The Vergecast - HomeView: Apple just got serious about the smart home | Livestream

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

Apple just announced its long-rumored HomeView smart home hub. But that's not all... there are cameras, thermostats and a door lock co-developed with LG and Schneider Electric, refreshed HomePod Minis, even a new Apple TV 4K. The Verge's senior smart home reviewer Jennifer Pattinson Tuohy joined Nilay Patel and David Pierce LIVE to discuss and take your questions about Apple's massive play to take over your house. You have until Thursday to vote for us in the Signal Awards! Vote Decoder: Best Business Podcast Vote Vergecast: Best Technology Podcast Vote Version History: Best History Podcast Further reading: Apple launches HomeView, its first smart display for the home The new Apple Home Collection includes a video doorbell, smart lock, and more Apple announces the HomePod Mini 2, but it isn’t ready for Siri AI at launch The new Apple TV 4K has built-in microphones so you can talk to Siri AI Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of personal context, a thing that means everything and nothing in the Apple ecosystem. I'm a friend David Pierce. I am joined by two of my colleagues, and I would say maybe one in two on the list of Verge smart home sickos. Number one with a bullet, Jen Tui. Hi, Jen, welcome. Hello, hello.

And my friend and yours, Neilie Patel. Hello, sir. I'm just a dilettante, a smart home dilettante. Are you okay with being number two to Jen? Jen is like oh it's not even a question it's like okay to being number two to Michael Jordan it's like yes I will collect my rings and quietly go home and we'll all know what's true and then in 30 years you'll make a really saucy documentary about how Jen never could have done it without you yeah yes we are here we are live on YouTube Apple just had its big welcome home

it I hesitate to call it an event uh Jen I want to talk a little bit about the last sort of 24 hours of your life because the experience of this launch has been really interesting. But Apple just made its big, long-awaited push into the smart home. We have a new device called the HomeView that we're going to talk about a lot. We have a new HomePod Mini. We have a new Apple TV. We have a bunch of LG-made sensors and devices. Don't forget Schneider Electric.

Come on, dog. I have been talking about Schneider Electric a lot, and I keep getting people telling me, why are we talking about this before, before today. Now everyone cares. I actually had them install a smart home panel in my house, But that's a whole other story. There you go. Shout out to Schneider Electric.

When we're saying smart home sickos, I don't think you understand that Jeff and I are smart home sickos. A lot of what we've been talking about for years just got thrust into the foreground. They're actually one of the original founders of Matter or like original early product companies in Matter. But anyway, I disfailed you. I'm sorry. I will warn you, there are going to be several instances of a new game that I'm going to

instigate on the Vergecast called should this have been an iPad. This is going to come up several times in this conversation. So get ready. I have strong feelings about that one. So do I. And so do our commenters. Travis, our producer is also going to be looking through all of your comments. We're looking at them too, but it's far away from me and my eyesight is not what it once was.

So we're going to, if you have comments, if you have questions, throw it all up. Travis is going to put a bunch on the screen and make us have feelings about them. Jen, let's start with you. Tell us, tell us about your day so far. This has been a strange Apple launch. We've all been to all flavors of Apple launch. but this was an unusual one. Just give us a sense of your day today.

This is my first ever in-person Apple event. So, yes. They don't normally invite me because they don't normally do anything with the smart home. So this was a big moment for the smart home. Apple finally paying some intention after a decade of sort of it being a hobby project, it feels like. But yes, so today the event started at 9 a.m. this morning.

And you're right, it's not in the lexicon of Apple experiences. This is an experience is what they called it, not an event. So there wasn't a big onstage presentation, but there was a keynote with one of the sort of product leads from Apple Home talking about the new product showing the video, which I think we will get to. And then they sort of, so it was in this Tribeca townhouse, which is something I think Apple has several events there a year for different products. But it was a home environment, so everything was sort of set up in situ, although there was one demo area where it was all like put on plinths and

looks like the crown jewels kind of thing. And I was taken through like different experiences. It was very similar. I think you both came to the Amazon event a couple of years ago where they had little rooms set up with different experiences. It was very much like that. But the key difference here was that Apple hired an interior designer, to completely design the home space to make it look more authentic, not made by a tech company,

which I have to say I actually appreciated because it really was a nice space. All of the rooms were very well done because they were turned by a professional. And then the home devices were sort of interspersed. They were so well interspersed that you kind of missed them. Like, oh, hang on, I need to go back. There was one there.

So yeah, that was, so I went through a few different experiences in that space for all the new products. And then they had a sort of, like I said, the sort of the room where everything's just on displays. But all of that stuff was not, you couldn't control it. It was all in demo mode. So I did, but I got to do some actual hands on in the house space, the apartment, the very expensive New York City loft apartment that I would love to move into if they're looking for

anyone. That place is spectacular. Would you like me to break your smart home? I know. I'm like, I could definitely, you know, torture test this for you. So I'm actually curious about the demos that they did for you because I think the big question that has shown up everywhere as this launch has been happening. Obviously this is a controller for your home. I'm almost hesitant to call it a smart home device, which is a thing I want to talk about and I think is a thing that you're struggling with too.

But the question of what does Apple perceive this thing to be? to be. It's a seven-inch screen that you can, you can mount it on the wall, you can put it on a table, you can plug it in, you can, whatever. It is, it is a home device that is supposed to do lots of things for lots of people and I want to get into all of those things, but I'm fascinated by the way that Apple decided to explain to you what this thing is for. Like what were the demos that you actually got to see? Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I probably should, I didn't really get into it, but obviously there were a lot of products announced. So there was the whole, Home View, which is the smart display.

And then there was the new Apple TV, the new Home Pod Mini, and also lots of smart home accessories as part of a new Apple Home collection from LG and Schneider. So that was like door locks and thermoacquist. You're actually paying you, Jen. Just be honest. This is the time to say it. But yeah, they're a great company. You know, if you haven't, if you, they probably made the in wall, so breaker box in your house.

That's what they make. Anyway, yes, I'm being diverted. So this was built, interestingly, and Apple always has a script, so everyone who talked to you sort of said the same thing. It's billed as both a entertainment device, a personal device, and a home. Apple has to stop doing this.

They've become a cover band. In a very important way, Apple's like, we've had a big, hit and we're going to do that hit again. And it's like, it was an internet communicator and a widescreen iPod and this one's like, it's an entertainment device and this other thing and a third thing. Can I just play the role of the smart home sicko in the audience watching this all all over the down?

Yes. And I, last night at like midnight, I was looking at Jen's coverage. It was about to go up. And all I could say was, is this just weird and complicated and a little bit confusing? Because all of it seems weird and complicated and a little bit confusing. And I think your question about should it be? an iPad, the idea that I have to go buy new cameras for the outside of my house to use the new Apple device when the cameras on my house already have an iOS app is just like the disconnect in

my brain is just monumental. I did specifically ask them. I said, so can I like download the ring app and view my ring cameras? They didn't actually say no, but they just went on with another question. They were like so, but you can view HomeKit Secure Video cameras through. the home app. Easily the most complicated way to do any cameras ever. Someone, what was it? Amjid 300, great name. It says, interesting, it'll have CarPlay apps.

It won't have CarPlay apps. Right. There will be another class of apps using the CarPlay frameworks. Yes, right. So you have to make an app for the phone. You have to make a CarPlay app for that phone. You have to redo that app for the iPhone 2 now. And then you have to make a second thing that is based on the CarPlay framework for this thing.

Well, so yeah, and I didn't get into deep details around that. They did say that basically it uses the CarPlay architecture. So any of the current audio device, audio apps that work in CarPlay should work. Although, so like they mentioned Audible. And I assume Spotify, because that's one that does. But no video because right now no video services are on CarPlay. I don't know because I don't use CarPlay. But I'm guessing you don't watch Netflix while you're driving down the interstate.

