Apple and Amazon have each released a new smart display, and both arrive with hardware far beyond what the category has offered in the past. Apple’s first smart display, the $299 HomeView, carries the A18 chip also used in the MacBook Neo along with a Liquid Retina display. Amazon’s $499.99 Echo Show 16 is a ground-up rebuild of its smart display line, using a MediaTek processor and the same Nanomatte display as its new Alexa Tablet. According to The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, who spent brief hands-on time with both, the devices could turn the smart display into a shared household screen for calendars, door checks and dinner planning.
The pricing marks a sharp jump for the category. Tuohy notes that in 2023 the Echo Show 5 sold for $85 and the Nest Hub for $99, while the HomeView, the cheaper of the two new devices, costs three times those figures. She writes that both devices now have a clearer purpose than serving as a vessel for each company’s revamped voice assistant, and that with supporting software they might justify the investment. The popularity of devices such as the Skylight Calendar, she adds, shows demand for a communal household screen.
The two companies are taking opposite approaches. Apple treats the person as the user: Tuohy reports that in Apple’s demo, Siri AI read text messages to know when a friend would arrive from the airport and turned on a coffee machine so espresso was ready on arrival. Most of the HomeView’s stronger features appear only when it recognizes a face and a nearby phone, she writes, making it an extension of the iPhone with limited communal features.
Amazon treats the household as the user, Tuohy writes, and designs the Echo Show to know the home. Its Omnisense technology senses presence, temperature and room acoustics, and in one demo a figure approaching a driveway appeared on a map of the home that could be tapped for a live view through a Ring camera. The Echo Show 16 offers broader household features, including meal planning, a full Fire TV and a color-coded household calendar, though it lacks the personal context of an iPhone.
Tuohy frames the split as Amazon selling a maximal feature set at a premium for everyone, while Apple pushes a more polished, narrower product at a lower price aimed at its existing users. She had written an obituary for the smart display three years ago, when a few underpowered gadgets from Google and Amazon tried to do too much and did too little well, and had laid out what the category needed to improve. Both new devices, she writes, check nearly every box on that list, and she says she is excited to test a smart display for the first time in years.
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