June 2017. October 2018. October 2018. And now, October 2026.
Eight years after Meta and Google, nine years after Amazon. That’s when Apple entered the smart display home device market. This is not entirely unusual. Apple wasn’t first to market with digital music players or smartphones, but it did perfect them.
I try to remind myself that I don’t have the market research a company has when it announces and markets a product. We can be absolutely certain market research drove Apple at every step in the HomeView process, from the feature set to the 193-second brand film it released today. So I’m not going to sit here and tell you the product is a bad idea or it will flop or it’s being marketed poorly.
But I will tell you Apple hasn’t perfected the category. Few people minded that Apple was late to digital music players or smartphones because, once we saw what Apple brought to the table, we knew we saw the very best version of the category. The Rio and the Nomad Jukebox looked like relics of a bygone era next to the iPod. You knew—just knew—physical keyboards were dead the moment you saw the iPhone. You do not feel that way looking at the HomeView.
I bet you don’t feel much of anything. Because you don’t know what it solves.
I grant that comparing anything to (arguably) the two most seminal consumer electronics devices of this century is a high bar to clear. But I struggle to even see HomeView clearing a low bar. What does it actually do?
It has multi-user recognition. Legitimately good, something we don’t have with iPad or iPhone. Is that so missing from people’s lives that we need it in a stationary device? Hard for me to believe.
It puts Siri closer to the center of our homes. This is not a selling point. If you don’t believe me, watch the 193-second video again. The family touches the device 10 times. That’s not an endorsement of Siri, it’s an indictment. Only two of the five people interact viva voce because the device can’t handle more than that or because five people yelling “Hey, Siri” in the kitchen would look and sound absurd.
It connects other home devices like security cameras and thermostats. I can see how this is useful. But what problem does this device solve? Those things can be controlled by the devices we already have. What justifies buying a $299 HomeView to accomplish that?
It’s one device, shared by everyone. k. Is that missing from our lives? Are there parents or grandparents or (god forbid we mention or market to) child-free people who wish there could be a shared device for the entire house? I’ll tip my hat if that’s in Apple’s market research.
In that whole video there’s not a single problem that another Apple device didn’t already solve. (Except, I guess, them watching the teenage daughter leave with her until-then-unknown boyfriend. Quality family time.) I can already ask Siri anything I can ask the HomeView. I can bring my iPad to the kitchen to follow a recipe. I can use an iPhone to ping my keys. To play and stop music. To see my calendar. To take a FaceTime call. To turn down the thermostat. On and on. HomeView doesn’t do any of those things better.
As a marketer I also have to talk about the film itself. (Film is what marketers call the super long video we would make if we didn’t have to be bothered by things like “People spend less than two seconds watching a social media post before they keep scrolling” or “Six-second ads are all that converts.”)
A lot of people online say it depicts a dismal view of what family life is or could be with this device. I don’t agree with that. I argue that everyone being obsessed with one device is better than having their heads down in their own devices, and I bet that’s what Apple wants to portray. If that’s the case, that’s what the video should portray. Say the thing you mean is my approach to creative concepts like that. As it is, I think it will be lost on most people.
(I could go off here about how Apple is the one who made the device that keeps a family isolated in their own worlds at breakfast and now wants to also sell a device to break that behaviour. People would certainly make that point if Facebook did something so hypocritical. But I won’t. Even though I kinda just did.)
To me, the film only lands as a product marketing sizzle reel. It highlights every feature they packed into the device but delivers no compelling narrative for why I need them bundled into a new piece of hardware. I’m using I in the selfish sense here because I’m single and live in a one-bedroom apartment; the concerns of two parents and their three children don’t come up in my daily life. But I still have money to exchange for things I want. Nothing in this video tells me why I should do that.
To which you might say, “Well you’re not the target market then.” Fair. But I throw this question back: Don’t you think it’s a slight problem if Apple entered a market eight years late with a product that’s only appealing to a slice of that overall market?
Whatever issues I might have with the way Apple chose to portray HomeView in the film pale in comparison to one single moment that drove me batty. At the very end, when the kids are all gone and the house is blissfully quiet, mom and dad come fact to face. Alone. Eye to eye. They say goodbye ,and mom…leaves. She just leaves.
WHY DID THEY NOT KISS EACH OTHER GOODBYE?
