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All right, so Apple had a mini Home event today. where they refreshed their Home lineup with. a new HomePod mini 2, which has some new colors and a new glowing display at the top that matches your music's album art, a new Apple TV 4K. that has far-field mics and a new remote with speakers so you can always ask Siri to find it, clever, and a new device to tie the Home all together called. HomeView. They just, they never name it. what you think they're gonna name it. But yeah, this was a real hole in their ecosystem for a while, and if Apple wants to pull people from. the Amazon Google Home ecosystems. they needed something like this.
Now that I've spent some time with it though, and I've digested everything, I actually don't think this first. offering. is very convincing. So welcome to your hands-on. and first look and everything you need to know or might be wondering about this. Apple. HomeView. And I'm gonna try to make it quick 'cause I just have a few key thoughts. on this thing. So the basic product. is this is a display. that lives somewhere in your house as a dashboard or a hub. for your smart home. Kind of the equivalent of like the Google Nest Hub Max. or the Amazon Echo Hub. So it serves as a controller or a connector for all of the other pieces of your smart home tech. So your thermostats, your doorbells, your security cameras, et cetera. So HomeView
has a 7-inch square touchscreen sitting in this color-matching base. It has speakers in it and a camera at the top, and the display articulates up and down a little bit on this little arm. and it's mostly made of metal. Some people are saying there's a little bit of iMac. G4 inspiration. in there. I don't know, I kind of see it a little bit, like maybe with that semicircle base. But there's also rumors of another one coming later with like a larger display and a whole articulating arm. That I could see a little bit more G4 in. But you know, that's another story for another day.
Now notably, the Google Nest Hub Max, $229. Amazon's Echo Hub, $179. Apple's HomeView, $300. So it's not a deal-breaker, but that's just where we're starting. So then the first interesting note is there's actually two versions of the HomeView. There's a version on a stand, which you've seen, this metal base, or there's a wall-mounted version. And this is already where it starts to get interesting because they're the same price, the same $300. Now that's a little odd to me to start just because. the speakers in the thing are split between. the display part and the base part. So there are dual speakers in the display, but then they also have a lower frequency woofer. in that base to give you the fuller sound.
So of course the wall-mounted version, since it doesn't have. the base, no woofers. And then you also have to then buy. the adapter to put it on the wall. So you can choose the one that's wall-mounted, but it doesn't come with an adapter by default. You then buy the adapter too. So there's a $60 USB-C wall adapter, or an $80 AC adapter, or. the $130. Power over Ethernet adapter. So if I'm getting this straight, the wall-mounted version. doesn't come with the adapter to actually attach it to the wall. You have to buy that separately. And. it sounds worse 'cause there's no woofer. And it only comes in silver or gray. None of the other colors are available for it. So why are they the same price?
Why do they cost the same amount? I'm not sure I've figured that one out. But anyway, functionality. Okay, so this thing has. an A18 chip inside, they print these things at this point, and it has a new operating system on top, HomeView OS, or at least I think that's what it is. They never really named it, but it's not iOS, it's not. iPadOS, it's this new HomeView software. It is pretty familiar though. And in fact, the more you use it, the more you see elements borrowed from other operating systems that Apple makes, like the customization. of the watch. or. clock faces, that's straight from the Apple Watch, very much
giant Apple Watch here. There's complications, modular faces, et cetera. And then you swipe up from the bottom to get to your app drawer, which you can customize. You can throw some widgets in there. So it's kind of like an iPhone home screen. But to be perfectly clear, no App Store. No. App Store, no third-party apps will run on this thing. It does support the CarPlay standard. So apps that use the CarPlay standard, you'll be able to beam content from your. iPhone to this display.
We'll get more into that in a second, but yeah, no third-party apps. But then this big headlining feature fast account switching. This is actually pretty clever. So up at the top here, it's kind of hard to see, but there is a single camera. that does facial recognition. So when you walk up to the HomeView, it recognizes you, and then it's able to give you answers from your personal context, like your messages and your calendar, et cetera. So if nobody's walked up to it or nobody that it recognizes walks up to it, it still works. It just doesn't give that personal information. And you can choose. which information that is. But it can always do. timers and. ask Siri stuff and say the weather and play music and things like that.
So for multi-person households, it will, based on who walks up to it and who it recognizes, it will actively switch between different. personal contexts and different Apple accounts. seamlessly. Whoever walks up to it, boom, switches to the new person's account. Which, to be clear, they've never done this before. We've wanted them to do this before. because. I've wanted this on. iPads for years. and Apple would rather just. you buy more. iPads for more people in your family, but this has to live in a household where multiple people use it. So fast account switching
is the clever thing. And this will work for up to six people. Two things though. One, this is not full Face ID. So just to be clear, it is just the single 12-megapixel Center Stage camera and then. no extra IR or depth information. But it also pays attention to if your iPhone or Watch. is nearby and was recently unlocked. just to double-check to make sure it was you. So in theory, if someone like holds up a picture of you, but you're somewhere else or you're asleep and your phone is locked for a while or something like that, it should not be tricked by that. But I do wonder how good that is. and also how well it will recognize people in the dark. since there's no infrared. But then number two, no. voice recognition, which I was kind of surprised by.