So I can see why there's a there's a path to video and car play. But that's just like a, why should I know about that as a consumer of this device that is meant to be plugged into my kitchen? I think the idea behind the car play is it's curated apps. So not every, so the way it works is when you, it's like the Apple Watch in the early days. When you added any device, any app you had on your phone that was compatible with the Apple Watch could automatically show up. on the Apple Watch. We have a smart home sicko in the comments who says that is scripted. I'm just shouting you out.

Like that's how deep we are. We've talked about this little Apple Watch on a hockey puck for five minutes and we've mentioned Schneider Electric. We've mentioned scripted. We've gotten our other to HomeKit Secure video and whether or not we're forking car play. Wait, let me just play devil's advocate. Just to plug it in and make it work.

Let me just, let me just swing all the way the other way and point out that almost no one has smart home stuff. The smart home is bad. It is full of products that don't work together. And most people, most people at most have a doorbell camera. Like, or hue lights. Those are the two things that like real people have in their life. Apple is coming from here. Okay. So this is what I was going to ask is like I, I think I expected this to be like Apple launching itself into the smart home universe. And this to me felt like Apple more or less

pretending that the smart home doesn't exist and that Apple is about to invent the smart home. And that's a very appelly thing to do in a way that is kind of annoying, but is also like maybe not completely wrong for something like this. Like most people don't have these devices. And if you have them all, the idea of like, I need to drop this into my home assistance. Like, no, you don't. Don't buy this thing. But like, let me just push back on this. And I want Jen to answer because she is far away the expert.

When you say most people might have a ring doorbell, lots and lots and lots of people have ring doorbells. You can go get a ring doorbell for 90. $89 that you install by peeling the tape off the back and sticking it to the wall. Right? And like millions of people have those things. So there's a part where Apple gets to reinvent the ecosystem. And there's a part where you just have to stare at reality and be like, in order to make this thing work in your home, the home you already have today, you have to get a new doorbell. Yeah.

That's, I just think that's weird. Ring is a difficult one because it was supposed to support home kit if anyone. support HomeKit if anyone remembers all the way back. I'm sure the commenters remember. And Ring is notoriously closed. A lot of the other doorbell manufacturers, I think, could potentially work with this device if Apple Home supported Matter cameras. They don't yet.

So yes, it's all HomeKit secure video. I don't think Ring is ever going to support Matter cameras, not with Jamie Simonoff as the CEO. But sidewalk, they will. And I do, but to David's point that I think Apple does, I was all excited that Apple could come in and like actually do something really cool and fun with this device and make and bring Siri AI and bring some really good capabilities. I've been testing Home Assistant AI's smart home assistance AI for the last year and I can see so much potential here. But I'm up here.

in the smart home in terms of what I want it to do and how advanced I'd love to see. And Apple is coming in right down in the basement and like, okay, we're going to say we have people that use our devices. They're going to see this device and think it's a nice extension of their iPhone in the home, which is essentially what I feel like it is. And then, oh, it's going to be really easy to add a doorbell because there's one that Apple recommends. They said to me, we get people asking us what we should buy all the time.

Now we have things we can say, this is what you should buy. So yeah, and then I was talking, I had an interview with two execs today. And one of the things they were saying was, yeah, we see this. Yes, we know there are a lot of people that are deeply invested in the smart home, but most people aren't. And this, but what gets them in there is one device. And they're like, oh, this works and oh, it works quite well. Maybe I'll try something else.

The problem is when they start with one device and it doesn't work well and it's a bad, experience and then they're like I'm done with this why would I even want to waste my time so they that's the whole sort of point of the home collection with these these partnerships is they're much easier in theory to set up they set up just like your AirPods do is the idea you just come you can tap with NFC and it recognizes the device so they're going for simplicity and ease of use and my hope is that that then they'll build on that but right now this is very much tailored to Smart Home 101.

And the device itself is, you know, first and foremost, they talk about it as being a way to sort of communicate with loved ones. So the FaceTime, like the iPhone experience is part of it. Then enjoy entertainment. So music is the one they mainly pushed because there is no, well, no obvious third-party video yet. Jen, did you just say enjoy entertainment? Enjoy entertainment? You spent too long at an Apple.

I want to read the phrase. So this is what they said, enjoy entertainment, connect with loved ones. I never enjoy everything. So I tried an iPod with such controls. And control your smart home. So the smart home was third. And yeah, that was that, that's the sort of, that's the sales pitch that they were, that they were giving for this device. And yeah, it's not targeted at the person, it's really not even targeted at the person like I was that carved a hole in their wall and stuck an iPad in it and figured out somehow,

some way to plug it in. It does have POE though, so yay. And it's not targeted at that person. It's just, it's targeted at someone that is really deeply in the APO ecosystem and might start to move into the smart home. Not to say that you wouldn't find it useful. Can I just, can I just take those two ideas and once again, the swirl of confusion in my brain that they have created? It's targeted someone who doesn't have a smart home who's in the Apple ecosystem and might want to begin with the LG camera or doorbell. But also, if you know what power over Ethernet is and you have that shit in your walls, they made one for you. And it's like, well, that's a different guy. Like, you know, that's Jen. It's Jen is the person I know with power

over Ethernet. So they're not throwing the power users under the bus here. There's still a few touches for us. And you're like, you know what I'd love to do is put Home Assistant on it. By the way, someone just shouted out that Home Assistant has a CarPlay app like where what are we doing there's just so much about this where it's in order to make it interesting yeah in order to make it interesting everything in the smart home is an edge case i think i've heard you say that yeah yeah right everything is a weird special corner case of weirdness and apple is trying to do the thing where they're they're simplifying it yes and actually the thing to do in a world where you have have an AI system in the background is embrace how complicated it is.

Yes. And I asked them this question too. I said, you know, you've harped on a lot about how Siri AI, it was the reason that they launched this now is because Syria was ready and Siri AI brought capabilities to the home, to the home environment that they could leverage. And I said, but you've already said how powerful this AI is. Could you do something good with it? Could you do something fun? Could you get it to like, make my smart home work better and have understood. I said, you know, I love all this personal context, but how about some home context?

Could that be part of this device? How was the user switching? Here's actually, I feel like we should, we've gotten so into being smart homes that goes, but that's like what happens when you talk about this wrong for five seconds. But right, the idea is, okay, it's sitting in your kitchen. Maybe we should just watch this video. But the idea is it's sitting in the kitchen.

Yeah, because I didn't get to try the user switching because obviously I'm not a registered user. So yeah, the video shows it quite well, I think. And they said that that's very true to life. Should we just watch this video? Yeah, let's, so there's this, let me just set this up real fast. So the Apple put this out with this like three minute long video

showing a family of five navigating this thing. And I think this video essentially tells you everything you need to know good and bad and impossible about what the home view is actually. So the way we're gonna do this is we're just gonna start this video and anybody say pause at any time and then we can talk about it. Sound good?

Yeah, okay. All right. You promise French toast, bro. I'm not your bra, bro. Thomas is we made, Vincent. Fine. Hey Siri, find the French Stills for the future.

Okay, pause. Yeah, right there. Where is it? Where is this device? Oh, I know where it is. Okay, well, also, importantly, the immediate assumption here that becomes very important to this entire thing

is that this device not only understood the request, but understood who is making the request. And this goes back to, I think, the single feature that makes this thing succeed or fail is the multi-user support. And the idea, as I understand it, is that you, it's able to recognize up to six people and it uses the camera to recognize and switch between users. As long as those users have iOS devices. Correct. But importantly, this dude who was just talking to Siri was not looking at it, was not close to it. I don't know if he was in range or not.

So now I'm at the point where like, does at this moment Siri care who is talking to it or is this considered like a group project? No, because that is a message. So the message is personal context. So that had to recognize him. How? Jen. How? And that was one of the things I said in my piece.

