Apple’s HomeView is nearly a decade late. That might not matter

Apple thinks you might want a screen in your kitchen or bedroom. It’s nearly a decade late to the party, with its $299 HomeView, announced on October 13, arriving nine years after Amazon unveiled the Echo Show, and eight after Google came out with its own Home Hub. But that tardiness doesn’t matter for the Cupertino tech giant, which has made its name by arriving with technology others have already developed, then doing it better—and making it a more enviable object to own. It’s a playbook Apple has honed, one that bets big on its design chops to differentiate its products from what’s already on the market. And once again, it might prove successful with the HomeView. When Apple released the iPod, it was far from the first MP3 player on the market. When the iPhone debuted in 2007, it was just one of many smartphones available to buy. What both did, though, was redefine the market by offering something distinctly Apple: beautiful engineering and clever design that made them, rather than their competitors, synonymous with their respective categories. The same is arguably true of the Apple Watch and AirPods, both of which hold outsized positions in their markets. [Photo: Apple] On the…