I F'in LOVE the OG HomePods. The sound quality absolutely slaps for the money/size/convenience. I've got one for music in the kitchen and it fills the room like a setup 3x as large. The bass response even at low volumes is remarkable, and clarity through the whole volume range is near perfection. Many of my guests have sourced their own OGs after hearing it. I've got another hooked up to my Apple TV (mono) that replaced a 3.1 setup that cost 3x as much and somehow didn't sound as good.
I can't relate at all to the bike-shedding of Siri complaints. It's like we're experiencing totally different products. Does anyone actually want to use smart speaker features beyond simple cooking timers and controlling music? These features work great. I thought we'd already determined (4 years ago) that voice/audio was a poor user interface even with google/Alexa? I always felt this was a remarkable speaker that got unfairly panned in reviews for performance on silly and contrived smart-assistant use cases.
Despite the fact that I love these speakers and could care less about Siri, this release has me a little disappointed. I don't see much stated improvement. Kind of seems like a processor bump type release, which is not what I expected in V2 after so many years.
HomePod is the most annoying piece of technology that I still frequently use. I was an early buyer of the first version, but this update doesn't address any of the complaints that I have about it:
1. No audio line-in! It's a $300 speaker, it sounds great...sometimes I'd like to be able to just plug something into it. If you have a record player, you have to have a separate set of speakers for it, because this thing won't work.
2. No EQ. Apple claims their room-sensing tech will pick the best EQ for your room/the music, but for my personal preference it's always too bassy-sounding (also, I live in an apartment, I don't want to disturb my downstairs neighbors with the bass). Apple added a limited "bass-reducer" mode, but I want more control.
3. Siri tries (and frequently fails) to identify me and my wife by our voice, and then won't do things (like turn off the music, find our iPhone, etc.) because she can't figure out who we are. Every time Siri refuses to obey my wife, and then does something when I make the same request, it ratchets up the marital tension a notch.
I should probably get rid of the thing, but it's actually convenient when it works, the kids use it constantly to play music, and I assume (naively?) that it has a better privacy stance than the competing Google/Amazon products.
Audio line-in would be nice even if it's just to get rid of wireless latency. If they had that, I'd buy a pair today just to test with my home office receiver.
>3. Siri tries (and frequently fails) to identify me and my wife by our voice, and then won't do things (like turn off the music, find our iPhone, etc.) because she can't figure out who we are.
I've never had this issue in my household. Have you tried re-training it?
The input situation is dreadful and I couldn't stand the delay with AirPlay2 either.
However, combined with an AppleTV 4K (2nd gen upwards), HomePods can be used as HDMI eARC devices. This enables playing sound without delay from any HDMI output.
In my setup I use an eARC capable HDMI splitter and a $10 Thunderbolt to HDMI adapter to create an audio device for my mac that has virtually no delay. The video output of the HDMI adapter is set to just mirror my first screen, which avoids additional video processing load.
I also had #3 happen many times, but my wife just laughs at Siri being dumb and is usually just thankful /somebody/ stopped that timer or turned down that music.
Any privacy benefits from Apple are mostly nominal. They are a giant corporation beholden to shareholders, that sells ads and collects user information, and works with the government providing said data. They may have marginally better policies but they are still in the same ballpark with Google rather than true privacy products that don't connect to the cloud or self-hosted.
Edit: for those downvoting, don't fall for the marketing hype. This isn't a conspiracy - the evidence is out in the open.
I am an old-school Apple fanboy. I learned HyperCard on a Macintosh SE/30—I am that old.
I still appreciate the Apple ecosystem, and I do like certain aspects of my HomePod mini…but Siri. C’mon. Get it together. It just fails at the absolute basics.
The basics being: please add stuff to my shopping list when I yell it into the aether while in the kitchen. It either completely mangles the speech-to-text (starches, Siri, not starships), or just…fails. It times out, or sits there, blankly pulsing a light at me.
I would really appreciate a higher-quality speaker with easy integration with my iOS/Mac devices. But $299 or something that has artificial stupidity like Siri? Nah.
