it launched the Apple Tech Exchange. The forums were renamed to Apple Discussions in 2000, and then to the Apple Support Communities in 2011, before taking on their current Apple Support Community name in 2022.
Apple informed MacRumors that it decided to sunset the Apple Support Community after a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs.
These message boards were an embarrassment for Apple. Not only were they very much out of step with what the web has come to be over the last couple of decades, but their presence under an apple.com domain meant that they ranked highly in search and were perceived by the general public as being official in some way.
But they weren’t, nor were they helpful. They were full of people asking questions and not getting useful answers, with many responses given by users who were more motivated to gain karma in the forum’s user-ranking system than to help. I can’t tell you how many times I visited these forums while trying to track down the answer to a peculiar quirk or bug, only to find the (legitimate!) question being shut down by an officious high-ranking know-it-all who didn’t actually understand what was being asked and couldn’t provide a useful answer.
Good riddance.
2026-11-11 18:00:00
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Apple rushes the iPod to the finish line and then introduces it to an uneasy and uncertain world.
