Apple's $299 HomeView Shows Family Texts on the Kitchen Counter, and the Wall-Mount Model Needs About $100 More

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy put a HomeView on her kitchen counter and found out what her daughter was typing. The Verge’s review says it plainly: “I could easily read my 15-year-old daughter’s text messages, and vice versa.”

Apple built the display to be two things at once. When your iPhone or iPad is at home and on the same Wi-Fi network, HomeView gives access to your texts, calendar and reminders, which the review calls “a communal device with personal data.” Switching between the shared screen and the personal one is where Tuohy says it stumbles, with “clunky authentication checks” and too many trips back to her phone.

Her daughter’s verdict on the whole arrangement: “I’ll just use my iPhone.” Her husband, who is largely tech-averse, “fell in love with HomeView, and immediately asked for one for his office.” (So it works great for the person who isn’t reading your messages.)

The second catch is on the wall. HomeView comes in a tabletop version and a wall-mounted version, and both cost $299. The wall-mounted one has one fewer speaker, because the tabletop model has speakers in the display and in its base. It also doesn’t include a mount or a power adapter.

Apple sent Tuohy two mounts from Schneider Electric for the review: a USB-C mount at $59.99 and a hardwired AC mount at $79.99, with a power-over-Ethernet option coming at $129.99. Add Apple’s $39 power brick and, in her words, “you’re starting at around $400 (until the inevitable third-party options arrive).” That’s an extra $100 for a device with fewer speakers. “It’s a weird move,” she writes. “Apple should have included a wall mount and adapter or dropped the price.”

The mount itself gets praise. It takes two screws in the wall, and the display snaps on with magnets “so strong that no one will accidentally knock it off the wall.” The sound doesn’t suffer much either: music on the wall-mounted model “wasn’t as much of a downgrade as I expected,” and it sounded richer and cleaner than an Echo Show 15 hanging in the same entryway.

There are no physical volume or mute buttons on any version. To turn the volume down, or to mute Siri, you tap the screen or pull out your phone, which is the thing the display was supposed to spare you from.

We covered the other half of this design when HomeView launched: Apple’s own pages say personal content appears only when the enrolled face and a paired, recently unlocked iPhone are both present. Whether that lock holds up in a house where every phone sits in the same pile on the same counter is not something the review settles.

I’d guess the text-message problem gets a software fix before the wall-mount problem gets a price fix. Settings are cheap to change. A mount that comes in the box is a margin Apple chose to keep. My money says the third-party mounts arrive first, and they’ll be the reason most people stop paying attention to the $299 number.

Four hundred dollars, and it still reads your kid’s texts.