I figured they could have done this. You know, with Google's, I have a Google Home, the Nest Hub Max and everything, this is how it's supposed to work. It doesn't always work, but when I ask for something, it knows my voice, recognizes me, and so it gives me personal answers. If someone else has a different account on it, it will give them their personal answers, but. that's not how the Apple version will work. HomeView. can only do that personal context if it sees you in the general vicinity, not if you're around the corner or on the couch.
Now, a couple other things I noticed. There's no battery in here. So while you can pretty easily unplug it at the back, it's not exactly useful until you plug it in again. But at least it's USB Type-C. That's actually kind of solid. Theoretically, that makes it a bit more transportable. And then it also has thick black. bezels, which might not be a big deal to you, but remember the. iMac? Do you remember when they talked about the. iMac and they switched this thing to. white bezels a couple years ago to make it, you know, this more friendly family computer that can be placed anywhere in the home? I still remember that.
I remember them saying that. But then yet here we are with black bezels on the HomeView. Makes you think. But I generally, I do think that the most important part of this product. is that the display looks. pretty decent. no matter what you think of the rest of the design. I think it looks a little funky, but whatever. But. the LCD display itself. looks fine. It gets up to 500 nits. I. personally can't tell if it's higher refresh rate. I'm pretty sure it's 60Hz in the little time I interacted with it, but it goes. down to 0.3 nits at its lowest, and it has True Tone.
And that's actually really important in the dark. If it's in like a bedroom or something, that means that this super overpriced alarm clock could be not annoyingly bright. But then it has a lot of the same. quirks and features as a HomePod. So it still relies on Siri, in this case, the new Siri AI, which has its ups and downs. It's still kind of slow, but it does more stuff. And then it obviously will give you a lot of first-party app responses to things. If you ask it for music, Apple Music. If you ask it for the calendar, Apple Calendar. But then also, just like a HomePod, you can actually tap your. iPhone to it to beam. whatever content was on your phone to the HomeView, and then it'll start playing from the HomeView.
So if you have music, Apple Music, beam it, starts playing on the HomeView. If you've got a link, if you're open in Safari, beam it, it'll open in Safari. on the HomeView. And if you have a FaceTime call going, you can actually beam it to the HomeView, and then it'll start up on that display with that camera. But if you want to use a third-party service, basically you AirPlay to it. So I was told. that. if. the app supports the CarPlay standard, it will still. be able to show essentially from the. iPhone onto the HomeView. So it's not running natively on the HomeView, but stuff like Spotify or SoundCloud. or other things like that. can still play from a HomeView. And sound quality was fine.
You know, it had that bass, so the subwoofer was there. It's a little bit low in max volume, if I'm being honest. I kind of expected it to be a bit louder, but it is pretty small. But at least it wasn't distorting. or sounding truly bad while trying to get extra loud. So I guess that's the win. So here's the deal. This is. my take. You know, the point of the product is clearly to plug. a hole. in their ecosystem. Like, Apple saw people going out and building their Google smart homes or their Amazon smart homes, and they just. wanted to offer something, some equivalent stuff, so that people could come back to having their stuff in Apple's ecosystem. So. they had to make some smart home stuff.
You know, they partnered with LG to make. the Smart Home Collection. so there's some new doorbells and thermostats and security cameras now that they worked with LG on that meet Apple standards. And now of course they make this HomeView display. But whenever we see a new product, whenever I think about a new product, I always want to think about the target demographic that they think it's best for, that they're aiming this at. And I've been living with this for. all day basically, and I cannot figure any group that this is actually. ideal for. Like maybe, okay, I guess. in theory, the complete casual who doesn't really care about the price and just. kind of likes that it's in the Apple ecosystem and the couple interesting features of it connecting to the
iPhone, that makes it cool, then sure, fine, I guess. But for like the super bleeding edge smart home enthusiast who already has a bunch of smart lights and is like ready to go all in with a smart doorbell and a smart thermostat and a smart home, well, this ecosystem is still. dwarfed by Amazon's. and even Google's, and the value proposition. of the display product that lives in your kitchen is not. that different between them. So. I just imagine. anyone who gets this, after like the first two weeks when the novelty wears off, it's just going to be. reduced to that. LCD square attached to a speaker that lives in the corner somewhere.
Once in a while you ask it for some music or for a timer, or you ask Siri some stuff, and it's fine at that, but it doesn't really. bring any extra value. on top of that's convincing me that it's worth the extra price. So yeah, my first impression is I think it's a skip for most people, but maybe the second generation. at some point when it comes out can be more convincing. We'll see. Oh, by the way, you guys totally crushed it with the desk pad launch from the last video, it's sold out of the smooth one already, which is amazing.
We're trying to restock that as quickly as possible. But like I said in that video, the one that I prefer. is the rough one with a little bit of texture, and that one is still available for now, so I'll leave a link below if you still want to get it. But anyway, that's been it. Thank you very much, and thanks for watching, and I'll catch you in the next one. Peace.
