Apple put the HomeView on stage on October 13, a $299 smart display with a 7-inch screen sitting on a speaker base, and the aim was plain enough: go after Amazon’s Echo Show and Google’s Nest Hub before that corner of the kitchen counter belongs to them for good. A week later, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is reporting that a larger and better HomeView is already being worked on.
What’s Wrong With The HomeView Apple Just Launched
It isn’t a bad product, but it’s a narrow one. The HomeView makes the most sense for someone who already owns the iPhone, the Apple TV and the HomePod, and who somehow never bought a smart home gadget from Amazon or Google along the way. That group exists and may be bigger than you’d think, though reviewers haven’t been kind about the rest of it.
- The screen tilts on a hinge but it doesn’t swivel, so if you walk to the other side of the room it can’t turn to follow you
- The bezels around the 7-inch display are noticeably thick for a 2026 Apple product
- At $299 it costs more than Amazon’s Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 11, and Marques Brownlee called it a skip for most people
- It isn’t sold in the EU at all, because the Siri AI features it depends on aren’t available there yet
Why The HomeView Looks Older Than It Should
According to Gurman, the HomeView had been sitting finished in warehouses for the better part of a year, waiting for Siri’s software to be ready. Its launch was pushed from spring 2025 to summer, then autumn, then spring of this year, and it only shipped once the new Siri was in a state Apple was willing to show.
That explains a lot of what people noticed on launch day. The A18 chip, the 8GB of RAM and those wide bezels were all decided on well before this autumn, so the hardware was effectively a generation behind by the time it reached the shelves.
What The Bigger Model Is Supposed To Do
The second device is codenamed J595, and it’s the tabletop robot Gurman first wrote about back in 2024. It puts a 9-inch screen on a thin robotic arm that can tilt the display and turn it a full 360 degrees, which fixes the HomeView’s biggest gap directly.
It’s meant to recognise who’s speaking to it and turn the screen towards that person as they move around the room, so a FaceTime call keeps you in the frame while you’re walking between the sink and the fridge. Nobody knows yet what Apple will call it, and HomeView Ultra, Max or 360 all seem possible going by how the company names its other products.
When It’s Coming And How Much It Might Cost
Gurman now puts the release in 2027 or 2028. That’s later than the 2026 or 2027 window his earlier reports pointed to, which fits the pattern of delays the first HomeView went through.
It will cost more than $299, though Apple hasn’t settled a number. Earlier reporting had executives trying to keep J595 around $1,000, and if that figure holds, the robot-arm version would sit in a very different price bracket from the one Apple just launched.