We have an original large-size HomePod in the kitchen. Its MAIN job is music-in-the-kitchen, and it excels at that. It's secondary job is "Siri portal" for random information or timers or whatever (btw, did you know you can set multiple timers and give then names, like "set a pasta timer for 10 minutes" and then also "set a simmer timer for 30 minutes" and ask it for status on those by name?).
I have an ongoing sort-of faux-competition with my wife about how to ask Siri for things. She asks questions and gets frustrating replies, but when I ask them slightly differently I get good data.
I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...".
I SUSPECT it's mostly specificity, or asking for simple facts ("when was King Charles born?") and not derived facts ("how old is King Charles?"), but it comes up a LOT.
That same history of software means that I don't even ATTEMPT some of the stuff Siri is notionally capable of, like maintaining a shopping list. (Though I routinely use Siri on my watch or phone to add appointments or reminders.)
Siri complain time? Well, my newest problem with Siri is: Let's say I want to play some classic song (like Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd). So I say "hey siri, play sweet home alabama" - and what I get is not the original one but some newish remake/remix/reinterpretation.
Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original?
Oh also ... what's the "next song pls" command in German? With Alexa I can say "Alexa, weiter" and the next track plays. With Siri? "Weiter" won't do anything. I have to say "Hey Siri, nächstes Lied" ... or I can just switch to English and say "Hey Siri, next" which then works.
Oh another one: The German Siri pronouncing English song titles with the German voice-set makes my ears hurt. Like you would read an English word but pronounce it like you would a German word.
But then again some Band/Song Titles she gets perfectly right. Cannibal Corpse sounds like perfect English.
Those AI assistants are a hot mess and get worse with time. Seems like feeding more and more data into your model won't make it better.
So Siri is mediocre at best, we also probably agree. Lots of things to complain about… how Siri works inconsistently across devices, punts most queries to a web search, etc.
I appreciate that they aren’t overbuilding Siri though. Alexa (which recent experienced an unfortunate gutting vis layoffs) was amazons attempt to build a consumer ecosystem, which meant a lot of crappy features no one uses (notifications?). Siri feels like it definitively lives on that device and is just a fancy hands-free control. No extraneous feature creep in an attempt to build out a platform. Apple resisted a lot of opportunities to grow Siri while Alexa et al dramatically increased headcount and features, and it seems that voice assistants never really caught on as a general purpose tool. I imagine smarthome/weather/music still dominates all queries by a huge margin.
I still don’t know why anyone would buy a $300 HomePod. As the owner of two original HomePods, they’re fine. This one looks like it has less speakers in it, but I assume it sounds comparably good. If you want good sound I assume you’d be buying a Sonos or something more versatile, but this is an equal but apple-loving choice. The real pro is that it sounds like it has a removable cable.
I still want a screen-based apple smart speaker. Smart speaker+clock is a sweet spot in terms of usability, and the Google home I’ve been loving. It gets you some richer visual for that 1% of queries that benefit, and a glanceable clock for the rest of the time. I can’t imagine apple making a UI that is one-off though. Hopefully the iPad goes the way of the pixel tablet
> Buy $299 or something that has artificial stupidity like Siri?
Well, in fairness, it’s designed first as a music device, the Siri seems like almost an afterthought. That said,
Spend $299 on a wireless speaker where the stereo pairing often fails, has random Wi-Fi connection issues (that no other Apple device has), and is otherwise hindered by issues?
Nah, fooled me on the first gen, fooled me again on the HomePod minis, think I’ll pass this time.
It would also be pretty nice to have Siri works in several languages on a shared device like the Homepod. Not everyone has the same native language in my house.
This is a pretty lackluster "update" for a product that had a number of issues. Not to mention a press release doesn't fill me with confidence that Apple even believes in this product line (if that wasn't obvious when they pulled the HomePod 1). I'm a hardcore apple fanboy and I just can't justify the HomePods. I want to like them but Siri is useful for setting timers, asking the time/weather, and... that's about all I trust it for.
I have near-zero interest in HomeKit (too limited, too locked in, I don't want wifi smart devices) and so while I have hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of smart devices in my house (Z-wave with a few zigbee, all run by HomeAssistant) I can't even use HomePod device to control my lights/etc. Yes, I know about HomeBridge and HA's HomeKit integration, every time I've tried this it's fallen over after a month or less and you have to set it all up from scratch again, the Home app drives me batty, it's so bad.
