Apple HomeView Gets Rooms by Dani Klaric and Bilal Rehman

Bilal Rehman lasted six weeks as a computer engineering student before he switched to interior design. Now Apple has asked him where a computer should go in a room. He and Miami decorator Dani Klaric each designed spaces around Apple HomeView, the 7 inch home display that went on sale November 13.

HomeView is the first Apple device in a long while that has to pass as furniture, and Apple clearly knows it. So the people showing it off aren't engineers. They're decorators.

Rehman Built an Office and Klaric Took the Entryway

Rehman designed three spaces for Apple's home launch, and the one he's pointed to most is an office built around a green iMac with a HomePod mini to match. Klaric's rooms are a bedroom and an entryway, colorful and vintage leaning, with a HomeView and a pink HomePod mini.

Neither of them is a minimalist. Klaric calls her style "playful nostalgia and contemporary maximalism." Apartment Therapy toured her 1,900 square foot Miami apartment in April 2022, and it's the opposite of an Apple Store.

Rehman is Texas born and runs Bilal Rehman Studio and a gallery on Westheimer Road in Houston. He went from intern to senior designer at a Houston firm before he'd finished at the University of Houston. A lot of people know him from TikTok, where he's blunt about bad rooms. Tatler Asia has featured a house he designed in Bunker Hill, Texas.

I think that's why this works. If Apple had staged HomeView in one of its own white rooms, the message would be that you need an empty house to own one. Put it in a maximalist's bedroom and a Houston designer's green office, and the message is that it'll sit in yours.

A 5.73 Inch Square Has to Disappear Into a Wall

HomeView comes in two shapes, and they ask for different things from a room. The wall mounted version is a square 5.73 inches across and 0.39 inches deep, with no base and two speakers behind the display. Apple pitches it for hallways and entrances, the kind of room Klaric took on.

The tabletop version is the sculptural one. Its screen tilts above a rounded aluminum speaker base with a woofer that fires down, and reviewers keep comparing it to the iMac G4, the lamp shaped Mac from 2002.

Both are cut from recycled aluminum. Tabletop buyers get silver, starlight, rose pink and space gray. The wall model only comes in silver and space gray, the two shades most likely to vanish beside a light switch.

One detail matters more to a decorator than to a reviewer. The screen dims all the way down to 0.3 nits, according to MacRumors. That's a display you can leave on in a bedroom.

Each version costs $299. The wall one also needs a mount, made by Schneider, and those start at $59.95.

Apple Sold the HomePod on Sound

Apple's earlier home products were pitched as audio. The first HomePod shipped in February 2018 as a speaker, and the HomePod mini followed in October 2020. Neither came with a decorator.

HomeView arrived at a Welcome Home launch in Tribeca on October 13, shown to a small room of journalists and creators instead of a keynote hall. The welcome copy that day read "Welcome in. Make yourself at home."

It came with company. Apple launched a HomePod mini 2, a new Apple TV 4K and the Apple Home Collection, a set of accessories made with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric.

The mini 2 is where the color comes from. It's sold in green, pink, blue, midnight and white, and both designers used it as an accent. His is green, to go with the iMac. Hers is pink.

"Apple HomeView is designed to be shared by everyone in the home yet feel completely personal to each user," Greg Joswiak, Apple's marketing chief, said when it was unveiled. Its camera recognizes up to six people and switches accounts for whoever's standing there.

A shared object in a shared room is a design problem before it's a tech problem. Apple's holiday film this week is set at home, too, a kid drawing with old Apple hardware in the background.

Rose Pink Is the One People Will Buy

Here's my read on the two versions. Designers will ask for the wall model in space gray, because their job is to make the thing recede. Everybody else will buy the tabletop in rose pink, because it's the first Apple home product that looks like it wants to be seen.

For the money you get a 7 inch screen, an A18 chip and a metal body, and you get an object that two working decorators were willing to build rooms around. That's a fair trade if the tabletop model is the one you want. The wall version is a harder sell once the mount is added.

Klaric already paired hers with a pink speaker.