Apple’s first steps toward a substantial ecosystem of products for smart homes has begun, with the tech giant announcing a new HomePod mini 2, an exciting Apple HomeView as well as the new Apple TV 4K, alongside a lineup of smart home accessories in collaboration with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. This push into the smart home comes after the new Siri assistant, called Siri AI, went live in September with the new iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27 Golden Gate. The Apple HomeView directly challenges Amazon’s Alexa-based Echo Show devices, which for a long time, haven’t had real competition.
The ₹39,900 Apple HomeView has a 7-inch Liquid Retina display, which has more of a square aspect ratio rather than a typical widescreen often seen in smart speakers with displays. Think of it as a much larger replication of an Apple Watch’s display, or if one goes further back in time, the iPod nano from 2010. The HomeView has an aluminium design in four colours, and the display is connected to a domed speaker base with a stainless steel hinge that provides an option to tilt. There is also an option for a wall-mounted model, which has the same 7-inch Retina display and integrated speakers.
The Apple HomeView experience is built on personalisation and the Apple Intelligence foundation for Siri AI. The Apple HomeView will support profiles for up to six users, with a personalised Home Screen, apps and widgets for each, alongside the Smart Home Dashboard. Personal content for each user will stay in their private accounts, except shared photo albums and music. The Siri AI app and functionality are replicated as on the iPhone or iPad, and can take action using context from apps that it is allowed access to. Apple says users will be able to customise the expressiveness and pace of Siri’s voice on their paired and compatible device. Much like the Apple Watch Faces, the HomeView also has a collection of Faces, some focused on time, some on memories and some purely functional.
“Apple HomeView is designed to be shared by everyone in the home yet feel completely personal to each user,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “It recognizes your face to shift from a household screen to your own experience, fills the room with incredible sound, keeps you connected to the people who matter most with FaceTime, and makes it easy to control your smart home. And it’s powered by Apple Intelligence with Siri AI at its core, drawing on personal context from your iPhone to help you find what you need and get more done, all while keeping everyone’s information private and secure.”
The HomeView’s audio architecture includes two custom full-range drivers in the display, a down-firing subwoofer, and two force-cancelling passive radiators built into the base. The wall-mounted option will forego the latter for mounting convenience, and the sound will be tuned differently on that version. Among the silver, starlight, rose pink, and space gray colour options, rose pink looks very similar to a shade seen many years ago with the iPhone 6s.
Its closest competitor, the 2026 Amazon Echo Show 8 holds a sticker price in India of around ₹24,999 and it is debatable if it can match the HomeView in terms of depth and fineness of music playback and the spoken word.
HomePod mini 2 and Apple TV 4K
It had been a while since the first generation HomePod mini was released in 2020, though there was colour option shuffling in 2021 and 2024. Now, the changes go deeper with a new speaker hardware, as well as the Apple S10 audio chip that unlocks advanced computational audio and an ability to set up more than one of these speakers as part of a four-speaker surround sound system. It can also become a speaker for the Mac computing devices—and it is for this reason, Apple has tried to match the HomePod mini 2 with the Mac colour portfolio, offering pink, green, blue, white, and midnight options.
The HomePod mini 2, priced at ₹18,900 gets something called the Sound Glow, which transforms the top of the speaker into a visual element that glows and pulses in sync with the music playback and reacts to the bass and treble. Apple says the song’s album artwork from Now Playing also generates a colour-matched light experience, which will be unique for every song. The HomePod mini 2 unlocks Siri AI, which will arrive in a future software update, and will bring voice conversations with personal context to the smart speaker.
“HomePod mini 2 brings together Siri AI, gorgeous new colors, and incredible audio,” said Kaiann Drance, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Home Product Marketing. “With Siri AI, it understands you better than ever, drawing on personal context and broad world knowledge to make music discovery even richer. It fills a room with sound on its own, which gets even bigger in a stereo pair or with multiroom audio, and when paired with the new Apple TV 4K, it delivers our most immersive home theater setup yet.”
The much-awaited Apple TV 4K (4th generation) is refreshed, with Siri AI again providing the foundation for the entertainment experience. While overall dimensions and silhouette largely remain the same as the previous generation, including a familiar metal remote (albeit with Find My support now, in case it’s slid down the side of the sofa), the new Apple TV 4K does get the powerfulA19 chip that has previously been seen in the iPhone 17 series. This means a 50% faster CPU than the model it replaces, as well as twice as fast graphics performance. Apple says the A19 chip also includes a new, dedicated AV1 decoder, enabling more efficient, high-quality streaming while using less bandwidth.
“The new Apple TV 4K is our most immersive home theater experience yet,” said Bob Borchers, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With Siri AI, finding something to watch becomes a full-screen, conversational experience, and with built-in far-field microphones, it’s completely hands-free. Pair it with HomePod for the best surround sound setup we’ve ever offered, and it makes managing your Apple Home accessories easier than ever. Now, alongside HomeView, HomePod mini 2, it’s part of the most connected Apple Home we’ve ever built.”
Apple has extended the smart home hub capabilities, which can control accessories without pausing media playback. The Apple TV 4K with the A19 chip retains the Secure Enclaves architecture, which will process microphone voice commands and query data separately from the rest of the tvOS system. Data processed and analysed in the Secure Exclaves cannot be accessed by tvOS, apps, the user, or Apple, they confirm. The Apple TV 4K is priced at ₹39,900 in India.
