The $299 HomeView Apple announced last week may just be the opening act. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is developing a higher-end HomeView — codenamed J595 — that puts a roughly 9-inch display on a motorized robotic arm, letting the screen swivel a full 360 degrees to face whoever's speaking.
The pitch is a screen that comes to you instead of the other way around. Gurman writes that the device will use voice recognition to identify who's talking and automatically turn toward that person — a mechanical answer to the complaint that the current HomeView's screen only tilts, so families gathered around a table have to physically drag it into position. Think Center Stage, the camera trick that follows people around on FaceTime calls, except the whole screen moves.
What matters here is that this isn't a replacement for the $299 model — Gurman says it sits above it as a premium tier, like iPhone and iPhone Pro. No price or chip was reported, but it won't cost $299, and it isn't close: the target window is 2027 or 2028.
The longer story is that J595 has been haunting Apple's roadmap for a while. Gurman first reported the codename back in April 2025, distinguishing the arm-less base HomeView from a later version with robotics. AppleInsider noted that the concept traces further back — to 2024 reports that Apple redirected its post-car robotics ambitions into the home with an iPad-like display on a robot arm. John Gruber piled on this weekend, pointing out that The Information heard about J595 back in January and claimed it would ship "as soon as this spring" — wrongly, it turns out; the actual launch is years out.
That history is the tell. Apple ships the base device, proves the software story — Siri AI, in this case — and then turns the experimental hardware into the upsell. The base HomeView makes the category; J595 makes it feel alive. Whether anyone wants a screen that follows them around the kitchen is the question Apple has two years to answer. Watch whether Apple demoed the arm in private briefings ahead of the base model's launch — if partners and accessory makers have already seen it, the "lineup" framing is already the plan, and the $299 HomeView was never meant to be the whole story.
— via 9to5Mac