I'm like, I don't. Having to stand in front of a device and stick your face in it to get it to react is not a good experience. I've tried that with the echo shows have that. This comes up a bunch in this video. Actually, let's just keep going here. is that you you bring up one of the things I want to talk about let's just keep playing here I found a message from mom with a link to a French toast recipe from taste of home okay stop I was gonna do stop stop okay every recipe blogger on the internet just

exploded like we were just looking at a story from five years ago from developers who put out an app called Recipesley where they scraped all the recipes and didn't show the you know the SEO content at the top that gets people traffic like Apple's like well the web's dead we're just gonna scrape what's left for it for French toast recipes and no one will react to that. I'm just gonna tell you we have already assigned that story because it's it's wild that Apple got here. Continue. I bet you didn't know that French doesn't actually French. Yeah right. Then why is it

called French genius? Fine. Live in Ingram. Hold please. Serious French toast French. No French toast is not originally from France. Where's the power cable? Now he's standing in front of it. So I sort of understand. Okay so the power cable has been drilled into the counter. Just point that as as one does when you buy a new piece of gadgetry. Who with children has not put a hole into their attention counter? All right, keep going, sorry. It's literally in the name.

Whatever, Bruno. Okay, wait, there, pause. Do you, Jen, this is what you're talking about. So the, she's right in front of it, the mom and a family just had to walk up to it, swivel at 90 degrees and have it look at her. And this, I think, is like, this is the behavior. And this is where I come to the first,

shouldn't this just be an iPad? Like, wouldn't it make a lot more sense if I could hand you a thing that you could then hold and look at instead of everyone having to crowd around your kitchen island and literally spin it? Like, no, no, no. You're gonna put this thing on like a lazy, you can over-saint-

When I got my mom her first iPad, like a first generation iPad, the first accessory we got for it was a mount that like mounted on the top cabinets of the kitchen. So she could put it there and like scroll through recipes on it. And this thing was like the biggest hit. It's just this. It's fine. It's a stand. It's fine. So you're saying yes, this could have been an iPad. In this case, you just said it could have been an iPad. I'm just defending the

mounting dynamic. This is why there's going to be one with a rotating arm though, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's the next. But that's the next. This is fine. The idea that it's a little display on a stand that lives in your kitchen totally in the realm of every other device of this. I don't know. Well, we should keep playing this, but there is something to the like chaos. of them all swiveling this thing around towards themselves to get their information. That just does not. None of them has their phone. Well, this is my favorite thing about this is that no one does have their phone. And it's the most unrealistic aspect of this video, but also the most optimistic. Because if I, honestly, if you promised me that if I got this device five years ago,

my kids would not be using their phone at breakfast, even though I tell them they can't, but still sneaking in it, I would have bought it because it's like having, oh no, you don't need to your phone because it's all right here. I mean, this is something that smart displays have been trying to do for a long time is replace your phone so you don't need them to control your home. You don't need them to, like I would try and use Google Nest Hub so that my kids could watch like Teen Titans Go, but unfortunately it would only play it in Spanish for some reason. So it's never worked well. Jen, your children are older than ours.

Am I meant to believe that as teenagers or my children will only argue about French toast in the province they're up? Because I'm looking forward to that. All right. Let's keep going. Hey, who canceled Harper's Ride? Uh, I canceled it. Oh. I'm going to walk today. Poor friend.

What? Sorry, something with the throat. It's for you. Pause. Hello. This I just think is really interesting. It gets a FaceTime call and it says underneath it who it's for. Yes.

So there's just all these little multi-user questions that it's like when you get an incoming call, how do you communicate who is supposed to answer it? it is anyone able to answer it it's just a button like so many questions yeah so I will complicate this further so I already have this device in my home because I have an old iPhone on one of those Belkin Magsafe stands that sits by the door and it just has home kit scenes he uses a duct kit yep and it just whatever you can turn lights on and off using the buttons on that thing and if someone calls me that phone always rings I cannot make it not ring in the way that you know Apple devices are

like a phone call like we have everyone panic. And so I already have this problem that I'm not at home and the thing is ringing. Yeah. And my daughter, if she sees that it's my mom, my daughter will pick it up and be like, hi. And it's fine because at least they're having a conversation. But I'm very curious how that works with this because so much of this device is tied to your iPhone being at home running iOS 27 for some features to work and some features not to work. Yeah. And it's such, it's Dying like that dynamic is just like ever present here. Right.

And it's such a sliding scale, right? There are some things that should obviously be accessible to everybody. There are some things that should obviously only be accessible to you. And then there's just a vast ocean of stuff in the middle that this stuff is just going to have to sort out. And I think a lot of this will probably become very obvious as we get to live with these in our house, which one's worked and which one didn't. But all I see in this entire ad is just questions about who is supposed to answer this call and who is supposed to be able to even see that they're getting a call. And that, and getting your kids to put their profiles on this will be very hard. I don't know many kids that are going to want their text messages showing up on the screen at the kitchen table.

And I've tried to get my kids to use because Amazon Echoes have face ID and voice match. And it was a frustrating experience. So Apple promises this is a much more seamless, like it should happen really fast. But yeah, that extra friction makes the smart display less useful. and it should be more of a communal device. I feel like making it a personal device. Is there differentiation here, though, from the other products on the market right now? I will say, shout out, we're like one minute into this three minute video.

We've already talked about 500 things. And the idea that these people are living a life written by Aaron Sorkin is very, very prevalent. Like, everyone is talking as fast as they can and they all have got business. Yeah, about French toast. All right, keep going. Let's play through this. Tom, a big time? It's sad. We're a bit busy now. What's with the beard?

We don't like the beer. Never did. Hey, has anyone see my keys? Uh, no, I haven't seen him. He looks like that. I thought we hate. Yeah. Hey, good pep talk.

Guys. Uh, call you from the car. Love you. Hey, bye. Bye. God, Los Alain. Siri, ping my keys. Pay me in your keys.

So, just pause. First of all, I mean, classic. But she has a phone. Right? Like, he's on the device talking to grandpa. Mm-hmm. And she has to wait. Right.

It's just like it's just a weird dynamic thing. Yeah, because he was the user and now then she has to switch. And also she wasn't close enough for it to know it was her because it doesn't use just the voice. It uses the face. So that was a little, it felt a little disingenuous there because she was. We don't know how fast the user switching is either, right? This is the number one question I have for this device is when no one's in front of it,

what is the user? Does it have a generic user that can do some things and control something? So the answer is yes, because there's some mentions in even the press release about like guests being able to access stuff. So. Right. But in the Apple. There is a base level, we have no idea who you are. Sure.

But in the Apple ecosystem, there are, there's no generic user. There's no base level of access that a device can have. Everything is user based. You're called an unrecognized user. So this is a new user in the Apple ecosystem. So I mean like their architecture does not have that category. in it. Everything is a user, everything is an iCloud account, everything is permissioned. So they've invented a new unrecognized user that has some

capabilities, some permissions. So anything that doesn't require personal context or that doesn't control security devices in your home can be accessed by anyone without being recognized. So you are the unrecognized user. So you can turn lights on and off, you can control thermostats, you can ask questions, the general knowledge, play music and you can watch live streams from videos you just can't rewind and see recordings and yeah it's very much a it's a guest mode but you are you're an unrecognized user you can also tailor it so if you have a device in a guest room you can just give them control of their devices in their home in their room rather than the whole house that kind of stuff so yeah john rober wrote a post about

the multi-user stuff and one of the things he said is that apple told him uh that there is a presumption that just by the fact that it's in your house, whoever is talking to it is reasonably allowed to do so. And I think that's fine. Right? And some of that exists on the Apple TV, some of you, like, you just, if you are in range of this thing,

you should be able to do some things on it, I think is fine. So that this is, that's my question. So they've, I am guessing that they did not re-architect their entire user account system. Just to, I might be wrong. Right, well, we're gonna get the device, we'll ask a million questions, we'll find out.