Maybe Matter will improve things (not holding my breath) but for now I'll stick with my Echo's. They do a decent job of controlling my smart house, are way cheaper, and integrate perfectly with HA. If Siri would actually talk directly to HA then I'd probably switch. It's really not a money thing, it's a reliability thing.
EDIT: After reading some more comments (and from things I've read online or heard on podcasts) I have no doubt the audio quality is amazing. My issue is that I just don't really care about feature as much. I have my AirPods Pro in 90%+ of the time I listen to anything and the other <10% is when I'm in the shower and use a Sonos Roam or in my car. My #1 use case for a "smart speaker" is smart home control followed closely by setting reminders/timers. Siri does great with timers/reminders, smart home (or rather MY smart home), not so much.
I saw you mentioned the HA bridge. I can only give my anecdote that it works well for me - probably been set up without touching anything for about a year now.
I remember the initial setup wasn’t exactly intuitive, but what I like is that HomeKit communicates using your own devices rather than via an exposed web service
I am very happy to see the bigger HomePod come back. I have a several big ones and a few of the small ones and they just don't compare for sound so I put off putting them everywhere I really wanted.
Will for sure be getting a few of these.
As far as Siri being "Stupid", idk it does exactly what I need it to do for playing music, controlling my home, measurement conversations, timers, and the occasional ask about if someplace is open or not.
I have long been wondering if Apple would expand the stereo audio for TV to more than 2. If they were to introduce a generic receiver (or actually make the Apple TV able to have inputs and not just use eARC) and allow me to have 4 or more HomePods for my stereo setup. I seriously wonder how that would compare to my current Atmos 5.1.2 setup. It would sure as hell be cheaper to buy 4 or 5 HomePods than this setup was.
Edit: Also the addition of the H1 chip was seriously the best thing to be added to the Mini and unsurprisingly it is coming here to make sending music from my phone to my HomePod easer when I get home. Not enough to replace the big ones I have but likely over time.
I would love to hear the inside story about why the old one was discontinued and it took so long for the v2.
The HomePod mini is the "first device" we have given to our children. No screen, I am comfortable with apple privacy, access to music and podcasts, etc.
The mini has shockingly good sound for $100 and what it is.
"The mini has shockingly good sound for $100 and what it is. "
It's really something, isn't it? I mean, I'm an audio nut with genuine crazy-person speakers in my living room, but goddamn if that single mini Homepod in our bedroom isn't stupid good.
I was going to get one for my kid but don't want her to be able to ask arbitrary questions and basically access web search just yet. When I looked into it, the only way to accomplish this was to turn off Siri entirely, and just make it into a speaker for source iOS devices. Any chance they have more fine-grained controls for this yet?
kudos to you! I know they will cherish a device like that. Growing up I had a similar tech item that was my "thing", it was a tiny MP3 player that I used for years. Having a HomePod Mini is a great way to get them access to super helpful tech without the drawbacks (ads, social media, privacy) of screen-based devices.
I was not expecting that, but I'm in, I'll buy a pair for my office stereo then move my office HomePod to the lounge.
I bought the first HomePod when they first came out and I heard it in the apple store and couldn't believe a single speaker was producing that sound. I use it constantly to play music in my office, set reminders and timers, asking about the weather and controlling the lights. I seem to be lucky in that Siri mostly understands what I'm saying.
This is once piece of tech I just take for granted, it does what it does very well with no fussing. I'm really happy to see Apple bring out a new version.
For me a smart speaker has to be a very good speaker first as my primary use for it is listening to music. Everything else is just icing on the cake and only really saves me from picking up my phone and authenticating to it to use Siri.
Temperature and humidity sensor is a nice perk for those of us with acoustic guitars and orchids. Presumably it can be used with Apple Shortcuts to trigger notifications. Might upgrade my first gen HomePod eventually, but it still sounds great.
Interesting to see a follow up. I didn’t think we would get another HomePod. I suspect they realized it was priced too high and the first version was just too expensive to produce.
On a side note, I still have my old Apple Hifi and it continues to sounds great. I use it as computer speaker via optical audio.
