One Countertop Device To Rule Them All — Apple’s Bid For Your Kitchen

Apple is ready to shine on your kitchen counter

Apple's strategy in entering a new market has long been "let others do it first." Generally, after a market has been established, Apple takes a look, sees what lands and where the company could innovate, then releases something that has everyone wondering "haven't we seen this before?"

The newly unveiled HomeView is a prime example of Apple doing just that — it's a countertop speaker, digital picture frame, synchronized online calendar, and media player…but it's also a "third screen" device for when you need quick info and aren't at your computer or phone (or watch? So maybe "fourth screen"). As usual, it's the device's deep roots in the Apple ecosystem that provide extra utility over other solutions.

The consternation online over the HomeView launch has been amusing to follow. Most people seem to be utterly confused that the company that makes their portable electronics is also making a stationary device that replicates many of the same functions. It's as if they've forgotten that an entire category of countertop electronics exist.

So let's be perfectly clear. Yes, your iPad, MacBook, iPhone, and Watch all do the same things that the HomeView does. Mobile computing is not the point of the device. It's meant to be a hub for quick interactions and at-a-glance information. Compared to all the other Apple products you have in your home or on your person, it's superfluous. But it's convenient and that's the point. It's a bridge between what's in your pocket, car, wrist, or desktop, and the rest of your unscreened life.

Digital photo albums are a killer app for any countertop device. Smart hubs from Amazon and Google include displaying your photos as a major feature. Digital frames, like the ones from Aura and Meural are custom-built to let you curate albums and share them between devices. In fact, I keep a deeply outdated Google Hub on my counter just because it's so good at showing timely pictures.

This is a spot where Apple shines as well. Memories in the Photos app are fantastic and also provide timely little snippets related to the day or season. But they're stuck in an app that, generally, doesn't get a lot of casual daily traffic. With HomeView, there's a dedicated screen where those Memories in the Photos app can shine.

Calendars are the other obvious use case. Skylight Calendar, for instance, is a purpose-built platform dedicated to getting your schedule out of whatever digital platform it's on and getting it in front of your family's eyeballs. It also has things like menu planning, lists, chore charts, and, yes, digital pictures.

While a bespoke platform built just for calendar organization will often surpass one that's just got calendar functions as part of its feature set, HomeView's user personalization could make this one of the standout features of the new platform. After all, I have trouble getting the other people in my household to even look at my digital calendar because it's mostly not for them. If, when they looked at the calendar, it recognized who they were and showed them the information that related to their schedule? That's the kind of direct engagement that drives adoption.

Then, of course, there's multimedia. There's no shortage of countertop devices that connect to whatever media platform on which you listen to music or podcasts. Less, however, connect to Apple Music. And none of them will provide the same continuity of experience: picking up from where you left off on your phone or in your car. And if you have Apple Music already, it just makes sense to have a device that connects to that ecosystem.

Make sure you follow the footnote to find out if your device one of the ones that will work with HomeView

Where HomeView starts to falls short is when you venture into the rest of your smart home. While the product page provides a best-possible picture when it comes to things like security camera integration, for those that don't have Matter-enabled products or aren't building a smart home with Apple's new line of LG smart devices, you'll miss out on the Apple Intelligence features touted here.

In particular, all-in-one smart security solutions like the one offered by Vivint don't integrate with Matter, so you'll likely have to hold on to your countertop or wall-mounted controller, unless you decide to build your own security system from scratch with products that integrate natively with Matter and are supported by HomeView.

So can Apple really kill competitors like Aura frames, Skylight calendars, or Google Nest Hub?

In the case of Google, I think it's an easy yes, since the company has abandoned the Nest Hub form factor, the last time the device got an update was in 2021. The other devices have their fans as well but with the clout of Apple behind HomeView, it may take more convincing now to get someone to adopt their platforms.

Amazon has a big lead when it comes to countertop devices. Since they broke into the smart things market, they've dominated and expanded. And, if you've gone all in on Alexa hardware, it's easy to see why people stay as well as why it'll be hard to get them to switch. Having an ecosystem of devices that seamlessly works together provides a much more satisfactory user experience than does a cobbled-together tech stack.

Except…Amazon has made moves in the past year or so that's weakened customer loyalty, the biggest being the removal of local voice processing. Then there's the time-worn complaint of plain old ad creep, with there no longer being an option to remove ads, only personalize them.

So while HomeView is for Apple users that want to avoid Amazon but still crave the kind of end-to-end experience that company provides its users, it's also a solution for Alexa users that are tired of Amazon.

Does the things you'd expect an Apple device to do — and that's the point.

I won't go into the specs and details of the hardware itself, my colleague David Phelan has already done an excellent job of that. Suffice to say — it does a lot of the same things that a stand-mounted iPad can do but with hardware and software optimized to be an always-on countertop device.

The biggest of these is personalization. Depending how well it's executed, it could be the make or break feature for HomeView. Each member of my family is looking for different things when they walk through or linger in the common spaces of our home. Being able to recognize a user and show content that's just for them or modify its display to their preferences on the fly makes the HomeView feel more like a digital personal assistant than another countertop smart thing.

Then there's FaceTime calling and Siri AI (eventually) — they're both parts of the Apple ecosystem that users rely on daily. Bringing those elements to the HomeView makes it that much more useful.

And, thankfully, there's a handful of chef-focused features that I'm eager to try out. Timer handoff is big, as is a dedicated cooking mode. The latter actually may make me reconsider just where the HomeView will go in my kitchen. It would be nice to not have to keep unlocking my iPhone to follow recipes.

While Apple faithful and haters alike each have reasons to rail against the HomeView platform, I think it will do more than enough to earn a spot on a lot of counters when it launches next month. And since it's from Apple, it will evolve over time (and maybe get a 16:9 ratio screen? That would be nice to see in a future iteration).

Especially once people encounter HomeView in the wild, I believe HomeView has all the potential to be a big hit. Learn more about HomeView and pre-order yours for a November 13 delivery, on the Apple website.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com