Apple Finally Moves In

A textured, embroidered Apple logo with horizontal stripes in green, yellow, orange, red, purple, and blue on a white fabric background.

Earlier this week in New York, Apple held its Welcome Home event and announced a slate of new home products: a new Apple TV 4K, a second-generation HomePod mini, and an entirely new device called HomeView. For years, the home has felt like a side project in Cupertino. The full-size HomePod came, went, and came back again. The Apple TV went four years without a refresh. Everything else arrived in a slow drip. This week, that changed. Apple is finally going all in on the home and that’s exciting.

But “going all in” and “worth buying” aren’t the same thing. This isn’t a technical deep dive, as plenty of other people will cover the specs. I’m more interested in how these products fit into an actual home. From where I sit, one of them is a genuinely new idea, and the other two are modest updates with much bigger price tags.

Apple TV 4K

After a four-year wait, this is a surprisingly small refresh. There are some nice additions, but I suspect a lot of people were hoping for more.

The headline feature for me is surround sound with HomePods and I’d love to try it. But I’ve been burned before. We used to use two original full-size HomePods as our TV speakers and the experience was unreliable at best. One would play louder than the other, or the pair would drift a few milliseconds out of sync. It was a constant, low-grade frustration. We eventually replaced them with a Sonos soundbar and an optical cable and haven’t had a single problem since. So before I’d spend real money on a bigger HomePod setup, I’d want proof Apple has fixed this.

There’s also now a far-field mic built into the Apple TV itself. Handy, sure, but there’s already a mic in the Siri Remote and in the Remote app on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Nice to have. Groundbreaking it is not.

The feature Apple clearly does think is groundbreaking is the new Siri AI. And I keep coming back to the same question: how often does anyone actually need it on a TV? How many people pause a show to ask Siri something random, or sit down on the couch with zero idea what they want to watch? Not many people I know. It’ll be useful now and then, when you’re hunting for something specific or just in the mood for something, but right now it feels more like a cool tech demo than a reason to upgrade.

HomePod mini 2

It has a cool, glowy display that hints at the album artwork of whatever’s playing. And, of course, Siri AI. What I haven’t figured out yet is where that Siri actually runs. On the device? Offloaded to a nearby iPhone or Mac? On Private Cloud Compute? If it’s not on-device, I’d love to know why the original HomePod mini can’t get it too. I have four of them lol.

HomeView

This is the big one. Picture a square iPad glued on top of a HomePod. Boom: HomeView. The more I think about where it would fit in my life, the more I think it could become the new family computer. Growing up, before everyone had a laptop, an iPad, and an iPhone in their room, we had one family computer, to which my parents had the password. Today the colorful iMac or a Mac mini can fill that role, but HomeView might be a better fit for what families actually do on a shared computer: messaging and FaceTime, playing music, putting on a show while cooking or hanging out, looking things up or asking Siri. Yes, an iMac can do all of that. But for $299, in a small package that recognizes who’s using it and switches accordingly? I think this could be a hit. And my wife wants one. Win-win.

The Price of Admission

Here’s what stuck with me most, as a regular person and not a reviewer: this stuff has gotten expensive. Our current setup is an Apple TV 4K we bought for $129, two full-size HomePods I got for about $300 total with my employee discount back when I worked at Apple, and four HomePod minis I picked up on sale over the years for around $80 each. That’s roughly $750 for a streaming box and some nice speakers, which already felt like a lot.

The same setup today would cost about $1,600!

Yes, I got deals. But even comparing full retail prices, the jump is wild. I’d honestly been thinking about upgrading our TV and speakers to try the new surround sound. Not after seeing that number. And it stings more because, not long ago, Apple was heading the other direction, introducing lower prices on things like the Mac mini and MacBook Neo. Now prices are climbing again. That’s not entirely Apple’s fault, since RAMageddon is coming for everyone, but it’s still a hard pill to swallow.

Apple has finally decided the home matters. Now it has to convince the rest of us that it matters $1,600 worth.