I also have a pair of Sonos Ones and a Sonos Move. I am fairly underwhelmed by the Sonos One sound quality, but the Move sounds great and is very convenient as a portable speaker.
This is extremely exciting, given the audio quality of the HomePod 1. I had been buying new old stock of HomePod 1s off eBay to make sure I have 6 working ones (I use 3 different stereo pairs) for the foreseeable future.
The only real downside of HomePods is that they don't function as bluetooth audio receivers (Apple proprietary AirPlay2 only) and that you need an Apple ID (as well as iCloud enabled on that Apple ID) to set them up - the creation of which these days requires a working phone number, so it's a little expensive (burner SIM) if you want to buy and use them anonymously.
People commenting about how Siri sucks I think are missing the point of these. These (presuming the sound quality is similar to the HP1) are the best consumer self-powered speakers for under $2000, full stop. The fact that they do anything else (mics, voice assistant, wifi streaming, whatever) is mostly unimportant if you understand what these things are. I'd use them even if they didn't have Wi-Fi. As far as I can tell, they (and airpods) were the latest "insanely great" product Apple made until the M1 macs dropped.
These are my success rates talking to home devices across brands in last 5 yrs. Yes - I am complaining, Siri is horrible. Can't believe I'm complimenting Google (Chromecast Audio, Stadia, that RSS thing) at the same time, but I am in the realm of voice recognition.
The HomePod is the worst Apple product I’ve ever owned, especially for what it’s supposed to do. I need to restart it every few days to even be able to connect to it and playing music with Siri stopped working a few months ago. It also mixes up HomeKit devices that don’t sound similar at all.
I use mine all the time and haven’t had these issues. Just the occasional Siri misunderstanding. My family loves it for playing music and a few other simple tasks like timers.
I have 3 full size gen 1 HomePods in my house (and 5 minis), and the full size HomePods are the absolute best audio quality I've ever come across. Especially when stereo paired. My paired two are in my music studio with baffler panels on the wall behind them and also paired to an Apple TV. For listening to music it's up there with an audiophile setup costing hundreds of thousands, for watching movies on the Apple TV it hands down beats the 7.1 full surround system I have in the living room. I was gutted (and baffled) when they discontinued them.
Also worth saying that the HomePod Mini audio quality is appalling and barely useful for anything other than podcasts.
If your eARC TV has a ATV 4K hooked up, then a pair of HomePods can be wireless Atmos speakers for anything hooked to TV, such as an Xbox console. Still works for music, without TV on, just push to the ATV's AirPlay name.
You don't need a receiver / AVR, this lets the eARC tv drive HomePods.
I love my OG HomePods that I got on close-out at Best Buy, but both of them have given me near constant connection issues over the last few months -- excited to have something to replace them with. I much prefer the appearance of the Big HomePod over the (not-really) equivalent Sonos One.
Seems like Apple executed the way Google should have with their Google Home Max. They've added stereo pairing, so you can have two of them sync up together and then connect them to an Apple TV 4k and you basically get a pretty nice wireless sound bar with Dolby Atmos enabled.
Still, at $300 per pod, I really need Siri to do better than the "dumber than a bag of rocks" vibe she currently gives off for this to be at all tempting.
As someone that does applied DL for work, especially NLP, I just don't understand what Apple is doing with Siri. It's like they see low user engagement metrics with Siri and assume it's because people don't want it. Instead, everyone I know that's an Apple fan uses Google Assistant, because it just works most of the time.
Lots of complaints here but I personally love my OG HomePod. It sounds fantastic which is what I'm looking for out of a speaker. I personally have zero issues with Siri. It's basic but that's all I really need; all I use Siri for is turning on music, measurement conversions when cooking, and adding things to my various reminder lists ("Hey Siri add cucumber to my shopping list").
I am a little surprised that it's more or less the same device re-launched but the more I think about it I'm not really sure what I expected. It's a speaker, its' main requirement is to sound good and the OG HomePod sounds great. I can't think of many other features you can add to the speaker itself.
[+] [-] Hippocrates|3 years ago|reply
I can't relate at all to the bike-shedding of Siri complaints. It's like we're experiencing totally different products. Does anyone actually want to use smart speaker features beyond simple cooking timers and controlling music? These features work great. I thought we'd already determined (4 years ago) that voice/audio was a poor user interface even with google/Alexa? I always felt this was a remarkable speaker that got unfairly panned in reviews for performance on silly and contrived smart-assistant use cases.
