THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH

Hello friend,

This week, Apple announced some new products specifically aimed at the home. These include HomeView, a shared display for home controls, FaceTime, and Siri AI, along with a new Apple TV 4K and a second-generation HomePod mini. There's also the Apple Home Collection, with cameras and a smart lock from LG, plus thermostats developed with LG and Schneider Electric. The hardware starts arriving later this fall, with Home Collection accessories following in December and early 2027.

Of these, the most interesting is HomeView, a brand-new product category from Apple, but not a brand-new category in this space. Amazon and other vendors have been making a "speaker with a screen glued onto it" type of product now for several years.

It's interesting to think about why Apple chose to release this product now. I suspect a big part of the reason is that they finally got their act together with Siri AI. A product like this wouldn't work without it.

Another data point, though, is where Apple stands with Apple Home right now. It's always felt to me like a bit of a lukewarm project out of Apple, where they put some effort into it, but just enough. In the first few years after release, it was feature-limited and buggy, so much so that I drifted away from Apple Home integration for a couple years.

In the last six months, however, I have gone all in again with Apple Home, and the second attempt has been a lot more successful. My blinds now go up automatically at sunrise and my lights reliably turn on when I walk in the room. Announcements come through my HomePods and my exterior cameras tell me when someone's at my door right on the Apple TV.

The automation stack is deeper with Shortcuts support. Home Assistant offers more control, but I think Apple Home is enough for most people. More importantly for my family, Apple Home is something they can control without feeling like they need computer science degrees.

What Apple needs to focus on now is stability and privacy. Put simply, we need the lights to turn on (and off) when we expect them to, and we need to feel like our camera systems aren't being converted into a small-market television program on the other side of the world. Apple has something to offer here if they're willing to put more wood behind the arrow.

With the release of this new hardware, I feel like the pieces are falling into place. I've given Apple Home a second chance. Now Apple needs to stay committed to making it reliable and private for everyone in the house.

Your pal,
David

This Week in the MacSparky-Verse

Here's what ran at MacSparky.com this week.

• In UniFi Takes Its Travel Router Long-Range, I looked at the new model and how it compared with the original I've been using.
• ​Apple's New Home Lineup covered HomeView, a new Apple TV 4K, and HomePod mini 2.
• On Mac Power Users 870: The Full Sparky, Stephen and I explored iOS 27 Shortcuts actions and caught up on our latest app and hardware experiments.

In the MacSparky Labs, we covered a lot:

• I wrote about tuning notifications and shared my Elgato Prompter XL setup.
• I made videos on getting better answers from Siri AI and giving Mac apps their own notification sounds with TrillMark.
• We got together for a Deep Dive on local and private AI on a Mac.
• I posted an update about moving Labs billing to Circle.
• I published The Lab Report podcast on Apple's new home hardware and making a smart home work for everyone in the house.

That was a single week, and the Labs run like this every week. If that sounds like your kind of place, come join us.

Put DEVONthink's AI Tools to Work

This week's newsletter is sponsored by DEVONtechnologies, makers of DEVONthink.

I've relied on DEVONthink for years to keep my research and documents organized. Its latest AI features make that collection more useful, especially when you have work you do repeatedly.

The new AI Library stores your roles, prompts, and skills. You can save instructions for summarizing research or preparing a brief and reuse them. Skills can also trigger smart rules, batch processes, and scripts, bringing DEVONthink's existing automation tools into the conversation.

DEVONthink's built-in chat can now also use its own MCP tools. That gives the chat more ways to work with your documents using AI, from inside DEVONthink. You can also connect an external assistant like Claude to the same collection.

You decide how much access to give it. Sensitive groups and individual documents can be excluded from AI access, and you can choose a local or cloud model. Those choices matter when the collection holds years of your work.

Visit the MacSparky offer page for 20% off DEVONthink through December 31, 2026. The MACSPARKY code also applies the discount to upgrades.

My thanks to DEVONtechnologies for supporting MacSparky.