Apple’s HomeView is my new favorite smart display — but not my daughter’s

November 12, 2026 · by TPW Pipeline

Apple’s first smart display is a gorgeous, speedy smart home hub and a great kitchen companion. It’s when it tries to be the family iPhone that things get awkward.

by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Photography by Hunter McRae for The Verge

Nov 12, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC Jennifer Pattison Tuohy is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.

The HomeView nails everything I want from a smart display. It’s superb at controlling my smart home; it’s an excellent hands-free kitchen companion, a good speaker, and a gorgeous digital photo frame. It’s also the first Apple smart speaker with Siri AI, which is an improvement, if still slow at times. But Apple has fallen into the trap that hampers other smart displays I’ve tested: not content with doing its core functions well, it tries to do more, and that’s where the friction creeps in.
.

The special Apple sauce here is that HomeView is both a smart display everyone in your home can use and an extension of your iPhone or iPad, providing access to your texts, calendar, and reminders when your phone is at home and on the same Wi-Fi network. This makes it a communal device with personal data, and switching between the two is where HomeView stumbles. Clunky authentication checks and being sent to my iPhone too many times interrupt the hands-free experience. Not to mention that I could easily read my 15-year-old daughter’s text messages, and vice versa.

Her verdict? “I’ll just use my iPhone.” But my largely tech-averse husband fell in love with HomeView, and immediately asked for one for his office.

Verge Score

The Good

Speedy smart home control
Excellent guided cooking
Siri AI is helpful in the home
Gorgeous customizable faces
Great sound for its size

The Bad

I could read my daughter’s text messages
Siri AI can be slow
The app / widget situation is funky
Wall mounts cost (a lot) extra

For households deep in the Apple ecosystem, especially those with younger kids who only need access to lights and music and aren’t interested in your text messages, this may be the first smart display your whole family will actually use. But for some, the idea of their texts appearing on a large screen in the middle of the kitchen will send them running.

Apple is late to the game here. Amazon and Google have had smart displays for close to a decade. But the company has debuted with a product that elevates the category in nearly every way — with a few quirks.

Polished and surprisingly small

The HomeView is much smaller than I expected, but it’s a great size for my needs. The star of the device is a 7-inch square touchscreen that displays a gorgeous collection of “faces” that I can customize to fit wherever I put it — the kitchen counter, bedside table, or the wall. It comes in tabletop and wall-mounted versions, and both cost $299, making it Apple’s least expensive screened device after the Apple Watch SE.

The tabletop HomeView fits neatly on my kitchen counter and is light enough to move around for cooking, or when my husband wants to check his schedule over breakfast. The long USB-C cable allows plenty of maneuverability, though after a few days of spinning, it did get a bit twisty.

The screen is clear and bright and looks good in most lighting situations. It’s large enough for reading messages, following a recipe, and video calling while in the kitchen. It’s super responsive, too, showing no lag or stuttering. There’s also a Center Stage camera above the display for taking a FaceTime call while moving around, staying in frame in every corner of my small kitchen. Callers could hear me clearly, although the farther away I was, the more tinny it started to sound.

Sound is very good for the size, with speakers on both the display and in the base of the tabletop model. It’s close to a HomePod Mini 2, not as room-filling, but with a touch more bass. Playing music on the wall-mounted model wasn’t as much of a downgrade as I expected in a device with one less speaker; it was richer and cleaner than on the Echo Show 15 wall-mounted in the same entryway. Siri responded well to voice commands using the device’s microphones, and as long as I remembered to put my phone face down if it was nearby, Siri replied from the correct device.

The one hardware miss is physical buttons: there aren’t any. When I want to adjust the volume quickly or mute Siri, I have to tap the display or pull out my phone.

I have a good spot on my kitchen counter for HomeView, but if you don’t, wall mounting is an option. Apple sent me two mounts for this review, both from Schneider Electric: a USB-C wall mount ($59.99) with a 2-meter / 6.5-foot cable and neat cable management, and a hardwired AC mount ($79.99). There will also be a power-over-Ethernet option for $129.99. The USB-C mount is easy to install: just two screws in the wall, then the display snaps on with magnets so strong that no one will accidentally knock it off the wall.

However, the wall-mounted HomeView ends up costing more than the tabletop version because it’s priced the same but doesn’t include a mount or a power adaptor. You have to buy those separately, and with Apple’s $39 brick, you’re starting at around $400 (until the inevitable third-party options arrive). That’s an extra $100 for a device with fewer speakers. It’s a weird move; Apple should have included a wall mount and adapter or dropped the price.

Superb in the smart home

HomeView nails the smart display essentials: controlling my smart home, monitoring my video doorbell, providing hands-free help in the kitchen, playing music and podcasts, and displaying photos.

Apple put a Thread radio and Matter controller in the HomeView, so it acts as an Apple Home hub, the first with an always-on screen. The Home app is infused throughout the device’s software, giving you multiple ways to control connected smart lights, thermostats, locks, and cameras. This is where HomeView shines. It can connect to any HomeKit or compatible Matter smart device, and it’s impressively fast at controlling them, turning on the lights in my entryway as quickly as a regular light switch. It also offers tons of options for customizing its c

Source: www.theverge.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.

Stocks in this story