Despite the fact that I love these speakers and could care less about Siri, this release has me a little disappointed. I don't see much stated improvement. Kind of seems like a processor bump type release, which is not what I expected in V2 after so many years.
[+] [-] yowzadave|3 years ago|reply
1. No audio line-in! It's a $300 speaker, it sounds great...sometimes I'd like to be able to just plug something into it. If you have a record player, you have to have a separate set of speakers for it, because this thing won't work.
2. No EQ. Apple claims their room-sensing tech will pick the best EQ for your room/the music, but for my personal preference it's always too bassy-sounding (also, I live in an apartment, I don't want to disturb my downstairs neighbors with the bass). Apple added a limited "bass-reducer" mode, but I want more control.
3. Siri tries (and frequently fails) to identify me and my wife by our voice, and then won't do things (like turn off the music, find our iPhone, etc.) because she can't figure out who we are. Every time Siri refuses to obey my wife, and then does something when I make the same request, it ratchets up the marital tension a notch.
I should probably get rid of the thing, but it's actually convenient when it works, the kids use it constantly to play music, and I assume (naively?) that it has a better privacy stance than the competing Google/Amazon products.
[+] [-] criddell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benhurmarcel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezfe|3 years ago|reply
I've never had this issue in my household. Have you tried re-training it?
[+] [-] hnkfrh|3 years ago|reply
However, combined with an AppleTV 4K (2nd gen upwards), HomePods can be used as HDMI eARC devices. This enables playing sound without delay from any HDMI output.
In my setup I use an eARC capable HDMI splitter and a $10 Thunderbolt to HDMI adapter to create an audio device for my mac that has virtually no delay. The video output of the HDMI adapter is set to just mirror my first screen, which avoids additional video processing load.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] odysseus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|3 years ago|reply
Edit: for those downvoting, don't fall for the marketing hype. This isn't a conspiracy - the evidence is out in the open.
[+] [-] perardi|3 years ago|reply
I am an old-school Apple fanboy. I learned HyperCard on a Macintosh SE/30—I am that old.
I still appreciate the Apple ecosystem, and I do like certain aspects of my HomePod mini…but Siri. C’mon. Get it together. It just fails at the absolute basics.
https://imgur.com/q0H788Y
The basics being: please add stuff to my shopping list when I yell it into the aether while in the kitchen. It either completely mangles the speech-to-text (starches, Siri, not starships), or just…fails. It times out, or sits there, blankly pulsing a light at me.
I would really appreciate a higher-quality speaker with easy integration with my iOS/Mac devices. But $299 or something that has artificial stupidity like Siri? Nah.
[+] [-] ubermonkey|3 years ago|reply
I have an ongoing sort-of faux-competition with my wife about how to ask Siri for things. She asks questions and gets frustrating replies, but when I ask them slightly differently I get good data.
I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...".
I SUSPECT it's mostly specificity, or asking for simple facts ("when was King Charles born?") and not derived facts ("how old is King Charles?"), but it comes up a LOT.
That same history of software means that I don't even ATTEMPT some of the stuff Siri is notionally capable of, like maintaining a shopping list. (Though I routinely use Siri on my watch or phone to add appointments or reminders.)
[+] [-] kybernetyk|3 years ago|reply
Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original?
Oh also ... what's the "next song pls" command in German? With Alexa I can say "Alexa, weiter" and the next track plays. With Siri? "Weiter" won't do anything. I have to say "Hey Siri, nächstes Lied" ... or I can just switch to English and say "Hey Siri, next" which then works.
Oh another one: The German Siri pronouncing English song titles with the German voice-set makes my ears hurt. Like you would read an English word but pronounce it like you would a German word.
But then again some Band/Song Titles she gets perfectly right. Cannibal Corpse sounds like perfect English.
Those AI assistants are a hot mess and get worse with time. Seems like feeding more and more data into your model won't make it better.
[+] [-] lancesells|3 years ago|reply
"I'm sorry, I'm having trouble connecting to the internet. Please try again later."
