Apple Announces HomeView, Its First Smart Home Hub — Plus a New HomePod mini and Apple TV 4K

Apple's "Welcome home" event brought a genuinely new product category rather than another phone refresh — a screen-equipped hub built to compete directly with Amazon's Echo Show and Google's Nest Hub.

Apple held a "Welcome home" event on October 13, 2026, introducing HomeView, its first dedicated smart home hub, alongside an updated HomePod mini and a new fourth-generation Apple TV 4K. It's Apple's first real entry into the screen-equipped smart home hub category that Amazon's Echo Show and Google's Nest Hub have occupied largely unchallenged for years.

HomeView centers on a 7-inch Liquid Retina display with True Tone, with brightness that adjusts from 500 nits down to as low as 0.3 nits for a dark room, and it uses Apple Intelligence to recognize up to six different household members and personalize what the screen shows each one. It comes in two physical forms, a wall-mounted version and a countertop model built around a speaker base, and runs on Siri AI as its primary control method — handling things like pulling up a recipe shared in Messages, locating misplaced keys, checking a family member's calendar, or starting a FaceTime call, according to Apple's own demo video. Pricing has been reported in different places as somewhere around $350, with Apple not yet listing a single clean number across every coverage source as of this writing.

The HomePod mini 2 is more straightforward: $149, available in five finishes (white, midnight, blue, green and pink), built around a new N1 networking chip for improved Wi-Fi and Bluetooth along with a faster S-series processor. Siri AI capabilities are coming to the HomePod mini 2 in a future software update rather than at launch, Apple said. Preorders opened today, with units shipping October 30.

The new Apple TV 4K, the fourth generation of the device, is priced at $299 for the 128GB model and built around Apple's new A19 chip, which Apple says delivers up to 50% faster CPU performance than the outgoing model. It also gains the same N1 networking chip as the HomePod mini 2, far-field microphones for hands-free Siri control without a remote, and support for Dolby Vision and HDR10+ playback. An updated Siri Remote, sold separately for $59, adds Find My support so a lost remote can be located the same way a lost AirTag can. Both the new Apple TV 4K and HomeView are set to ship November 13, two weeks after the HomePod mini 2.

Alongside the three headline products, Apple also announced the Apple Home Collection — a line of smart home accessories including cameras, a door lock, thermostats and sensors developed in partnership with LG and Schneider Electric, extending the HomeView ecosystem beyond devices Apple builds itself.

The bigger story here is category, not spec sheet: Apple has largely sat out the screen-based smart home hub market since the first HomePod's 2018 launch, while Amazon and Google built out years of hardware and software iteration in that space. HomeView is Apple's most direct answer yet, built specifically around the kind of ambient, always-on household coordination — shared calendars, FaceTime, recipe lookups, who's home right now — that a phone screen handles less naturally than a hub mounted on a kitchen wall.

Original coverage: Apple Announces HomeView, Its First Smart Home Hub