Cute and compact
HomeView is cute. That might not be the most eloquent adjective, but it’s the best way to describe how I felt when seeing it for the first time. A 7-inch LCD screen floats above a rounded aluminium base on a stainless-steel hinge, and you can nudge the display back or forward depending on whether it’s on a low nightstand or a tall counter.
The hinge is a joy, too. It has firm, satisfying resistance, so the screen moves when you want it to and stays put when you let go – not too dissimilar to how I felt about the iPhone Duo when I tried it last month. It feels high-end in the way Apple hardware usually does, with no creaking, no plastic pretending to be metal, and a premium, solid feel all over.
HomeView’s low-profile design will look great on a table or a countertop.
Foundry
There are four color options—Silver, Starlight, Rose Pink, and Space Gray—and Apple matches the USB-C cable to the body, similar to the iMac and its accessories. They’re muted shades that will blend well with whatever’s around it: wood, tile, or painted walls. Starlight was my favorite of the four, with its warm, soft tone, but they’re all lovely.
The device itself includes a several rows of holes on the base and under the display for speakers, which pack two full-range drivers into the display, plus a down-firing woofer and two passive radiators in the base. It looks more like a Dyson appliance than an Apple gadget, but it sounds great for something so compact. Think somewhere between a HomePod mini and the full-size HomePod: noticeably fuller and punchier than the mini, without quite the room-filling presence of its big sibling.
If you’d rather put a HomeView in a hallway or on the kitchen wall, there’s a wall-mounted version too, which is only available in Silver or Space Gray. That model has the same aluminium display frame, but without the speaker base, the sound quality won’t be as good, so that’s something to consider.
Shared yet personalized
HomeView can do a lot, but the feature I appreciated most was face recognition. HomeView can learn up to six faces within a household, and once it recognises you, a swipe up from the bottom of the screen brings up a home screen that is not only familiar but personalised, too.