[+] [-] vineyardmike|3 years ago|reply
I appreciate that they aren’t overbuilding Siri though. Alexa (which recent experienced an unfortunate gutting vis layoffs) was amazons attempt to build a consumer ecosystem, which meant a lot of crappy features no one uses (notifications?). Siri feels like it definitively lives on that device and is just a fancy hands-free control. No extraneous feature creep in an attempt to build out a platform. Apple resisted a lot of opportunities to grow Siri while Alexa et al dramatically increased headcount and features, and it seems that voice assistants never really caught on as a general purpose tool. I imagine smarthome/weather/music still dominates all queries by a huge margin.
I still don’t know why anyone would buy a $300 HomePod. As the owner of two original HomePods, they’re fine. This one looks like it has less speakers in it, but I assume it sounds comparably good. If you want good sound I assume you’d be buying a Sonos or something more versatile, but this is an equal but apple-loving choice. The real pro is that it sounds like it has a removable cable.
I still want a screen-based apple smart speaker. Smart speaker+clock is a sweet spot in terms of usability, and the Google home I’ve been loving. It gets you some richer visual for that 1% of queries that benefit, and a glanceable clock for the rest of the time. I can’t imagine apple making a UI that is one-off though. Hopefully the iPad goes the way of the pixel tablet
[+] [-] jsjohnst|3 years ago|reply
Well, in fairness, it’s designed first as a music device, the Siri seems like almost an afterthought. That said,
Spend $299 on a wireless speaker where the stereo pairing often fails, has random Wi-Fi connection issues (that no other Apple device has), and is otherwise hindered by issues?
Nah, fooled me on the first gen, fooled me again on the HomePod minis, think I’ll pass this time.
[+] [-] tiffanyh|3 years ago|reply
They need to license/acquire Nuance Dragon, or do something to improve it.
https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html
[+] [-] benhurmarcel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshstrange|3 years ago|reply
I have near-zero interest in HomeKit (too limited, too locked in, I don't want wifi smart devices) and so while I have hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of smart devices in my house (Z-wave with a few zigbee, all run by HomeAssistant) I can't even use HomePod device to control my lights/etc. Yes, I know about HomeBridge and HA's HomeKit integration, every time I've tried this it's fallen over after a month or less and you have to set it all up from scratch again, the Home app drives me batty, it's so bad.
Maybe Matter will improve things (not holding my breath) but for now I'll stick with my Echo's. They do a decent job of controlling my smart house, are way cheaper, and integrate perfectly with HA. If Siri would actually talk directly to HA then I'd probably switch. It's really not a money thing, it's a reliability thing.
EDIT: After reading some more comments (and from things I've read online or heard on podcasts) I have no doubt the audio quality is amazing. My issue is that I just don't really care about feature as much. I have my AirPods Pro in 90%+ of the time I listen to anything and the other <10% is when I'm in the shower and use a Sonos Roam or in my car. My #1 use case for a "smart speaker" is smart home control followed closely by setting reminders/timers. Siri does great with timers/reminders, smart home (or rather MY smart home), not so much.
[+] [-] tass|3 years ago|reply
I remember the initial setup wasn’t exactly intuitive, but what I like is that HomeKit communicates using your own devices rather than via an exposed web service
[+] [-] nerdjon|3 years ago|reply
Will for sure be getting a few of these.
As far as Siri being "Stupid", idk it does exactly what I need it to do for playing music, controlling my home, measurement conversations, timers, and the occasional ask about if someplace is open or not.
I have long been wondering if Apple would expand the stereo audio for TV to more than 2. If they were to introduce a generic receiver (or actually make the Apple TV able to have inputs and not just use eARC) and allow me to have 4 or more HomePods for my stereo setup. I seriously wonder how that would compare to my current Atmos 5.1.2 setup. It would sure as hell be cheaper to buy 4 or 5 HomePods than this setup was.
Edit: Also the addition of the H1 chip was seriously the best thing to be added to the Mini and unsurprisingly it is coming here to make sending music from my phone to my HomePod easer when I get home. Not enough to replace the big ones I have but likely over time.