But I'm guessing that all of that is basically the same as it has been. So they've been, I've invented a new user, and I know the Apple TV, if you don't have to set up users, but the Apple TV still needs you to have an Apple account in order to download apps. Like their entire user model is predicated around Apple accounts. They're just in the realest way. So then they made a new user that needs to be logged into something to get access to HomeKit.

So is that a variant of your account? Like I'm just dying to know because the thing that needs to happen is then you show up, David, you show up, and it sees your face and it switches to your account with your permissions. And then you hang up the call, you turn it, Jen's there to ask for her keys and needs to switch to her account and go into her devices and ping her find my and I have no idea

how quickly those users will switch. If they're all active at the same time and the devices just quickly like, I mean, RAM's expensive, so is everything active at the same time? Like this is the core promise of this device in a real way and how it works to me, is still kind of a mystery. And this video is not making it clear. That's it. If it works the way it would be awesome, it is depicted, it would be incredible. Like this is the kind of thing,

that sort of simultaneous multi-person, multi-use device would be unbelievable. And it's something that nothing in the home for any system like this does a good job of right now. And it is actually exactly what we need. So the idea of that is like the foundation of my smart home. Right. So we have, what's it, Jordi Lopez 1175 is like it's an extension of your phone, not a reply. Great. I think It's an extension of six people's phones. Yes. That is just a new operating model for the whole deal. Yep.

Right? This thing is six phones at once. Okay, which one is active? How does it know? What if two people fight? Like, there's a lot of questions, and it's an extension of your phone. For sure. And the multi-user issue is exactly the reason why an iPad has never fit into this role properly.

It's been very hard to use it as a home control device because of that. Well, Apple just wants to sell all of your children. Why? Why, Jen, why couldn't Apple do every single thing it did here on an iPad? Like, one of the core brands of the verge is that we have asked every person who works at Apple for a decade why we can't do better multi-user support on iPads. And just just a lot of like shrugging at us. And this is the idea.

Like again, this is, this is the correct idea about how this should work. Maybe it's coming. It would be so funny. If they launched this and then like in two weeks, they're like, Oh, all these same features are coming. But no, we will not cancel your pre-order. We're so sorry. All right, we need to get off of this.

We have a lot of testing. Let's do this. Thing is coming out, I think, in a month. We will get one at some point. We didn't even finish the video. We didn't even finish the video. We are too deep in this. But Jen, I do want to know, there's been a lot of talk about the hardware.

Some people are mad about the bezels. There are a lot of questions about the size and shape of the thing. You're the only one of us who has actually looked at it and touched it. How do you feel about the hardware? I like the screen. I really like the screen. I mean, it's not a smartphone. I don't, the bezels don't bother me.

It actually makes it look like more of a photo frame, which is, it does, it displays photos really beautifully. And I love the way it works. The clock kind of works around your photo. So it's not just sort of stuck over your face. The photo element is key here. And you know, you always knew that it would be. I think the hardware feels very solid.

The screen is really responsive. I was, it feels, like using an iPad, a lot of swiping and it has the control center. You swipe up for the apps as well as the widgets. Obviously it looks an awful lot like Apple Watch faces and they actually call these devices that they call the screens faces and you can choose from multiple faces. You can actually easily swipe too. You don't have to do like go to your iPhone and set them up. You can just do it all on the device and you can swipe through whichever faces you like. Many of the faces have widgets so that you can control different things.

The sound was fairly impressive for the size. I was surprised at how small this was. Actually, the speaker itself is really quite compact. You barely see it behind the screen. The square form factor I originally was a bit like when obviously this has been leaked for months and years. And I thought the square form factor seems a little odd. But actually it fits nicely in the home because it's not, it doesn't take up as much space. It feels like you can sort of slot it into areas a little easier than say like the echo

show 11 or the Nest Hub Max which are wide and long and they take up a lot of room. So I think form factor wise. I don't look like a TV which is important. Yeah. Like I think there are a lot of these devices that look like tiny TVs and I think the aspect ratio is a big part of that. And so just the fact that it is a different shape from what amounts to a television in your house, I think is goes a long way here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean and again I think the and the display is is nice and bright but also goes down to 0.3 nits, which they said is the dimmest they've ever done, which Apple said was a strange claim to fame for a screen. But you know, I know, Nila, you use the Google Nest Hub and that can get really dim and works actually quite well

as a bedside table device because it gets so dim, whereas the echo shows are too bright. So I'm interested, they didn't have a dim room for me to test it out, but I'm very interested to see if this is going to be able to be dim enough to have in a in your bedroom because it could make a nice Bedside table display and you know smart devices and you know set an alarm those types of things I could see it seems like it has for me two core places where it would fit well the bedroom and the kitchen in your home and then potentially in like your entryway if you're gonna use it for controlling smart devices Yellow Mellow asks in our comments Jen can you watch movies and TV shows on it did a lot of people ask asking this. Like, people want the tiny kitchen TV.

Can this be the tiny kitchen TV? So they said it will depend on devices, on apps supporting the CarPlay framework that we discussed earlier, whether you get Netflix or Hulu. But they are open to it. There is a path to that. It will be up to the app makers to develop for it. I'm not going to try to stand for my Google home very much. It is at this point just a confused and lost device.

But Google owns YouTube TV and a thing you can do is you can just ask it to play the Packers game and it will just do it. Do you know what I mean? Like that ecosystem exists and there's just a part of this where Apple being like, it was all bad actually is it's working against this product in real ways. Right. If you can't just put the YouTube TV app on this thing and run it, like what are we what are we doing? Yeah. Do you think Google will develop YouTube TV? develop a car play variant of the YouTube TV app but only for this device because it's actually not car like do you know like there's just something about this that is like it it's too in a bubble when can we watch the Odyssey on it as Nolan intended is an amazing question um Christopher Nolan doesn't give a shit how you watch his movies this is a real thing

yeah he's he's he also would never have a home view no he doesn't even know he doesn't even know how you're watching his movies he's not worried about it I have so many more questions about this device specifically we obviously have to get it and review it you can tell I'm like I'm fascinated by it in like 10,000 different ways but just to come all the back around to the Schneider electric of it just just to point you to Patel I there's Schneider devices in this house they don't just make the panels they make really nice light switches they bought a company called Shelley which makes relays and can eye behind real light switches like real

smart home nerds know that this is this company is a force because they make all the stuff. And all I'm pointing out is, yes, it's kind of funny that Apple went to LG, the privacy company, to make a bunch of cameras so they can send that data to LG servers to, who knows. But they had to go to Schneider because they make all the other stuff, right? If you want a whole bunch of matter, light switches and devices, like Schneider is the company that makes them. Yeah. So that little concession to the reality of the smart home is to me like the most revealing part of this whole exercise that if you want this thing to work and you want it to be the

Siri AI device that they're, you know, they waited for it to be real before they launch this hardware. The reality is there, right? The reality is that lots of people have ecobee thermostats that are on home kit. And now you're going to put another screen next to those ecobee thermostats, right? Like the reality is lots of people have doorbells and smart locks and they're incredibly popular and they may or may not work with this. Lots of people, I'm staring at my home bridge. It's over there.

My little raspberry pie tomogachi of a homebridge is over there. That is a popular thing. It's so popular that people have commercialized Humbridge and made companies out of it. And there's like scandals and controversies about that. Like I know you think it's small. All I hear at the end of every one of these sentences is parentheses and very, and vastly more people do not. Right, but if you want to sell this device,

this is why I'm bringing up Schneider Electric, if you want to sell this device into anyone's house, you will just run into the brutal reality that everyone's house is different. Yes. And so everyone needs different things in different ways. Everyone has weird electricity in their house. David, I believe you just had to rewire your entire house.

