Apple’s Smart Home Hub Will Be Called HomeView and Ships in Mid-November, Bloomberg Reports

Apple’s long-delayed home screen has a name, and it is not a tablet. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in his Power On newsletter that the smart home hub Apple is set to unveil at Tuesday’s “Welcome Home” event will be called HomeView. It pairs a display with an A18 chip and is meant to be the Siri command center of a house already full of Apple gear. Shipping, “at least as of now,” is mid-November, roughly a month after the unveiling. The new Apple TV 4K and the new HomePod mini are the ones that reach stores first, on October 30. HomeView follows them. The name surfaced first in a trademark filing by a shell company, a find MacRumors reported on Friday and Gurman credited. “View,” in his account, is the point of the product: a display you look at and run with your voice, not a HomePad you poke like an iPad. The screen supports touch. Voice is the primary control. A limited set of Apple apps runs on it. There is no dedicated App Store. Two Bases, Four Colors, One Job Gurman describes two versions. A countertop model sits on a metal speaker base and comes in space gray, silver, starlight, and pink. A wall-mounted model uses a flat, square base and is limited to space gray and silver. Sound is said to beat the new HomePod mini. Earlier reporting has put the square display at about 7 inches, with facial recognition on board. Those size and camera details are not in the Sunday newsletter’s confirmed lines. Treat them as prior leaks until Tuesday’s stage. The chip is an A18, the class of silicon in current iPhones, not a Mac chip and not the S-series used in wearables. That is enough for a always-listening speaker, a camera if one is present, and a handful of first-party apps. It is not a pitch for a third-party app economy. Gurman’s note that there will be no App Store is the product decision. HomeView is a house controller, not a second iPad on the counter. Photos, Notes, and Calendar have been named in earlier interface descriptions that blend Watch, iPad, and Apple TV elements. Tuesday will show which of those survived. What Else Is on the Tuesday Card The event is “Welcome Home.” Invitations went out Thursday with a rainbow Apple logo. Alongside the hub, Gurman expects a new Apple TV set-top box on an A19 chip and an updated HomePod mini on an S10 chip, both aimed at October 30 availability in stores and to customers. The mini is six years old in its current form. A refresh that extends voice, music, and household control is the speaker half of the same bet: Siri in more rooms, with the screen in one of them. Third-party gear is the other half. Gurman has previously pointed at an LG partnership for a doorbell, a smart lock, and a thermostat, shipping later this year at the earliest, after HomeView. Apple’s hole in the home has never been the absence of a speaker. HomePod and HomePod mini exist. The hole is a screen that can show the camera, the lock, and the calendar without sending you to a phone, and accessories that are not a patchwork of HomeKit brands. HomeView is the screen. LG, if it lands, is the lock and the doorbell. Why This Took So Long Amazon has had an Echo Show for years. Google has had Nest Hubs. Apple has had a Home app, a speaker, and a television box, and no product that is the counter. Reports of a home hub have circulated through multiple chip generations and a Siri rebuild. Shipping in mid-November, a month after a reveal, is a short gap by Apple’s old calendar and a normal one for a product that still needs a software polish. “At least as of now” is Gurman’s hedge. A slip into December would not be a surprise if the voice layer is the part still moving. Price is not in the Sunday report. A countertop speaker-display with an A18, in four colors, will be judged against an Echo Show and a Nest Hub on one side and against not buying anything on the other. Apple’s home products have never won on price. They win when the person already owns an iPhone and does not want a second account. HomeView only makes sense inside that house. A household on Android has no reason to put an A18 screen on the counter to run Siri. John Ternus is in his first weeks as chief executive, and Gurman’s newsletter noted that design is the priority he has set. A home hub is a design object as much as a computer: a metal base, four finishes, a square that has to look acceptable on a wall. Tuesday is the first Ternus hardware event that is not a phone. What to Watch The October 13 unveil, and whether the name is HomeView on the slide. Price, and whether the wall model costs less than the countertop. Which apps actually run, against the no-App-Store line. October 30 availability for Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini. Any LG doorbell, lock, or thermostat date. Apple is about to put a screen in the home and call it HomeView. Bloomberg says it ships in mid-November, after a Tuesday reveal, in two shapes and as many as four colors, with Siri in charge and no App Store. The Apple TV and the HomePod mini get to stores first. The hub is the product that was missing. Digital8Hub will update after Tuesday’s event if the name, the date, or the price differs from the report.