[+] [-] Terretta|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newmac|3 years ago|reply
The HomePod mini is the "first device" we have given to our children. No screen, I am comfortable with apple privacy, access to music and podcasts, etc.
The mini has shockingly good sound for $100 and what it is.
[+] [-] ubermonkey|3 years ago|reply
It's really something, isn't it? I mean, I'm an audio nut with genuine crazy-person speakers in my living room, but goddamn if that single mini Homepod in our bedroom isn't stupid good.
[+] [-] gnicholas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strangescript|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s3p|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crimsontech|3 years ago|reply
I bought the first HomePod when they first came out and I heard it in the apple store and couldn't believe a single speaker was producing that sound. I use it constantly to play music in my office, set reminders and timers, asking about the weather and controlling the lights. I seem to be lucky in that Siri mostly understands what I'm saying.
This is once piece of tech I just take for granted, it does what it does very well with no fussing. I'm really happy to see Apple bring out a new version.
For me a smart speaker has to be a very good speaker first as my primary use for it is listening to music. Everything else is just icing on the cake and only really saves me from picking up my phone and authenticating to it to use Siri.
[+] [-] andrewbarba|3 years ago|reply
- We lost two tweeters (7 down to 5)
- We lost two mics (6 down to 4)
Really curious how the sound compares to the original.
[+] [-] fassssst|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] holistio|3 years ago|reply
Just read through the page and couldn't figure out what's new. I was expecting much more from a new version.
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
On a side note, I still have my old Apple Hifi and it continues to sounds great. I use it as computer speaker via optical audio.
I also have a pair of Sonos Ones and a Sonos Move. I am fairly underwhelmed by the Sonos One sound quality, but the Move sounds great and is very convenient as a portable speaker.
[+] [-] sneak|3 years ago|reply
The only real downside of HomePods is that they don't function as bluetooth audio receivers (Apple proprietary AirPlay2 only) and that you need an Apple ID (as well as iCloud enabled on that Apple ID) to set them up - the creation of which these days requires a working phone number, so it's a little expensive (burner SIM) if you want to buy and use them anonymously.
People commenting about how Siri sucks I think are missing the point of these. These (presuming the sound quality is similar to the HP1) are the best consumer self-powered speakers for under $2000, full stop. The fact that they do anything else (mics, voice assistant, wifi streaming, whatever) is mostly unimportant if you understand what these things are. I'd use them even if they didn't have Wi-Fi. As far as I can tell, they (and airpods) were the latest "insanely great" product Apple made until the M1 macs dropped.
[+] [-] aug_aug|3 years ago|reply
These are my success rates talking to home devices across brands in last 5 yrs. Yes - I am complaining, Siri is horrible. Can't believe I'm complimenting Google (Chromecast Audio, Stadia, that RSS thing) at the same time, but I am in the realm of voice recognition.
[+] [-] alexktz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emsy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trafnar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drcongo|3 years ago|reply
Also worth saying that the HomePod Mini audio quality is appalling and barely useful for anything other than podcasts.
[+] [-] plusminusplus|3 years ago|reply
Amazon and Google have the "works with Amazon/Google" so you can buy any brand of hardware (smart plugs for ex) and control them all with one device.
[+] [-] Terretta|3 years ago|reply
You don't need a receiver / AVR, this lets the eARC tv drive HomePods.
[+] [-] akmarinov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dddddaviddddd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BasedInfra|3 years ago|reply
Alexa & Google just bypass it in cleverness while also understanding my accent way better.
The only major plus of Siri is tight integration into ios.
[+] [-] t3rabytes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroCool2u|3 years ago|reply
Still, at $300 per pod, I really need Siri to do better than the "dumber than a bag of rocks" vibe she currently gives off for this to be at all tempting.
As someone that does applied DL for work, especially NLP, I just don't understand what Apple is doing with Siri. It's like they see low user engagement metrics with Siri and assume it's because people don't want it. Instead, everyone I know that's an Apple fan uses Google Assistant, because it just works most of the time.
[+] [-] stanmancan|3 years ago|reply
I am a little surprised that it's more or less the same device re-launched but the more I think about it I'm not really sure what I expected. It's a speaker, its' main requirement is to sound good and the OG HomePod sounds great. I can't think of many other features you can add to the speaker itself.