Sure did. Because you had weird electricity in your house. Sure did. Right, like everyone just has these crazy problems. Some people just are renters and they can't screw things into the wall the way that Apple appears you'd want to drill holes in your furniture to make this product work. And the reason I just come back to Snyder Electric is like that is the concession here. They needed the partner that makes all of the stuff. Yep.

The other concession is they're partnering with ADT to install it. So you go to the Apple store and you buy this stuff. You're like, I don't have anyone to put it in. They will send ATT to your house. Do you know what the least Apple experience you can have in the entire world is? is dealing with ADT. Like the number of people who are going to get upsold to an ADT security system that does not work with Apple Home,

but does, in fact, work with the Google ecosystem because Google is an investor in ADT, but boggles the mind. So, okay. This is, this is a good segue into the Apple Home collection of products with Schneider Electric, the Vergecast's favorite company apparently. LG made a bunch of stuff.

We should talk about all these products. Thank you, Siri. Siri just failed. Like, it literally failed as we're live streaming. We're going to talk about the Apple TV and the HomePod Mini in a little bit. And spoiler alert, everybody, I'm going to make Neelai try to justify a $300 Apple TV 4K. So we will get to that. But first, we need to make some money so we can all go buy these weird things.

So we're going to take a really quick ad break. And then we're going to come. We're going to get into the home collection. We're back. Support for the show comes from Upwork. Business owners know that you kind of need to become a job. of all trades to grow. But as you do, situations arise where you end up wishing you can simply hire a jack or a jill of a very particular trade. In those cases, you'll be glad to have Upwork.

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And you could use a platform that has it all and stays useful even after you launch. That's what Framer is. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. You're able to prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. On Framer, agents bring speed and scale while people bring taste, judgment, and control. And that all takes place in the same workspace where the real site is designed, managed, reviewed, and published. Everyone's ideas land on the canvas, stay editable, and can be published when the team is ready.

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You go to Apple's website and it just has a picture that is just like a white circle on a white background. It's just like, they're just, what if, what if this device was nothing? That's how it's supposed to be. Nealai, we talked a little bit about this last week on the Vergecast in sort of looking ahead to what this is going to be. And you made the argument that partnering with a company like LG and Schneider Electric, our favorite, Makes a lot of sense for a company like Apple if you're going to ship all these things. It's so good. Tell me what is going on with the home collection here.

Why do this if you're Apple? So I don't think Apple wants to make all these devices. Apple's manufacturing is all about massive scale, like just huge scale. They got to make a billion iPhones this year. They're going to do that. If you want to make a bunch of cameras and get them through all of the certifications in all the countries, like these are just, they're better suited to. two companies that manufacture lots and lots of different things. That's just the reality of it.

And I also think Apple doesn't not want to own the like customer relationship here in a really important way. Like you bought an LG camera. Too bad it sucks. It's like a great hedge for Apple. And the whole point of this ecosystem I keep saying is they're going to need a massive ecosystem to support everyone's house. There's someone in the chat who said I'm just making up exaggerated edge cases and I'm just going to defer to Jen and and have her back me. me up, everyone's house is crazy and this is the thing that kills everyone's smart home dreams. You cannot sell it as a product. You have to stand up integrators who come to your house and design a system for you.

Right. And that's, I mean, that speaks to the whole ADT partnership too. It's like, yeah, the idea here is that they're going to come and install this stuff for you. Because I remember when we were talking a while back about what all these rumors, it's like, is Apple really going to make a video doorbell? Are they going to have systems to help you install? door wiring into your home and that doesn't seem like an Apple thing to do. And it isn't.

So yeah, and Google did this too. They partnered with, was it on tech with their devices before the ADT partnership to get these into people's homes? Because yeah, most people, even though installing a smart lock actually isn't that hard, neither is installing the smart video doorbell. Most people just either aren't, don't want to consider it or are put off by the prospect and having someone else do it for you makes a lot of sense. But the packaging of the smart home, I think, is one of the concerns I have about this.

It's like a smart home in a box, to your point, Nealight, rarely works because it just, these things don't fit into your home. And like, who needs three, four security cameras from LG? Actually, I would rather have some door window sensors or a flood or a leak sensor, which is what we may end up seeing from the Schneider partnership. I did ask Apple if there was any more coming from these partnerships and they obviously didn't share. This is, I think, one of the weird things about this is HomeKit supports Matter just fine. Right.

I have Leagues sensors in my house. They're in HomeKit through Matter just fine. And then the list of devices here, and I'm curious where you take on the prices, right? LG is making a $200 indoor camera that automatically tilts down to provide privacy when you return home. Cool. a $300 outdoor security camera with optional floodlights that raise the price to $400. That's a bit of a bum. And a $250 video doorbell.

Yep. And it's HomeKit Secure Video, which you have to buy some complicated additional ICAD plan to get cloud recording operating on it. All of that is more expensive than anything else. And that's not even including a $40 temperature sensor and a $200 thermostat and a $350. smart deadbolt lock like every one of these is vastly more expensive than you could find in lots of the ecosystems I will say they look cool sure the smart lock is sort of on par because of the UWB but yeah the rest the rest of them are a

high-end they're not out of the park expensive but they're definitely high-end and most of especially around video doorbells and security cameras prices have been coming way down over the years and ring because they're all subsidized by Much, yeah, a lot of, well, to your point, right, the basic HomeKit Secure Video subscription is relatively inexpensive. You can get it with the sort of 50 gigabyte ICloud plan. But if you want the new Apple intelligence features, you're going to be paying a lot more money.

In fact, I think the highest tier is $60 a month, and that covers five HomeKit Secure Video cameras, which there's a subscription money to be had in the smart home. This is probably really why Apple is moving in this way. Just to put this in the context of ring, I know there's lots and lots of other brands out there. And the market is actually staggeringly competitive for cameras like this because they are cheap to make. Right. I mean, we're just talking about the smartphone supply chain. Yeah.

Like if you want to buy a five-year-old camera sensor and stick it on the wall with a Wi-Fi chip, like you can just get those. And that is a lot of what has enabled the smart home market. But one of our ring cameras just died. And I was like, I should buy a new one. And then I thought to myself, I will wait until any. holiday or prime day when Amazon will just give me one for free because I'm a subscriber, right? And that is just the reality of that market. That is a subscription. They know it's going to pay off over time. And Apple is not competitive with that. Now, you can have a lot of feelings about

ring. You can have a lot of feelings about, I don't know, security and police and that whole model, but Apple is going to charge you money for a subscription, and that subscription is not going to subsidize one of these devices at all. And I think a lot of people just look at the dollars and cents. Like straightforward, they look at the dollars and cents. Yeah, but also there is something to what we were talking about earlier, that there is a power just in being the products that Apple has decided to bless. Yeah. And my question for you in this case, Jen, is looking at this list of products, did Apple go out and work with these companies to make the best smart home stuff that exists?

Or is this just overpriced versions of things that already exist that Apple is going to sell in the Apple store and make a lot of money off of? Because we have seen Apple do both of those things in the past. Yeah. So I would say this is a list of list of the most popular smart home devices that people use. They're the ones that have the solve single point solutions. So you know, you want to know if you have a package. You want to be able to get into your house. The floodlight camera is actually my recommendation. If you're going, if you want a smart security camera, they're one of the best solutions for one because you have the lights and the motion activated light is a nice safety feature like just walking around

your house, not security wise. But yeah, these are the most popular devices, thermostats as well. But I think in terms of the best products, what the selling point here isn't that they've done anything special and created new products that no one else has. It's that Apple integration. It's the setup I mentioned earlier where you just tap, you can just tap these devices and they will pair like your AirPods. So the idea is to be a lot simpler. And whilst the design was based...

