Your new Apple HomeView, huggable as it may be, will already be old when it’s finally in your hands next month. The oldness is etched right into the throwback design, some of which, yes, is Apple Watch-like, or an intentional wink at classic and beloved Apple gear from ancient history like the iMac G4. But its proportions and thick black bezel prematurely age it in a less retro-cool way too, calling to mind the iPads of eight years ago.
And the guts are rapidly aging as well. Its A18 iPhone processor was cutting-edge two years ago, and its paltry memory offering of 8 gigs marks this as a device meant to be sold to the consumers of the past—because that’s exactly what it is, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Gurman’s earlier columns asserted the development of an Apple smart home device with a screen long, long ago—a “low-end iPad,” he wrote with laser accuracy all the way back in 2023. But along the way, his sources apparently fed him stories about a problem that squeezed the product pipeline nearly to death: AI-powered Siri sucked for years before Apple finally got it to work.
As Gurman reported in March, the embryonic product destined to become the HomeView had to be frozen while Apple struggled to build the AI-powered software interface. To Apple’s great humiliation at the time, it eventually had to rent an AI model from Google just to make the pain stop. Analysts are now starting to rewrite history, as if Apple is Silicon Valley’s master of AI jiu jitsu due to its relatively low capital expenditure, so I guess it’s easy to forget just how much AI-related misery Apple publicly endured over the past two years.
At any rate, all this delay means, according to Gurman, the actual HomeView units about to be shipped out to consumers “have been sitting boxed up in warehouses for the better part of a year, waiting for the software to catch up.”
Consequently, Gurman says social media users who no longer work at Apple are waxing nostalgic about the time they spent working on the HomeView. He doesn’t name names, but I found Carl Schoeller, whose post below about HomeView screen brightness refers to what one of his jobs at Apple “was.” He now identifies not as an Apple employee, but as an AI CEO.
One of my jobs at Apple was making sure that green LED is as bright as possible and can be seen from every angle. Ended up running hundreds of ray traced simulations just to move a tiny diffuser by .3mm pic.twitter.com/SeU8SAHlPO
— Carl Schoeller (@CarlSchoeller) October 14, 2026
Compounding the delay problem is the HomeView’s many link-ups with LG as part of something called the Apple Home Collection (which also includes design collaborations with Schneider Electric).
Firsf look at the Apple Home Collection of smart home devices designed by Apple in collab with Lg and Schneider pic.twitter.com/EysYAHrlMk
— Ray Wong (@raywongy) October 13, 2026
It may have seemed like a stroke of genius to chain the release of the HomeView to LG’s products in 2025. But since about a month ago, LG’s reputation around privacy has been taking a beating. A viral YouTube video claimed that the microphones on LG smart TVs pick up ambient audio from users 24/7. LG has denied this, but Apple probably wishes the HomeView’s release wasn’t delayed until the middle of a PR disaster involving one of its partner companies.
