Apple’s $299 HomeView is a late entry, and new Siri has to carry it

The Verge’s senior smart home reviewer has spent a week with the $299 Apple HomeView, Apple’s first smart display (launch coverage), and opened a subscriber Q&A. She tested a tabletop and a wall-mounted version on a kitchen counter, a bedside table, in an office and on a coffee table, and mounted one as an entryway control panel. She used it for cooking, calls and running her smart home, and tried the new Siri AI capabilities.

This is a Q&A post, not the full review, so details are thin. But the choices are telling: a $299 price, two form factors, and one positioned as a wall-mounted smart home control panel. Apple sees this less as a gadget and more as the hub for a household’s devices.

Smart displays have long been a showcase for voice assistants, and voice assistants are where the AI race is landing in the home. Amazon and Google have sold these for years, and the reviewer has tested every one. The hardware isn’t the hard part anymore. The question is whether an assistant understands context, handles follow-ups and actually does things without the stilted command-and-response pattern that made older assistants frustrating. If the AI-upgraded Siri delivers that, a kitchen screen becomes a natural place to use it.

Rivals are pushing assistants into new surfaces too. Google is putting Gemini deeper into phones (Gemini Intelligence) and onto faces with screenless glasses (Gemini glasses). Apple’s launch pitch leaned on privacy, FaceTime and keeping phones off the kitchen counter rather than novel smart home tricks.

The reviewer says her tech-averse husband was a big fan and her teenage daughter less so, with the reason held for the Q&A; we won’t guess. The split itself is telling. Shared home devices have to work for everyone in the house, including people who never asked for them, a different design problem from a personal phone. A wall-mounted control panel also raises the stakes for smart home makers, for whom compatibility with Apple’s ecosystem could matter more.

Any always-listening device in a shared room collects a lot about daily routines. Apple has built its brand on privacy, and buyers will reasonably expect clear answers on what this device hears and keeps. Google’s glasses show how detailed those commitments can get, and where gaps such as voice data handling remain. Apple is late, but late with a strong assistant can still win; the full review will show whether the new Siri is the real thing. More in our generative AI coverage and Google coverage.