Apple HomeView Smart Hub Is Official, and Siri Leads the Way

Apple has officially pulled back the curtain on its biggest smart home push in years. At a hands-on "Welcome Home" experience held in New York on October 13, 2026, the company unveiled Apple HomeView, a brand-new smart home hub built around a revamped Siri, alongside a refreshed HomePod mini and a new Apple TV, according to MacRumors.

Apple HomeView is the headline act, and it is priced at two hundred ninety-nine dollars, with pre-orders opening today and shipments beginning November 13, 2026. The device centers on a seven-inch square Liquid Retina touchscreen running on Apple's A18 chip, and its tentpole feature is Siri AI, a conversational overhaul of the voice assistant that Apple says can draw on personal context from a paired iPhone to give richer answers. For households deep in the Apple ecosystem, this is the command center years of rumors promised.

The hub: two designs, face recognition, and no App Store

HomeView comes in two physical versions. The tabletop model sits on a metal speaker base and comes in silver, starlight, rose pink, and space gray, while a slimmer wall-mounted version ships in silver and space gray, with Schneider Home mounts sold separately at prices ranging from roughly sixty to one hundred thirty dollars. At just over two pounds for the tabletop build, it is meant to live on a kitchen counter, nightstand, or side table, and a twelve-megapixel Center Stage camera enables FaceTime calls.

The standout trick is recognition. HomeView can identify up to six people by face and automatically switch to a personalized Home Screen for each, surfacing private content like messages and calendar events while shared photos and music stay visible to everyone. A distance-adaptive interface adjusts as you walk closer, and the screen cycles through display faces including Photos, a motion-reactive Flow face, a Snoopy face that reflects the time of day and weather, a modular smart-home control view, and a camera view that can livestream as many as nine feeds at once.

In the kitchen, Apple is pitching the hub as what one product lead called a perfect sous chef: it converts recipe measurements on command and runs hands-free timers while you cook. It also works as an Intercom, doubles as a Spatial Audio speaker, and packs four far-field microphones with Sound Recognition that can listen for smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. Temperature, humidity, and ambient-light sensors, plus Matter, Thread, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 6 support, round out the spec sheet. Notably, there is no App Store, a deliberate choice Apple says keeps the hub focused on home control rather than becoming another tablet.

One caveat will sting European readers: Apple HomeView will not be sold in the European Union, where Siri AI is currently unavailable. Apple has not given a timeline for bringing the assistant there.

HomePod mini 2 and a faster Apple TV round out the lineup

The second-generation HomePod mini costs one hundred forty-nine dollars, a twenty-dollar jump over the original, and moves to Apple's S10 chip. Pre-orders are open now, with the speaker landing in stores October 30, 2026, in pink, green, blue, white, and midnight. A new Sound Glow animation plays across the top when Siri is active, and the speaker now supports Wi-Fi 6E, can serve as a default Mac speaker, and can team up with the new Apple TV for four-speaker surround sound.

Here is the catch: the revamped Siri arrives on the mini later, via a software update, and only in English in select markets at first. "The speaker brings together Siri AI, gorgeous new colours, and incredible audio," said Apple vice president Kaiann Drance, adding that paired with the new Apple TV 4K, "it delivers our most immersive home theatre setup yet," according to fonearena.

That new Apple TV carries the steepest price of the day. It comes in at the same price as Apple HomeView, a sharp climb from the previous generation's one hundred twenty-nine dollars in 2022. Inside, the A19 chip delivers up to fifty percent faster CPU performance and double the graphics power, plus a dedicated AV1 decoder for smoother streaming. Three far-field microphones enable hands-free Siri at launch, the remote now supports Precision Finding with an audible locator tone, and the box comes with one hundred twenty-eight gigabytes of storage and gigabit ethernet, according to 9to5Mac. Four HomePod speakers can surround a room and auto-calibrate themselves, and the box is available for pre-order today, following the same November shipping schedule.

"The new Apple TV 4K is our most immersive home theater experience yet," said Bob Borchers, Apple's vice president of worldwide product marketing. Beyond the hardware, Apple also announced an Apple Home Collection of accessories built with LG and Schneider Electric, including cameras, thermostats, sensors, a doorbell, and a smart lock, starting under forty dollars and shipping in December, according to techaeris.

Why this matters, and the two big questions

The timing is no accident. A long-delayed Siri overhaul arrived this past June, and Apple spent years watching Amazon's Echo Show and Google's Nest Hub own the smart display category while HomePod and Apple TV units served as quiet HomeKit hubs. Apple HomeView is Apple's answer at last, and the company is betting that a personal, face-aware Siri, not another screen of apps, is the differentiator.

But two questions will decide whether it lands. The first is price. Asking buyers to swallow the hub's price alongside a streaming box that more than doubled in cost is a bold ask when rival displays routinely sell for a fraction of the price, and Apple TV's price jump alone is the kind of sticker shock that will test even loyalists. The second is software: the most important upgrade in the room, Siri AI, will not even be present on the new HomePod mini at launch, arriving later and only in select English markets, while EU buyers are shut out of the hub entirely.

For Apple households, though, the picture is compelling. Apple HomeView greets each family member by face, answers with context pulled from their iPhone, watches the front door, and keeps dinner from burning is the smart home story Apple has been circling for years. Whether Gen Z renters and dorm dwellers bite at flagship pricing remains the open question, and early reviews will say more than any launch demo. For more launch coverage, browse our latest gadgets topic page, or catch up on the gaming side with our tech and games coverage.