For all the obvious benefits, Apple's new HomeView appears immediately and unnecessarily stunted by not allowing users to install any apps at all.

Imagine cooking with the Paprika 3 app on your HomeView, or having your OmniFocus To Do list alongside your Fantastical calendar. Right now, all you can do is imagine, because none of this is possible.

It's a curious thing that the Mac App Store never came close to the popularity of the iPhone App Store. Or that you've forgotten there even is an Apple Watch App Store.

Yet the HomeView needs one because otherwise there are compromises in software. That's a bad position for the device to be in since there are also compromises in the hardware.

By going for a HomeView, for instance, you're choosing a very small screen compared to what you could get on an iPad. But it's the absence of software that is galling because it seems unnecessary.

This is a new form factor and a new screen size, but so is the iPhone Duo and Apple has worked hard to make iOS adapt for that. And it's working hard to get developers to adapt too.

Whereas with the HomeView, you are at best stuck with Apple's stock apps, and possibly not even that. So far the HomeView looks like a holder for app widgets instead of apps.

So nearly the perfect kitchen device

I cook every night using Paprika 3 on my 13-inch iPad Pro and do consider that a bit of a waste of such a powerful device. Just in the last few days I've been considering digging out an unused old HomePod and adding it to my kitchen because I'm in there such a lot.

And as it happens, we have an ancient wooden, updateable calendar that we've never bothered to update in a decade. A HomeView would fit very nicely into that calendar's spot and it would provide personal calendars for any of us who looked at it.

So Apple has hit multiple sweet spots for me and my use cases, and threw in a clock that'd be a lot more accurate than the one I use to try timing when simmering and reducing is done.

Except I'd have to go back to using Apple's Reminders, which is very good in many ways but it isn't OmniFocus. I wouldn't have to abandon Fantastical, but I'd have to trust that my recent syncing problems between it and Apple Calendar were sorted out.

So right now, an old iPad with a wall-mount is a better idea. We'll be talking about that soon enough.

Siri AI is a plus and minus

There have long been rumors that the HomeView was ready but Apple was waiting for the improved Siri AI. That's now easy to believe since the HomeView is so dependent on Siri AI that there's little else here.

So in my kitchen, what I'd have to do is rely on Siri AI for everything. True, that's much less of a jolting concern than it would've been before this version of Siri was released.

But yesterday Siri AI just decided to prefix every text message I sent with my name. Later when I asked it for the route home on Apple Maps, it asked me which of four people named Carl I wanted to phone. Siri AI still can't do what it says it can with Apple Music.

So as great as Siri AI can be, and as often as it can be that great, having it effectively be your sole way to do anything with the HomeView is at least a bottleneck.

Apple hasn't said why it isn't allowing other apps, but presumably it doesn't believe there's a need.

There's a need. It will be very apparent soon.