Apple's HomeView smart display goes on sale Friday, November 13 for $299, but the hardware will arrive carrying a souvenir of how long it took to get here: the devices ship running HomeView Software version 26.5 — a build that's already six months old — and prompt users to update to version 27.2 during setup, according to MacRumors, citing AppleDB data.
A day-one software update isn't exactly a scandal; plenty of new hardware ships stale. But the version numbers tell a story Apple would rather you forget. HomeView was reportedly all but finished for years, stuck in limbo while Apple rebuilt Siri. The device Apple announced October 13 is, in software-archaeology terms, a launch that sat in the warehouse while the OS it was supposed to run on got rebuilt underneath it — which is exactly why version 26.5 still exists on factory-sealed units while 27.2 is current.
This isn't the first fossil to surface, either. When Apple released HomeView Software 27.2 ahead of launch, developers poking through it found a hidden HomeView Software 26 graphic — a leftover from the original release plan. Yesterday, developer Guilherme Rambo booted the HomeView software in a virtual machine, and Steve Troughton-Smith walked through the result: the home screen, Control Center, Flow and Snoopy clock faces, a Liquid Glass slider for interface transparency, support for up to six household users, and apps like Timers, Alarms, and World Clock. The software is based on tvOS, doesn't use the iPhone's SpringBoard launcher at all (it has its own, codenamed BreadBoard), and even its Control Center runs as a process called CupBoard.
So the shipping product is a curious artifact: a brand-new device whose software has visible strata from a launch that was supposed to happen last spring. The practical impact on buyers is small — a longer-than-usual setup while 27.2 downloads, and possibly an update size worth knowing about on day one. But symbolically, it's the clearest confirmation yet that the HomeView you buy on November 13 is a product of the pre-Siri-AI era, patched up for a world where Apple finally has a voice assistant worth selling a smart display around.
What to watch: launch-day reviews land in under two weeks, and reviewers will tell us whether anything about the shipped 26.5 — performance, unfinished edges, vestigial features — betrays the delay in a way the update doesn't fully erase. Also worth watching: how big that day-one 27.2 update actually is, and whether Apple repeats this staggered pattern on the rest of the year's home lineup.
— via MacRumors