Apple has finally built the thing the rumour mill has been promising for years: a smart screen for the kitchen counter. It is called Apple HomeView, it was announced on 13 October, it costs $299 (or £299 in the UK) and it lands on 13 November.
Think of it as a HomePod with a 7-inch face. It plays your music, takes your FaceTime calls, shows you who is at the front door and runs your smart home, all from a little aluminium stand that tilts to whatever angle you are slouching at. The part that matters, though, is the brain. HomeView is built around Siri AI, the properly conversational version of Siri that arrived with iOS 27, and it unlocks your personal stuff by recognising your face.
What Apple HomeView Actually Does
The hardware is very Apple: a 7-inch Liquid Retina display connected to a domed speaker base by a stainless-steel hinge, in silver, starlight, rose pink and space grey, each with a colour-matched cable. The screen does the clever adaptive things you would expect – True Tone, auto brightness – and it changes what it shows depending on how far away you are. Across the room it is big, simple information; walk closer and it fills in the detail.
There is a second, wall-mounted model in space grey and silver that is designed for the hallway or entryway. It fixes to the wall with one of three mounts from Schneider Home, and you can either install it yourself or pay someone to do it for you.
Then there is the face recognition. HomeView knows up to six people in a household, and each one gets their own Home Screen, apps and widgets. The important bit is what stays private: your Messages, FaceTime, Calendar, Reminders and Find My only appear when it has recognised you, and when your paired iPhone or iPad is nearby and has recently been unlocked. Shared photo albums and music are open to everyone, guests included.
“Apple HomeView is designed to be shared by everyone in the home yet feel completely personal to each user,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, in the launch announcement. “It recognizes your face to shift from a household screen to your own experience, fills the room with incredible sound, keeps you connected to the people who matter most with FaceTime, and makes it easy to control your smart home. And it’s powered by Apple Intelligence with Siri AI at its core, drawing on personal context from your iPhone to help you find what you need and get more done, all while keeping everyone’s information private and secure.”
Siri AI Is The Real Launch Here
Apple describes Siri AI as “an entirely new version of Siri that’s profoundly more capable and conversational”, with broad world knowledge, onscreen awareness and, when it is paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone or iPad, access to your personal context. In practice that means asking it about your calendar, your messages or your Apple Music playlists and getting an answer that is about you rather than a web search.
Conversations sync privately through iCloud, so something you start asking HomeView in the kitchen can be picked up in the Siri app on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch or Vision Pro. You can also tune the expressiveness and pace of Siri’s voice on your phone and have that carry over to the screen, although the customisable voices need a recent iPhone (Duo, 18 Pro, Air or 17 Pro) or an M4 iPad with at least 12GB of memory, and they are English-only for now.
Worth knowing: Siri AI ships in beta on HomeView, and Apple says some of the server-side Apple Intelligence features come with daily usage limits, with expanded access to be sold “for a fee in the future”. So the free version has a ceiling.
The Fun Stuff
HomeView has “faces”, in the Apple Watch sense. The Photos face turns a shared album into a living photo frame with Portrait-style depth, so your sister in Sydney can drop pictures straight onto your kitchen counter. The Flow face reacts to movement in the room like a piece of interactive art. And there is a Snoopy face, with animations that change with the weather, the time of day, sporting fixtures and holidays, which is frankly the one we will be using.
It plays Apple Music with animated album art and lyrics, plus Podcasts, Apple News, Apple TV and compatible third-party apps, and it slots into multiroom audio alongside HomePods and AirPlay speakers. Hold your iPhone in front of the screen and whatever you were listening to on the walk home hands off to the kitchen.
In the kitchen specifically, HomeView will convert a recipe from the web into step-by-step instructions with hands-free timers and ingredient tracking. Intercom lets you broadcast to one room or the whole house, including everyone’s iPhones and Apple Watches, which is going to be used almost exclusively to shout “dinner”.
The Smart Home Dashboard
This is where HomeView is most obviously aimed at the Echo Show crowd. The Home Modular face gives you one-tap access to your favourite accessories; the Home Camera face can stream up to nine feeds at once. With an eligible iCloud+ plan it will recognise familiar faces, pets, packages and vehicles on compatible cameras, with end-to-end encryption, and it can write a text description of a HomeKit Secure Video clip so you do not have to watch it. It also listens for smoke and carbon monoxide alarms and pings your iPhone or Apple Watch if it hears one.
Apple is launching a matching Apple Home Collection – cameras, thermostats and a lock made with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric – from December, with some accessories following in early 2027. Existing Works with Apple Home and Matter devices are supported too.
Privacy, Because It Is Apple
The camera and microphone data is processed inside what Apple calls Secure Exclaves on the A18 chip: isolated runtimes that the HomeView software, apps, the user and Apple itself cannot access. Siri requests run on-device or through Private Cloud Compute, where Apple says the data is neither stored nor made accessible to anyone. Apple also says Siri “remains the world’s most private digital assistant”, which is a company claim rather than an independent one, but the architecture is more than most rivals offer.
Price, UK Availability And The EU
Apple HomeView and HomeView (Wall Mounted) are both $299 in the US. UK pre-orders opened on 13 October through apple.com and the Apple Store app, with availability from Friday 13 November. The wall mounts are $59.95 for the USB-C version and $79.95 for the AC-wired one, with a Power over Ethernet option at $129.95 arriving in early 2027. Siri AI on HomeView is English-only at launch, covering the UK, US, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Singapore and South Africa.
HomeView is not on sale in the European Union at all, because Siri AI is still unavailable in iOS there. Apple says it is “working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward”. If you are reading this from Paris or Berlin, the kitchen upgrade will have to wait.
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