Apple just launched a new product. A product the market has been waiting on for years. A product that a big chunk of the market is laughing at. But it’s also a product I think takes Apple to $10 trillion.

It's called HomeView, and the best way I can describe it is the lovechild of an iMac and an Apple Watch.

A 7-inch square screen sits on a speaker base or hangs on your wall, for $299 either way, and I'll admit it looks pretty neat.

Pre-orders opened overnight, and it ships on 13 November. I think it’s going to be a huge success. And when the first quarter of sales comes in, it’ll give a nice boost to the stock price.

Initially the market thought as much too. Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) opened at $344.67 and touched a record $348.15. Then the tech reviews landed, and the side-eyes and skepticism started.

Yahoo Tech's deputy editor wrote that Apple is “very late to the smart display party,’ and that it was, “too little too late.”

MacDailyNews called the launch video a, “spectacular disaster.”

And Marques Brownlee one of the world’s most popular tech reviewers ran his review video with the headline, “Apple Homeview Impressions: Not Convinced!” That video has 1.3 million views last time I checked.

And the shares followed suit, closing up just 0.09% for the day...

The sceptics have a decent case.

Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) unveiled its Echo Show on 9 May 2017, with the same 7-inch screen. It’s been running and dominating this space ever since.

Meta (Nasdaq: META) tried to crack the home “pod” market shipping 800,000 Portals in 2021 (a little under 1% of the market). It bombed so bad, Meta just dropped the whole thing completely within a year.

Google is still having a crack with its Nest Hubs. But it’s just making up the numbers for those Alexa devices. To be fair though, it’s a market worth having a go at.

It’s said that Amazon makes a big loss on Alexa devices, they anticipated the additional revenue from shopping and apps would make up the deficit on the loss on the devices.

But that never came.

I think they stick with it mainly because Prime subsidises it all, and that they anticipate being able to run their AI through the whole thing.

Apple has a chance here, not just to steal Amazon’s slice of the market, but dominate it and then make it insanely profitable too.

How?

HomeView has no App Store, and its new Siri features will take time to roll out globally. But this is a device where I anticipate as many as one in three iPhone buyers ends up with one of these.

I say this also because I just ordered one too.

In all likelihood, many households I expect end up with at least two of these.

And let’s say that’s the case, that as this rolls out globally and an improved Siri AI becomes a key part of interacting with HomeView, that one in three iPhone buyers buys one of these what does that do to Apple’s bottom line?

Well over time they could be looking at well over $165 billion in sales for HomeView. But that is over time. And I expect that buyers maybe turn these over only once every five years or so.

But the devices isn’t the thing that pushes Apple to $10 trillion. That’s only part of it.

HomeView is the proverbial door into the home.

As I said, Amazon expected shopping and additional app purchases to be the big revenue kicker. But from firsthand experience, that whole concept was just ridiculous and clunky.

I've owned just about every smart home gadget going, including several Echo Shows, a Meta Portal, Google's Nest Hubs, Ring and Nest cameras, smart lights and switches.

None of it worked that well together, and half the time it didn't work at all.

Even now the only thing I use the Echo for in the kitchen is to set a timer, a reminder, or to play some music.

Hardware was never the issue. It was the software tying it all together and the experience of using it. The ecosystem has always sucked.

However, that's the bit Apple does better than anyone.

Its phone, watch, laptops and earbuds just work together, and that's why people never leave. Their operating system is the best, their ecosystem just works.

HomeView can tell up to six people in a house apart by their faces, and it pulls their calendars and messages from their iPhones.

It also speaks Matter and Thread, the shared standards most new smart gear uses, so it can run kit people already own. And Apple also helped LG build a doorbell, a lock, a thermostat and cameras to go with it.

Everyone expects the next “iPhone moment” from every Apple launch. They can never deliver that. But also, who cares?

The device matters far less than the software running it and everything else it brings together with ease.

My view is that HomeView gets mocked for a few months, then a full year of sales turns it into one of Apple's most popular products. Every 10 million sold at $299 is about $3 billion of new sales, and each one makes an iPhone owner a little harder to lose.

Once you get one, I think Echo finds the bin pretty quick, and the Nest Hub, and everything else. I then think all those extras and addons, and additional units find their way in.

It took Apple a long time to figure it out, but if they can crack the home, which on the basis of this launch, I think they can.

Then you watch them regain the title of the most valuable company and then become the first ever to $10 trillion.

More soon,

Lewis Maguire