Welcome to another wild and crazy Techtober week! Yesterday I spent the day at Apple’s NYC HQ checking out its new smart home devices, including the HomeView hub. More on that below.
Then, a whole bucket of AI craziness: Meta and Google have new AI models, and an OpenAI employee allegedly bugged the office. Don’t worry, the FBI arrested him, and the DOJ says it was an employee from Saudi Arabia. Plus, a tour of Elizabeth Holmes’ office. Sort of.
📆 Calendaring note: We will be back in your inboxes tomorrow instead of Friday with some exclusive reporting on Microsoft and Nvidia. Like I said, wild and crazy Techtober continues.
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It was a dark and stormy night in Cupertino.
Deep in the bowels of Apple’s secret labs, an engineer had a brilliant idea: What if we took an Apple Watch, an iPad and the iPhone’s CarPlay functionality, threw them into a cute machine, flipped the switch and brought an entirely new Apple product TO LIFE!?
That, dear readers, is the untold origin story of Apple’s new HomeView, set for release next month. I swear every word is true. (Absolutely none of it is true.) But that’s exactly how I felt after getting my first look at the HomeView at Apple’s event on Tuesday.
The new $299 device is Apple’s answer to Amazon’s Echo Show and Google’s Nest Hub: a touchscreen command center for your smart home. But unlike those devices, the HomeView feels like a Frankenstein’s monster of existing Apple products, stitched together into something new. And it’s one of Apple’s biggest ecosystem plays in years.
Apple isn’t just trying to get another screen into your home. It’s trying to make your home another extension of your Apple devices; you need to have an iPhone or iPad to even use the HomeView in the first place. And for those of us who have Apple HomeKit gear all over our homes, this new product might just be…a good idea? Let’s examine the parts.
Fun Fact: According to 2026 Census data, the median new home in the U.S. is 2,142 square feet. This figure is down 325 square feet from its peak in 2015. That’s roughly a room and a half gone—or one less room to fill with Apple’s new HomeView.
This newsletter was written and curated by Joanna Stern and Adele Lowitz.
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