A product with a missing market
Apple announced HomeView on 13 October, a $299 smart display built around Siri AI, and opened pre-orders the same day in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. The European Union is not on the list, and Apple’s own press release says why in one sentence: “Apple HomeView is not available for sale in the European Union, as Siri AI is currently unavailable in iOS in the EU.”
The company adds that it “is working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward”. It gives no date.
What the EU does not get
HomeView is a 7-inch Liquid Retina display on a domed speaker base, joined by a stainless steel hinge that lets it tilt, in silver, starlight, rose pink and space gray; a wall-mounted version comes in space gray and silver. It runs on the A18 chip and processes camera and microphone data in Secure Exclaves. It recognises up to six people by face and gives each of them a personalised home screen, and its camera view can show up to nine live feeds at once.
Both models cost $299 in the United States and go on sale on Friday 13 November. The Schneider Home wall mounts start at $59.95 for the USB-C connector and $79.95 for the AC wired version, with a Power over Ethernet mount arriving in early 2027 at $129.95.
Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said the device “is designed to be shared by everyone in the home yet feel completely personal to each user”. Siri AI on HomeView is available in English in the eight launch countries, with Canadian French to follow in a free software update, and Apple’s footnotes describe it as available in beta in HomeView software version 27.2.
The sentence does the work
What makes the line notable is that Apple put the reason in the pricing section rather than burying it in a footnote. The company is not describing a staged rollout or a supply constraint. It is stating that a product it has built cannot be sold to roughly 450 million people because a feature it depends on has not shipped in the EU.
Apple’s press release does not name the regulation behind that. 9to5Mac notes that the Digital Markets Act designates iOS as a gatekeeper platform while macOS and visionOS are not, which is why Siri AI has reached those platforms in Europe and not iPhones. That inference is the publication’s, not Apple’s: the press release says only that Siri AI is currently unavailable in iOS in the EU.
What to watch
The next signal is not another hardware launch. It is whether Siri AI reaches iOS in the EU at all, and on what terms. Until it does, HomeView stays a product European customers can read about and not buy — and the list of Apple features that stop at the EU border gets one more entry, this time attached to a price and a shipping date.
