Apple's 'Welcome Home' Event: HomeView Hub, HomePod mini 2 and New Apple TV
Apple has confirmed a "Welcome home" event for Tuesday, October 13, starting at 9 a.m. ET. Marketing chief Greg Joswiak teased it on October 8 with an X post showing someone embroidering Apple's rainbow logo. Press received invitations to an in-person "Apple Experience" in Tribeca, New York, while the main presentation is expected to be a prerecorded video streamed on YouTube, the Apple TV app and Apple's events page.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and outlets including MacRumors and 9to5Mac report the long-rumored smart home hub carries the name HomeView. It is said to use an A18 chip — the same silicon as the iPhone 16 — with roughly 6 inches of square touchscreen, though some earlier reports described a 7-inch panel. The countertop model is designed like a floating display on a speaker base, drawing comparisons to the iMac G4; a wall-mounted variant uses a square base.
Reported finishes split by model: the countertop HomeView comes in space gray, silver, starlight and pink (some reports say rose), while the wall-mounted version is limited to space gray and silver. Sound is said to be better than the current HomePod.
According to multiple reports, HomeView's home screen offers widgets and clock faces and handles FaceTime, calendars and security camera feeds, but it will not open access to the App Store and runs a limited set of Apple apps. It serves as the control point for HomeKit and Matter accessories, with Thread built in so devices connect without a separate hub, and Siri AI as the headline feature.
The first real HomePod mini update since 2020 keeps the spherical body but moves to five colors — green, pink, blue, white and black — replacing yellow, orange and midnight, code leaks in Apple's own files show. A faster chip is expected to support Siri AI. Gurman says the speaker and the new Apple TV reach stores on October 30.
The fourth-generation Apple TV 4K is expected to look unchanged: Gurman confirmed an A19 chip with 8GB of RAM, an Apple-designed N1 chip with Wi-Fi 7, Apple Intelligence and Siri AI support, plus a revised Siri Remote with a built-in speaker to help find it.
Gurman reports an "Apple Home Collection" of accessories co-developed with LG and Schneider Electric: a smart doorbell, a smart deadbolt that unlocks via ultra-wideband as an authorized user approaches, a thermostat, a temperature sensor, and indoor, outdoor and floodlight cameras. LG's products will ship "later this year at the earliest," well after the hub itself.
HomeView is slated to go on sale around mid-November, just ahead of the holiday rush, while HomePod mini 2 and Apple TV 4K land October 30. Pricing has not surfaced in any reporting and will be revealed at the event.
The stakes are catch-up, not expansion. HomeKit has lagged for years behind Amazon's Echo Show and Google's Nest Hub, and Apple now has a conversational Siri to anchor a hub, a display and its own accessories into one system.
Apple has two October events. October 13 is entirely about the home. Bloomberg reports a second launch "on or around" October 27 for the first touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro, M6 versions of the 14-inch MacBook Pro and iMac, and an OLED iPad mini, with an in-person showcase in Los Angeles on October 27 and 28. They are separate stories.
Everything — final names, specs, prices and availability — lands in tomorrow morning's stream, with hands-on time for press in Tribeca afterward. If the reports hold, Apple's smart home skeleton ships to buyers by mid-November.