One View over the Cuckoo's Nest
First: Marques Brownlee and Luke Miani cover the Apple HomeView and provide complementary angles.
Two things are true about the HomeView at the same time:
Many people assumed that it would "just" be an iPad on a stand, with a focus on controlling smart home devices and providing some video calling, like an actual people counterpart to the little pads that exist inside some business conference rooms. It is, needless to say, a lot more than that, and it is still reasonably inexpensive. (That it is priced exactly the same (in the US) as the latest Apple TV 4K, which was price bumped by almost twice its value for no adequately explored reason, is bonkers.) It is aggressive both as a value package and as a technological exploration — it is not the path of least resistance.
It is so convoluted that people will be having trouble understanding it, and if they have trouble understanding it they'll be having trouble trusting it. Most of what it does involves somehow sucking in the juices from the people's devices that cohabitate with it. If Bob looks at the screen, Bob's messages will show; if Alice tries to hijack the session it's supposed to not allow that. All this is dependent on ambiently understanding, without fault or flaw, the true current driver of the device.
That it works at all is impressive, but will people really put their integrity in its hands? Between this and the various "always-listening" features of the recent Apple Watch releases, I'm thinking Apple has gotten a bit too high on its own supply.
British computer science luminary C.A.R. Hoare once said that "there are two ways to write code: write code so simple there are obviously no bugs in it, or write code so complex that there are no obvious bugs in it." Apple's approach to privacy (and to increasingly many other things) seems to hinge on striving for the complex solution, trying to find all the gaps and holes and then dipping it in some sort of simple user experience.
To wit: a child can understand how tapping a button to re-play conversation or summarize overheard talk, or appearing before a screen and seeing your stuff on there is meant to work, but that doesn't stop those things from asking questions of boundaries, ownership and privacy that we will all need to grapple with for years. Apple's technological description is not the end of that conversation as much as it is the start of it. The product does not end at the glass - the product involves the people using it, the context within which they use it, and the other people they interact with.
As both Marques and Luke touch on, this also leads up to the question of "to what end"? Having a little screen that you can yell to to set timers and scroll your recipe hands-free, or use to control the parameters of your smart home devices - okay, sure. But all the stuff that they didn't have to do, how many people are really asking for that? And how many hokey, awkward social situations will the HomeView end up causing with this magic?