Like a David's face. Neil, say matter. Say matter. What makes is this? You should have to scan a QR code. Yes, that's true, except for, but one, but the advantage here of the Apple integration, specifically to your point about LG sending your video off to China is that all of the devices work with Apple devices in your home. They do not use any LG servers.

They do not use an LG app. It's all going through your Apple devices, your Home Hub, your Home View, your Apple TV. Apple TV, potentially through your phone, it's all controlled by you. So that's the security and privacy angle is the big one. And that's why a HomeKit's secure video has always sort of had an edge. And the MATA standard for cameras hasn't really filled that gap yet because someone needs to take it and run with it and no one really has. But that's what Apple's selling here is that these are products that we guarantee the security

and privacy of and you don't have to worry about downloading apps. You can't do that with any other security camera yet because they don't work with matter. other devices do work with Matter. So yes, you don't have to download the app. But I'm just saying the reason for that, the ice cold business reason for that is cameras of the device where you can charge a subscription fee for storage and AI recognition and security services. So there's no way anyone has any incentive to make Matter cameras.

Because then you can decouple them from the subscription service. And you can see Apple is doing almost exactly the same thing here. Yeah, they did say, you know, we're fully invested in Matter and we're interested and working on the Matter smart home camera standard. In fact, the lead of the Matter camera standard is an Apple engineer. So they are fully involved in that. But yeah, at this point, they said we're still sticking with HomeKit Secure Video. But you can, you could use, a platform could use Matter and still add a subscription

layer on top. It doesn't negate the ability to put a subscription layer on top if you add additional features like the AI text descriptions, which is that's what you have to pay. pay $60 a month for if you want that on five cameras with HomeKit. So yeah, there's you they could use matter as the infrastructure and then add their services on top, um, which I think of it is they may get to eventually, but they did just completely re-architect and a whole new spec for HomeKit Secure Video came out at WWDC this year. So um, they're sort of yeah, that would have been the moment to go to matter.

I would just say all of this is, it's, it's, It's made so much easier if you have AI around, right? The whole point of this is that Siri AI is good now and do world knowledge and ask it any question you want. And that is all right next to a bunch of Apple's competitors are launching things that look like agents and how many times have we covered, you know, someone built a dashboard and cloud code that can run their home assistant. Like this is a thing that exists in the world today.

And all of these devices and all this configuration and all the automation that makes having this stuff really valuable. is nowhere in this product. Yeah. Like, why do you have a temperature sensor to do stuff when it detects temperature changes? Not just to look at it, like, being like, I wonder what temperature it is in the basement is not of enormous value. So I think, I'm hoping we'll see more. So Apple did launch the adaptive temperature feature and they didn't, I did not get confirmation.

I haven't read the PR yet. But I didn't get confirmation whether I'm assuming these two thermostats will work with adaptive temperature because very few smart thermostats that have come out to date work with that. And that is using some type of, it's geolocation predominantly, but I'm hoping you'll kind of see that next level when they start to bring these sensors together with AI and bring that home context in to play to start doing some of the more proactive things that the smart home could do. Because the adaptive temperature now, it will, like it adjusts based on how far away you are from home so that your home will be. And this is what Nests did for years too.

But Apple has it baked in to the OS system so that you don't have to buy a specific thermostat. You just have to, it just has to be, you don't have to buy a specific brand like NEST as long as it's compatible with Apple Home and supports Apple Home adaptive temperature. which and these sensors but would feed into you can have these all around your house so kind of get that ecobi experience which is what you could be sold sold itself on for many years where you know it can adjust in different parts of your home but that's all quite complicated to set up and to manage it was complicated for you to just say yeah like I love this stuff and I'm just like I there's this is what I I'm just going to keep coming back to this the idea that they can ignore what exists in why it all exists as complicated as it is yes and just be like buy these cameras

it's all gonna work great is gonna it it just my guess is is that's why David you called it out is like wonder what they think this is yes right there's like an inbuilt inherent confusion here because you can't not gesture at all these weird edge cases yes and I think it's so funny to me the way Apple is approaching this because the bet here clearly is that people will start by buying a home view that your first smart home gadget for a lot of people will be a home view. And then that will be the sun around which everything else rotates. And that is so the opposite of the dream of the smart home,

which is that there are a million entry points. And the controller doesn't really matter because all of the controllers all work. Because the logic lives on a server in your basement. Right. You just buy all the things that you need and they all figure out how to work together. And I would say I have been bearish on matters ability to pull any of this off. I think for a good reason.

Listen, history continues to prove me a little more right every single day. And it makes me sad every single time. But I do think Apple is looking at this

to say the main thing you're going to want is this main device. And this is like a generation old idea, right? Like go all the way back to the original Amazon Echo. And there was this thing

about, okay. Do we know what processor this thing has in it? Do we know any of its specs? Does it have RAM? Um, AAT. is the chip.

So the Apple TV has the A-19, but the A-18 is what powers the Siri AI. The Apple TV has more processing power than the... Yeah. It's plenty of process. Both of them are going to be vastly overpowered for what you need on these devices. I'm just curious why you would make that choice.

Price. Sure. This thing is cheaper than the Apple TV. What are we doing here? They're the same price, aren't they? Oh, you're right. They're the same price. Very confusing.

All the way around. I know. I was surprised. It's like, oh, yeah. I was actually thinking this is going to be 350. Because the Apple TV is a game console, you guys. Come on. Get it through your heads. I don't think this isn't the computer. Like this is the other big smart home philosophical swirl is where does the computer live in your house? So if you want to have a bunch of automations or you just want everything to connect to something, you have to make some choices. And I would, these are abstractions, but like in the Google ecosystem, Kind of everything lives in the cloud, like in a very Googly way. That's true somewhat of Alexa as well, although those devices are,

Jen's just, I'm just looking at Jen to see if I'm getting this right. This is very much like taking a test live. They both have some local control, but the majority is through the cloud. All the logic and all the automations live in the cloud. The Apple ecosystem is the most confusing ecosystem of them all. Like sometimes if your Apple home breaks, the way to fix it is by restarting your iPhone. Your iPhone. And I don't know why.

And this device carries it through. They haven't been like, OK, this thing is in your house. It's a computer. It's going to run all the logic. I was hoping it would have more. I asked us like, does it do something special as a home hub? Or is it just like all the others? And if you leave your house with your phone

or you don't have a phone running iOS 27, this thing has different capabilities, which is bananas. Yeah. But Apple doesn't acknowledge the existence of people who don't have iPhones running the latest version of iOS, which is fine. But what I'm saying is like, again, the question is just like, where is the computer? I think this is the computer.

I think the biggest- The computer is still your phone. No, it's, sure. Like, no, Neil, I love you, but no one actually cares where the computer is. People care where they get to the computer. Trust me, the second your Apple home breaks, you'll be like, show me the computer

because I need to unplug it and plug it back in. And then you will find yourself like restarting your Apple Watch while hopping up and down on one foot and logging out of ICloud. You're like, just show me the computer. Sure. All of that is true, but I think Apple looks at this.

and says this for a lot of people in their home is the computer. It is the central device that will manage everything. And how all of that works is abstract by design. It's abstract, but it's also, you are very confidently answering a different question, which is, where does HomeKit live? That's the question I'm asking. What is the device in which HomeKit operates? In Apple's case, It's all of them at once. Yes. Which is in the context of this being the first smart home device that you buy is just again, I have a million questions about how that will work for regular people.

