Picture a kitchen counter in November. A seven-inch screen glows next to the coffee maker, spots your face as you walk in, and reads out the day’s calendar in a voice that sounds almost like a person. That is the picture Apple is selling with HomeView, which it unveiled on Tuesday for $299, and it is one of three AI-driven gadgets that big tech companies have pushed out in the past week, all aimed at the holiday shopping crush.
Apple bets on the home
HomeView sits on a table or hangs on a wall. A 7-inch Liquid Retina display tilts on a stainless steel hinge above a domed speaker base, and the unit comes in silver, starlight, rose pink and space gray. It recognizes users by their faces and adjusts what it shows to each person in the house: messages, calendar items, photos. A new, more conversational Siri handles questions. Pre-orders have opened, and the device reaches customers starting November 13.
“HomeView is designed to be shared by everyone in the home yet feel completely personal to each user,” said Apple’s marketing chief, Greg Joswiak. Analysts liked the price. Mohit Agrawal of Counterpoint Research told CNBC that Apple chose adoption over fat hardware margins and priced a local-AI hub below what its specifications would suggest.
Amazon swaps its tablets, Microsoft goes big
Amazon has stopped making Fire tablets. In its place come three Alexa Tablets, described by The Next Web as Amazon’s first tablets with Android and the Google Play Store. The Alexa Tablet 8 starts at $229.99, the Tablet 11 at $329.99, and the top Alexa Tablet 12 Pro at $499.99, which CNBC rounded to $500. They shipped on October 14 in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, with five European markets following on October 19.
Alexa can also look at whatever is on screen and take action through a feature named On-Screen Intelligence; a cooking video, for instance, becomes a shopping list. Amazon says the feature starts switched off, and a light shows whenever the assistant can see the display. The new line is pricier than the Fire tablets it replaces. Amazon raised device prices in August, citing a shortage of memory chips, though it denied that memory costs shaped the new tablets’ pricing. Panos Panay, Amazon’s devices chief, said in a CNBC interview that the memory shortage made building a premium tablet affordably “quite tricky.”
Microsoft took the expensive road: a Windows laptop built around an Nvidia AI chip, starting at $2,599, that runs demanding models on the machine itself instead of in a remote data center.
Will shoppers bite?
That is the question, and the holidays should start to answer it. Forrester analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee, speaking to CNBC, said buyers are still working out what AI can do for them. “What’s less clear is whether they are interested in buying hardware specifically because it is an AI device,” he said.
Wallets still have some room. In an August McKinsey survey, 47% of U.S. respondents said their holiday spending would roughly match last year, and 23% said they would spend more. Bain’s September forecast is for sales across November and December to climb 4.5% and cross the $1 trillion mark, a first. Higher prices, though, explain over half the growth.
Sources
- Meet Apple HomeView (Apple Newsroom)
- Apple, Amazon and Microsoft Introduce AI Gadgets for the Holidays (Entrepreneur, citing CNBC)
- Amazon replaces Fire tablets with Android Alexa Tablets from $229.99 (The Next Web)
