Apple's first smart display goes on sale tomorrow, and the first reviews landed today with a verdict that's almost unanimous: the hardware is a charmer. After ten days with the $299 HomeView, Chance Miller at 9to5Mac calls it "an adorable little thing" that feels like "an oversized Apple Watch for your home." The Verge's Jennifer Pattison Tuohy went further: "The HomeView nails everything I want from a smart display."
But the reviews also found the one thing that could keep this off the kitchen counter.
HomeView's pitch is a shared family screen that keeps everyone's stuff private: it recognizes up to six people by face and voice, and personal data only appears when your iPhone was recently unlocked on the same Wi-Fi network. In Miller's testing, the lock held: opening his wife's Messages got a "can't verify my identity" message, and repeated attempts disabled facial recognition until she re-authenticated.
Tuohy found the gap: she could read her 15-year-old daughter's texts if she reached the screen seconds after her daughter stepped away — and for as long as she liked if her daughter was still sitting across the room. The daughter's review of the whole device, in full: "I'll just use my iPhone."
That matters because privacy is the whole justification for HomeView. Amazon and Google have sold shared kitchen screens for years; Apple's was supposed to know whose texts are whose.
The other seams are smaller: no physical buttons, no App Store, and Siri AI sometimes hangs — it once told Tuohy's husband a drive would take an hour and 47 minutes. The real drive was five hours. The $299 wall version loses the base woofer and ships without mount or power brick — about $400 on the wall.
None of that stopped the reviewers from liking the thing. The recipe handoff — hold your iPhone up to the screen and the recipe becomes a step-by-step cooking interface — is the kind of detail that makes the device feel designed rather than assembled. The Verge scored it 7; Engadget went 8.4.
Watch what Apple does next. The profile-switch timeout is a software decision, and a December update is already planned for Siri's lock and garage-door controls. For a device in the middle of a family's kitchen, whether the text handoff window is a bug to close or a trade-off to live with matters more than the speaker quality.
— via 9to5Mac