Your new Apple HomeView, as cuddly as it is, will already be old when it finally hits your hands next month. The antiquity is etched right into the retro design, some of which, yes, resembles the Apple Watch, or an intentional nod to classic and beloved Apple gear from ancient history like the iMac G4. But its proportions and thick black bezel make it age prematurely in a less retro-cool way, reminiscent of the iPads of eight years ago.
And the intestines also age quickly. Its iPhone A18 processor was cutting edge two years ago, and its paltry 8GB of memory makes it a device meant to be sold to consumers of the past, because that’s exactly what it is, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Gurman’s previous articles claimed the development of an Apple smart home device with a long screen, long there’s a “low-end iPad,” he wrote with laser precision as early as 2023. But along the way, his sources apparently fed him stories about a problem that almost killed the product pipeline: AI-powered Siri sucked for years before Apple finally made it work.
As Gurman reported in March, the embryonic product intended to become HomeView had to be frozen while Apple struggled to build the AI-based software interface. Much to Apple’s humiliation at the time, it ultimately had to rent an AI model from Google just to end the pain. Analysts are now starting to rewrite history, as if Apple is the master of AI jiu jitsu in Silicon Valley due to its relatively low capital expenditures. So I guess it’s easy to forget just how much AI misery Apple has publicly endured over the past couple of years.
Regardless, all this delay means, according to Gurman, that HomeView units about to be shipped to consumers “have been sitting locked in warehouses for the better part of a year, waiting for the software to catch up.”
As a result, Gurman says social media users who no longer work at Apple are nostalgic for the time they spent working on HomeView. He doesn’t give names, but I found Carl Schoeller, whose post below about HomeView screen brightness refers to what one of his jobs at Apple was like. He now no longer identifies as an Apple employee, but as an AI CEO.
One of my jobs at Apple was to make sure the green LED was as bright as possible and could be seen from all angles. I ended up running hundreds of ray tracing simulations just to move a small diffuser by 0.3mm. pic.twitter.com/SeU8SAHlPO
– Carl Schoeller (@CarlSchoeller) October 14, 2026
Compounding the delay problem is HomeView’s many ties to LG under something called the Apple Home Collection (which also includes design collaborations with Schneider Electric).
First look at the Apple Home collection of smart home devices designed by Apple in collaboration with LG and Schneider pic.twitter.com/EysYAHrlMk
— Ray Wong (@raywongy) October 13, 2026
It might have seemed a stroke of genius to chain the release of HomeView to LG products in 2025. But over the past month or so, LG’s reputation for privacy has taken a hit. A viral video on YouTube claimed that microphones on LG smart TVs pick up users’ ambient audio 24/7. LG has denied this, but Apple probably wants the release of HomeView not to be delayed until the middle of a PR disaster involving one of its partner companies.
Gn tech
