Apple is finally taking the smart home seriously

Apple ( AAPL ) has danced around making a major push into the smart home market for years, via its HomePod, HomePod mini, and Home app. But it fell shy of ever launching its own dedicated smart home hub, ceding much of the space to Amazon ( AMZN ) and Google ( GOOG , GOOGL ).

That changed on Tuesday with the launch of Apple's HomeView . Sporting a 7-inch Liquid Retina Display that can sit on a counter or be mounted to a wall, the HomeView serves as Apple's biggest smart home effort to date and could help it win over a market in flux as powerful AI models enter the home .

"Most smart speakers and hubs in homes today are low-cost devices that can't run AI at the edge, so they are ripe for replacement," Counterpoint Research research director Mohit Agrawal said in a note following Apple's Welcome Home event on Tuesday.

"Amazon and Google have only just begun refreshing their hardware for Alexa+ and Gemini, so the upgrade cycle is wide open, and Apple wants to win it," he added.

The HomeView takes a lot of its software design cues from the Apple Watch , complete with a series of built-in clock faces. There's a hub screen that lets you control your smart home devices, such as lights, locks, and thermostats, as well as an iPhone-like home screen where you can open apps like FaceTime or Messages.

Users can also view multiple smart camera feeds, use the HomeView's built-in camera as a vanity mirror before they head out the door, and look up things like recipes from their iPhones and then project them on the screen.

Apple is framing both its Siri AI and its privacy stance as two key benefits of the HomeView. Siri AI will allow you to control smart home devices with your voice, make FaceTime calls, and ask broad world-knowledge questions.

The company designed the HomeView to recognize six faces via its facial recognition camera. If you want to access your personal messages, calendar, and so on, you'll need your iPhone on the same Wi-Fi network as the hub so it can authenticate you.

Apple said HomeView does all of this seamlessly, allowing you to simply walk up to it and instantly see your customized home screen and app setup.

The new hardware provides users with a long-awaited Apple-built solution for controlling smart home devices. To date, customers have had to wrangle a collection of do-it-yourself options, such as using iPads as wall-mounted command centers.

HomeView changes that, with Apple noting that the device will work with existing Apple Home and Matter-compatible accessories .