A girl was reading texts from a boy she liked. Her brother leaned in to snoop. The screen went blurry. That's Apple's (AAPL) new HomeView doing its job, in a demo Nicole Nguyen describes in Wednesday's Journal. It's a $299 screen and speaker for the kitchen, and it knows whose face is in front of it.
HomeView is a 7-inch screen with a speaker built in, and the new Siri AI runs it. What sets it apart is that it can reach into your iPhone. Ask it to play the song a friend texted you, and it digs through your messages and plays it, lyrics on screen. Ask when a guest lands and how long the train takes, and it chains the answers. Amazon's (AMZN) Echo Show and Google's (GOOGL) Nest Hub start at $100 and have been around for years. They can't see inside an iPhone.
The privacy setup is strict. For a personal request, the camera has to know your face. Your iPhone has to be on the same Wi-Fi, and you have to have unlocked it in the last eight hours or so. Nguyen calls that “three-factor authentication.” Up to six people in a house keep their data apart. Guests can ask about the weather and turn on the lights. Reading texts, scrolling back through camera footage or unlocking a door takes a registered user.
The catch is the fence
Everyone in the house needs an iPhone or iPad on the newest software. A home split between iPhone and Android won't work. Smart-home gear that doesn't speak Apple's HomeKit, like a Ring camera, stays outside. Rolfe Winkler's story in the same paper's business section says the market Apple is entering is small and shrinking. IDC puts smart-display sales at $2.3 billion in 2025, down from $2.5 billion in 2023. One survey firm says Amazon has two-thirds of the U.S. market, and families rarely switch once the gear is in. Apple launched locks, a doorbell, a thermostat and cameras built with LG Electronics alongside the screen. Its market value briefly passed $5 trillion on Tuesday, Oct. 13, and closed below it.
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This is Cash Flow (M5), and the number that got us is $3. Nguyen uses her Echo Show every day, and she's sick of the ads. To swap them for her own photos, Amazon wants $3 a month. HomeView does that with no subscription. So the $100 screen's real price includes that small bill every month, or the ads if you won't pay it. Small monthly bills are how a household budget leaks. The other cost is the fence. Once every lock, doorbell and thermostat talks to Apple, leaving means replacing all of it. A research analyst told the Journal, “The loyalty play is huge for Apple.” It's a fine thing for a shareholder. Apple is held at weight in 24 books, Amazon in 19 and Alphabet in 28; nothing added. It's a cost for the customer, and it's one that never shows up on a receipt.
Here's the check for this week. Open your card statement and find every charge that repeats each month. Photo storage, the ad-free tier, the cloud backup, the app you forgot about. Add them up and write the yearly total next to the list. Then, for any new gadget, ask what it would cost to leave in three years. Bring the yearly total to your next review. The $3 line looks like nothing until you've got a dozen of them. An umbrella costs the same before the rain as during it. Subscriptions don't work that way. They cost more every month you don't look.