HomeView First Look with Jennifer Tuohy

Stephen Robles (0:00)

Welcome to a special episode of Primary Technology. I'm your host, Stephen Robles, joined by my friend and co-host, Jason. How's it going, Jason?

Jason Aten (0:06)

It's very good. I'm very excited about this extra episode.

Stephen Robles (0:09)

This is a fun episode. We have a big debate because for the first time on this show, we have special guest, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. Jen, thanks so much for being here.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (0:16)

Hello, hello. So excited to be here. Very honored.

Stephen Robles (0:20)

Yes, and we met at CES earlier this year for the first time, so that was super fun.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (0:24)

Yes, at the Carre event. Yes, and I have the pin. I haven't been to Antarctica though yet, sorry.

Stephen Robles (0:31)

Yes, you have our primary tech pin, that's wonderful. And a car is going to come up later in this conversation because we're going to compare that. I have some questions about Apple Home Collection, but HomeView, that's the story.

You were there at the event in person. You had, I think, a great reel of all the stuff. You got to spend a long time with it. And a lot of creators said that they couldn't actually use the device. Apple kind of used it for them, and they could record it. So Jen, you were there in person. I want to hear from you.

Overall impressions. How did you, who did you bribe to get hands-on time with this thing? How did it go? Just tell me all about it.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (1:08)

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so it was a very unique Apple event, from what I'm told, because it was actually my very first Apple event. Because Stephen, in case you didn't know, they haven't done a lot of stuff around Apple Home.

Stephen Robles (1:22)

It's been a minute, it's been a minute.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (1:24)

So yeah, it was lots of different experiences. So they had a keynote, which was a video basically. And then Cecilia, who's one of the product managers on Apple Home, kind of gave a little presentation. And then they had two apartments set up in the building that were kitted out as full New York City apartments. So it was the whole floor of this five-story Tribeca townhouse, I think. I didn't count, but there were a lot of floors, at least five.

And there were two different apartment areas. And then there was a sort of staged area where most of the videos you probably saw were done, where it was more the sort of typical hands-on of like an Apple iPhone event, where everything's on a plinth and it's all mainly in demo mode. So you couldn't really do much. You just see different things, different experiences flying by, which was kind of difficult for videos because you were like, I wanted that, come back. But yes, so there were those different experience rooms. The main room was the apartment that was actually designed by an interior designer. They had the interior designer come out and give a little talk, which was kind of neat because one of my big things about smart home technology is that much of it has not been designed with the home in mind.

It's often been designed by, and I say this, I've said this many times before and people can come at me, but by single male men in their 20s that live in Silicon Valley in a small apartment. So it doesn't really have the family in mind or the home space in mind outside of a small apartment. So it's got better over the years, definitely, and Google has done good stuff here with the fabric wrapped in nice colors. We've seen more of that, but anyway, I thought it was great that they had it all set up in a really nicely designed apartment. This wasn't like steel and brick and glass apartment. It had soft furnishings and it felt like a more traditional home, maybe not a normal home because this is still Manhattan, and it was a large apartment. But they had all the devices sort of interspersed around the home as you would in your home. And it was very well done because you actually, I sort of walked past things and missed that there was a device there. It wasn't like really in your face. So it was giving you that, this is what it's like in your home experience, which I thought was well done. And we've seen other companies try and do this. Amazon did it with its Alexa Echo event, but this was an actual home, which I think lent to the experience. We had very limited time in each space. We had very limited time in each space.