FCC filing shows Apple HomeView was in regulatory testing from October 2024, two years before launchFCC filing shows Apple HomeView was in regulatory testing from October 2024, two years before launch

An FCC filing shows Apple began regulatory testing of HomeView's wireless hardware on 14 October 2024, two years before it announced the smart display.

The filing is Apple's FCC grant for model A3218, which the paperwork describes as a Smart Speaker with Display. MacRumors reported the 2024 dates on 14 October, crediting its contributor Aaron Perris with finding them. The test reports themselves, published by the FCC on 13 October, the day Apple announced HomeView, give the detail.

What the FCC filing says

The testing was done by Element Materials Technology in Morgan Hill, California, the lab formerly known as PCTEST. Its 5GHz Wi-Fi report lists test dates from 14 October 2024 to 15 January 2026. A separate report on dynamic frequency selection, the rule that makes Wi-Fi devices step aside for radar, ran from 14 October 2024 to 7 January 2025.

The paperwork was finished only recently. The 5GHz report was first issued on 20 October 2025 and revised three times, the last on 24 September 2026. Apple's application is dated 25 September 2026, and the FCC granted it on 13 October. The filing covers Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth and 802.15.4, the radio used by Thread. Apple asked for confidentiality on its photographs and user guide, which stay private until 11 April 2027, and on its schematics and parts list indefinitely.

MacRumors also reports that the unit under test ran software it numbers as version 18. We could not read that section of the report in any copy available to us, so that detail is MacRumors' alone. Apple has not commented on the filing.

Why did HomeView take two years to ship?

Apple has never said, and the filing does not explain it. MacRumors ties the wait to Siri. Apple previewed a more personal Siri at WWDC in June 2024 and then, as we set out when covering the class action over those Siri features, delayed it in March 2025. Siri AI finally shipped with iOS 27 in September this year. Before launch, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that the hub's software was designed around Siri AI, with touch as the fallback.

Our take

The dates fit the Siri explanation better than any other. Radio testing is one of the last things done to hardware that is largely settled, and the 2024 unit was already being tested as a smart speaker with a display. A device that began certification in October 2024 and shipped two years later was waiting for something, and the most obvious candidate is the assistant its software was reportedly built around.

That makes the hardware the question worth asking. Apple announced HomeView with an A18 chip, a 7-inch display and a $299 price, and the A18 is the iPhone 16 chip of September 2024. Nothing in the filing shows whether the chip or display changed after 2024, and photographs that might settle it are sealed until April. Still, the overlap with Apple's 2024 chips is hard to ignore. Buyers are getting a product whose radios were tested two years ago, at a price that has not moved.

For anyone deciding whether to pre-order, the useful reading is that HomeView is not a rushed product. Its wireless hardware had more than a year of lab time, and the revisions run right up to September. The part that is new is Siri AI, which still carries a beta label and works in English only. APPDOOK thinks that is where the risk sits: a device delayed two years for its assistant now depends on one Apple has not called finished. App makers should read it the same way, since HomeView shows iPhone apps rather than running its own, and the Siri AI integrations are what will reach it first.