Well, I wrote a whole piece about this saying I wanted Apple to launch like a home hub that was also a router that's also a local AI processing that does everything, like that it is your computer that runs your smart home. We saw these at EFA this year. There were two companies, UFI and UGreen, launched these kind of whole home computer, NAS device storage systems for your home that run local AI. But that's, that's definitely, you know, that's the Mac book, that's the Mac Pro trash can level of smart home, not, not the Homepad Home View level of smart home. I mean, we, we have people who have just full on home labs

in our comments here, right? Like, it's like there is, there's a big spectrum in the market. This isn't for you, but. And that's okay. This is the thing. So I just, I mean, I just, To be like, I just think it's true. Philosophically, this is one of the things about this device that is the most interesting. And, and like you said, for a company like Apple that only makes things that are us sensibly for everybody, the Vision Pro threw people off because it was for nobody. And this is very much not for everybody. And I think, I think, and one of the things that I believe in my heart is that this device would have made a hell of a lot more sense to a hell of a lot more people three years ago, which is probably when Apple wanted to launch it. When they were supposed to launch it. Siri AI screwed the home view because Siri AI wasn't any good when it was supposed to come out and then it came out and it is too late and they have missed a lot of the people for whom this would have made sense could have been the beginning of the smart home journey like would have brought a lot of people in and instead we just like those people bought echo shows.

Yes, we just let chaos rain for two more years. People built weird things and this does not slot into any of those things. To be clear, Jen just wrote a piece about living with Alexa Plus for one year and it's not like they solved the deed. It's not like there's a whole. The whole, like, the market is done. Like, it's still pretty bad all around. The market is done in the sense that people are, people that are in it are fed up with it. And people that aren't in it are like, why would I get involved in that? It looks really serious. If you're not already a person with a smart home device, do you want a smart home device?

Is such an open question. I keep telling when I talk, I was just at the Z wave summit a couple weeks ago. And I was talking to my, I just got the hard eyes. This is why it's going to enjoy entertainment. The Z-Waves Summit. Was it, is the building the shape of a Z? No, they don't have a building anymore, so. Since Silicon Labs sold them.

But yes, I was at the Z Wave Summit and I was talking to, I did a little presentation about what people want from the smart home. And I was like, we, we, the problem today is that we are not, manufacturers are not able to explain the benefits of the smart home. of the smart home. We need to tell the stories of the smart home. This is what I do try and do in my reviews. It's like, how does this help me in my daily life? How does this work in my home? How does it help with my kids? You know, too many things are about protocols and plugs and hubs and there's not enough about like this is what you can actually do. I think most people come to the smart home

from a single point solution. They have something they need to fix. They fix it with a device, a garage door controller, a video doorbell, a smart door lock. And then they start to see, oh, this is kind of neat. Maybe I can try something else. But when that first experience is bad, that's where things start to fall apart. And this is Apple's angle here, I think, is we're going to make that first experience good, hopefully, and then you'll buy more things. Agreed.

All right, we are getting kicked out of, well, Jen is getting kicked out of the studio in 15 minutes, and we still need to listen to Neil, I try to convince us all to buy $300. Apple TVs. But before that, we need it ready. It looks just like the old one. They didn't even make it fancy. We're going to take one more really quick break and then we're going to come back. We're going to finish up. Be right back. Support for the show comes from Bitwarden. October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And here's an upgrade that actually gives you something back, time. With fewer password resets, less typing thanks to autofill and no more trying to remember

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Is a powder you stir into some water going to do it for you? All that plus the strange tale of the gorilla poop obsessed father of cornflakes in the latest episode of Gastropod. Find Gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Eli Patel, it's your time to shine, baby. $299 Apple TV 4K, the first update in four years. Hit me. They added Siri AI.

They did it. Look, all I'm going to say is it Rams expensive. Yes. Rams expensive. We live in a time. And people have these for 10 years. I think I legitimately have an Apple TV that's like 8 years old. And it was the last.

one. So the two features basically are there's some interesting surround sound stuff, but the big one is you can, there are far-filled microphones, right? So you can talk to Siri AI without using the microphone. You can also, I think, ping the remote now directly to be able to find it. And it uses Bluetooth channel sounding, which is kind of neat. Sure. Jen, what do you make of this thing? It's a cheaper version of UWV. Most of the time, our commenters, I think, like nice things. In this case, the overwhelming reaction has been, why on earth is this $299 and why would anyone buy it? Do you have a reasonable case for it against that argument? Why is it $299? I think they, well, the far-filled microphones,

I mean, they've added more hardware into this. I think the far-field microphones is a good move, because this is essentially a home pod mini in your living room now. Although you can also pair now, that's one of the other features, is you compare up to four home pods for surround sound. But I think having been able to talk directly to the TV is, is it probably the best new feature here, along with being able to find your remote? But I was surprised when they sent over the pricing.

I was like, whoa, this is $50 more than the top level one now, which has all the same features except for the far-filled microphones and the Siri AI. So it does have the faster processor. So this is kind of like buying the advice that we give when you buy a computer, right, by the most expensive one you can afford because it'll last the longest. And this has the A-19 chip. It has the 128 gig of RAM. It has the X features.

Is this the only one? And it has Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0. So it's like the top of, it's specked out. It's fully specked for. streaming folks for what? Yes, for what? What does it do with any of that? My Apple TV lives in a rack in the closet plugged into Ethernet.

I don't need any of that stuff. Yeah. Like not a little bit of it. We did get a comment that said in all caps, ask Neely about HDMI pass through on this thing. Your thoughts. Yeah, I didn't. HTML pass through.

Yes, you can plug your cable box directly into the Apple TV recapitulating the doomed Xbox strategy from 2014. One, baby. Oh my God. But like I think the real answer here is that Apple knows that most people don't even buy these anymore. Right? They use whatever software is on their TVs. It's undoubtedly spying on them with ACR.

And then when their TV software gets slow, they go and buy a $39 Roku stick, which is also spying on them. And that is where they deliver Apple TV, the service, not the platform. And that is fine. Like Apple doesn't want to be in this business. And there's some set of people that will just pay the money, whatever amount of money that is for this device. And they'll have for a long time. So it's the Mac Pro is what you're saying. No, it's not the Mac Pro.

It's more like if you're an expensive Apple customer, there's just price elasticity. You're like, I'll never buy a Roku. And then you're like, well, I don't care. Like, oh, no, some de blooms fell out of my pocket. I guess I bought an Apple TV. Like, I think they're in the part of the market with this where they have no intention to being mass market. And like Greg Joswiak is offended by the idea of having a Google TV. So can I can I just have one thing to that theory?

I think most of that is right. I also think it is true that deep inside of Apple Park, they believe that they are good at gaming and that just, just around the corner, Apple is going to be a great gaming console and the Apple TV is going to suddenly be that thing. We're like two turns from the whole point of Apple doing AI being decompile doing PC games and running them on M-Series processors. No Man Sky is coming to iPad in like two weeks.

It's gonna change everything, Nealai. It's right there. They're like, finally we've cracked PC gaming by doing the bleeding edge of copyright infringement. Like whatever that is, it's fine. But yeah, some part of them believes that this is a game console and that's fine. But I think they just need to have this device.

And for the numbers of Apple TVs they sell, it does not matter how much they cost. Okay, wait. The people who buy them do not care about money. I just want to shout out the comment that just came in suggesting the GTA 6 is coming to Apple Tee. Can you imagine? Next week they're like, and it runs native, like the world would explode.

Immediate best 300 odd purchases. Toad guy, my boy, Toad Guy in the chat says he bought three Apple TVs and most he spent was a buck 39 on sale. Yeah, sure. That's when they had like two or three of them. There used to be a cheap one and an expensive one. Remember you could buy one with like additional storage. Just for the hell of it.

Yeah. Just like why? Like I need it, I need a terrible storage. And they're all gone. This is the only one you can mind now. And that's, I'm saying I think they have recognized the reality of the TV market. In the way that I think the home view is disconnected from the reality of smart homes, I think the Apple TV is like right in the pocket of TVs. Well, and it is also for the smart home nerds is the ideal Apple Home Hub because it has the Ethernet.

