Apple’s $299 HomeView Is the Cheap Part of Its New Smart Home

CUPERTINO — The price on Apple’s new smart display is $299. The price of the home it is built to run is not on the box.

Apple introduced HomeView on Tuesday, a 7-inch Liquid Retina display on a domed speaker base that recognizes up to six people by face and shows each of them their own messages, calendar and photos. Pre-orders opened the same day in the United States, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, with deliveries starting Nov. 13, Apple said in its announcement. A wall-mounted model costs the same $299.

The launch is the payoff for the “Welcome home” event Apple scheduled last week, and its argument is that the device matters less than the assistant inside it. Apple calls that assistant Siri AI, “an entirely new version of Siri,” and says it is the centre of HomeView. Apple’s release does not mention Google. Fortune reported that the new Siri relies on Google’s Gemini technology, a dependency Apple has not described in its own materials.

Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, said HomeView “is designed to be shared by everyone in the home yet feel completely personal to each user.” The fine print in Apple’s release is less personal. Siri AI is in beta on HomeView, in English only, and requests that draw on personal context need a paired iPhone or iPad with Apple Intelligence turned on. The footnote adds that certain server-based features “are subject to daily usage limits,” and that expanded access “will be available for a fee in the future.”

The larger bill is the rest of the house. Apple also announced Apple Home Collection, a lineup of cameras, thermostats, a video doorbell and a deadbolt lock designed with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. In the United States a doorbell and a lock together start at $599.90, about double the price of HomeView, and a floodlight camera alone starts at $399.95. The wall-mounted HomeView attaches with one of three Schneider Home mounts, which start at $59.95. Apple says availability for the accessories begins in December, with select products in early 2027, and did not say which.

Analysts read the move as a reset rather than a gadget. “This is them rebooting their entire approach to home,” Anshel Sag of Moor Insights & Strategy told Fortune, though he also said the public seems largely unaware that Siri has been upgraded at all. Mohit Agrawal of Counterpoint Research noted that Apple is partnering with LG and Schneider Electric rather than buying its way in, as Amazon did with Ring and Google with Nest.

The history is not kind to the category. TechCrunch noted that products such as the HomePod have struggled against the Echo Show and Nest Hub, and that HomeView’s delay was reportedly tied to problems with Siri. Fortune put revenue in Apple’s Wearables, Home and Accessories segment down 4 percent in its 2025 fiscal year, to about $35.7 billion. Fortune counted this as the second major launch for chief executive John Ternus, who replaced Tim Cook in September, after the iPhone Duo, and Apple also announced a new Apple TV 4K and a HomePod mini 2.

Apple says Home Collection data in the Home app is encrypted end to end, so that LG, Schneider Electric and Apple cannot read it, and that HomeView’s face recognition is built with privacy at its core. There is no independent testing of those claims yet, because the hardware is not in customers’ hands. Reviews of a beta assistant on a screen that ships in a month are not possible, and neither are verdicts on accessories that arrive in December or later.

What Apple has priced is the screen. What it has left open is how much the assistant will cost to keep using once the daily limits start to matter.