Apple Announces HomeView Smart Display

Apple has officially entered into a new product category: the smart home. The company on Tuesday announced the HomeView, a new AI-powered connected hub designed to reside in your home and control your connected home accessories. The device consists of a 7-inch screen that sits atop a speaker base and works with Siri.

"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, said in a statement. The product, he said, "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." Apple's new HomeView is priced at $299, with preorders opening Tuesday ahead of a November 13 launch.

It's the second major new device announced under new Apple CEO John Ternus, who took over for Tim Cook in September ahead of the company's iPhone event. At that event, Ternus also unveiled the first folding smartphone, the iPhone Duo, which begins preorders later this week. While Apple has long supported the smart home ecosystem with its HomeKit standard that third-party device makers could choose to use to help their devices more seamlessly integrate with the iPhone, the HomeView underscores that Apple views the smart home market as one worth competing in with its own hardware.

If the new device takes off, a consumer moving outside the Apple ecosystem — or "breaking up with Apple" for Amazon or Samsung or Google or another rival — becomes a harder decision. Apple is famous for deeply integrated software and hardware. This is a developing story…