It's the only way and that and most Apple Home users, super users, have a lot of, and it is, on Apple TV because of the being able to have that consistent hard wide connection. And Apple Home has this feature that selects your hub for you and it will often not select the Apple TV with Ethernet. And people got so mad that they changed it so that you could go in and manually select it. It took like five years. It took a while. By the way, this is a total like niche feature of Apple Home, but like when it was announced,

people celebrated. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's like, I'm going to pick a default home hub for my app. I can finally choose my TV. I think my frustration with this one is just that. there are basically only two good streaming boxes. And it's the Nvidia Shield, which Nvidia doesn't care about in any way, shape, or form.

And there's the Apple TV, which Apple clearly doesn't care about in any way, shape, or form. And it is so obvious that if somebody was just actually interested in building a good product at a competitive price, it would probably work. And no one is willing to take a run at it in a real way. You can't because the Roku model, we'll just use Roku, but this is the model for Amazon. it's the model for Google. They have done the Apple app model at scale on televisions. So if you buy a Roku, you can get a Roku for $39.

Amazon will just like fire a fire TV stick at you if you blink at prime. They're not, they're obviously not making any money on the hardware. They, to every app on those devices, they say if you run ads, if you have any advertising in your app, we get 30%. And it all has to come through our servers and we have to see it. We're going to track it into all the data. And so they were just sitting back and being like, we gave away free cable boxes and we are collecting fees on the advertising that runs on those cable boxes.

And Apple won't do that. That it's like too grimy for Apple. I think if they could do it, they would in the sense that they love taking fees on their platforms. I don't think anything is too grimy for Apple at this point. But that like that connected TV advertising market is like very grimy. Like you can't imagine any Apple employees

like being at those conferences. Like it's not acceptable to that. And so I think they're fine. They're like fine. Like LG is going to do data collection and Visio is going to continue to just relentlessly exist and sell a hundred inch LCD TVs that don't look bad for five dollars and everyone's like man, TVs are cheap. Like that's all fine and then if you want to pay for privacy and Apple's conception of privacy, you can pay three hundred dollars for this Apple TV and there's no there's no business model under it except you subscribe to channels somewhere and where else are you going to go. It's There just are not a lot of games in this particular town.

Before we go, let's talk about the HomePod for just a second. I think this is actually a much more exciting upgrade with more. A lot of people shout out of the Invidia Shield in our chat, and I just want to tell you, I love you. I'm not sure Nvidia is aware that it still makes the shield. They are literally frying bigger fish. And in fact, I wrote, let's see, it was four years ago now that the fact that the Nvidia Shield is still one of the best set-top boxes on the market is a truly damning fact

about the state of the set-top box market, and it is ever more true now. But let's talk about the HomePod Mini for just a second, because I think the... Wait, wait, wait, wait, the Shield was discontinued 10 days ago, but the Shield Pro lives on with a 50% price like. Great job, everybody. The HomePod Mini, too, $149. Price went up a little bit, price went up on everything. It's not a cheap little speaker. Two new things, basically. One is sound glow, which syncs it to album art, which I don't care about at all. Much more exciting is the fact that you can actually much more successfully put this into your Apple ecosystem now. Like Jen, you mentioned, you can now pair it with the new Apple TV

induce rounds on that way. You can make it your max default speaker. Yeah. Other than the fact that this thing has to be plugged in, which I think it still has to be plugged in, right? Other than that, this is very close to being the thing we've always wanted the HomePod Mini to be. But it does not have serious. AI. Oh no. This is... This is...

So it has the faster... Yes, I mean, it's been six years since they did a proper refresh. And this was limping along on an S5 chip, which is an Apple Watch chip from like, I don't know, last decade, I mean. And this now has the S-10. They didn't do much more on the sort of hardware front. It's very much still the same. speaker, but the S-10 is supposed to power Siri AI, but it's not launching with it.

It's coming in a later software update. And actually Siri AI on the Apple TV is in beta. So this Siri AI is finally ready for the smart home stick seems to be actually maybe a little paper thing. Because just like we've seen with all the other platforms as they've rolled out their AI powered assistance, they hit some bumps in the road. In terms of the device, like what you might want to upgrade for to get this, if your Siri AI is not on your roadmap, I think being able to work as speakers for your Mac is great and actually stick. Because you've always been able to like AirPlay, but they've said they've sort of underlying, they've done an underlying audio architecture revamp to make this really latency free.

And you compare two side by side. and they color match with your iMac if you have a colorful eye mac. Just the fact that they can just, they can act like speakers. You don't have to point to them as a destination. They can just be your computer speakers. Yes. It's a meaningful thing. They're still expensive.

I wish they had gotten more of a sound upgrade. Nielai, are you a home pot guy? What's your, what's your little speaker of choice? Do we, we don't, we have speakers in the ceiling, all through this house. Schneider Electric is in there doing something. We have some electric devices in this house. Little speaker of choice.

We have old Sonos 1 SLs that don't have microphones. So no smart speakers. We have one Sonos one that it still has Google Assistant because we're a Google family. And we're only a Google family because of the existence of Google Photos, which looks really good on the Home Hub. You start there and you kind of move through the rest of it. But the Sonos ones, we didn't even upgrade to the Era 300.

Those sound great. I have one that's been mounted outside on the back patio. These are not technically waterproof. It's just been outside for three years and it's fine. Okay. We need to go, but here is my demand of both of you before we go. When you guys get your home views, I just want to be there for the unboxing and the like incredible existential crisis it causes both of you. Of am I going to literally rip things out of the walls of my house to support this device?

Or am I just going to accept that the home view is not for me and move on with my life? A lot of people are going to buy this device and then very quickly buy a Raspberry Pi to run HomeBridge. I guarantee you that will be the next thing that happens. As a lot of people are going to figure out very quickly that you can actually bridge everything into HomeKit if you're willing to do one more turn of integration. And all of those companies that make the commercialized Homebridge installs, there's one called Hoobes, which is Joanna Stern's favorite. I'm just going to throw that out there. She laughs every time I say it, this explosion of popularity because you're going to want to bring everything into the screen. I already have holes in the walls where I have one that I made for an iPad Mini.

But the annoying thing about this is it's going to be too small. I'm still going to have, I'm going to have to do some filler around the sides. So it will be going to my wall and on my counter. I'd like to try both. try both because I do feel like there's two different use cases there it's like the echo hub is their wall mounted version and then you have the the tabletop device which becomes more of a enjoyment entertainment enjoyment experience we had a very old I feel very dumb right now because we had a very old well if you get really in the smart home you also get pretty good a drywall

this is like these these things go together um we had a very old intercom system that I ripped out and I patched but it was wired with Ethernet and the drop goes to the basement. This is what I'm saying. 19 hour verge cast of just Neely pacing around his house trying to figure out what to do with the Home View. You know what I didn't live stream and I should have and I think it would have put me, I would have been like a very rich Twitch streamer if I had live streamed this. When we moved into this house, I ran around with an Ethernet toner finding all the all the drops for the because we rewired the rewired that. Precisely.

That's all I'm just going to put it out there. All of the landlines in this house were wired with RJ6. So we just did that. All right, we need to get out of here. That is it for this episode of Smart Homestikos, a podcast within a podcast of the Vergecast, which just continues to spawn new weird shows. Thank you to both for being here.

I should say all of these products are coming out kind of over the course of the next month, so we'll have lots more to say about all of it. We're going to get one of these into Jen's house, and she's going to break everything with it, and I'm very excited to hear all about it. Thank you both for being here. Thank you to Travis and our whole team for producing.

Thank you to all of you for being here hanging out with us. It's been incredibly fun. We will see you next time. Eli. Bye. Rocker roll.