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Apple Announces Its 'Next Breakthrough' Product: the HomePod (techcrunch.com)
Apple unveiled its home speaker during WWDC 2017 on Monday. The device, called HomePod, will go toe-to-toe with existing competitors such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Apple said it wanted to combine good speakers with smart speakers you can talk to, referencing Sonos and Amazon Alexa. It said the speaker "needs to rock the house" free from distortion. It also needs to have "spatial awareness" to make the music sound good no matter the room size. It also needs to be fun to use, Apple said, adding that the HomePod does all of this with a customer's privacy in mind. From a report: The device is a pill-shaped circular speaker. It has 7 beam-forming tweeter array. It has a custom-made woofer and an Apple A8 chip. It has multi-channel echo cancellation, real-time acoustic modeling and more. The HomePod can scan the space around it to optimize audio accordingly. Schiller spent a lot of time talking about how good it sounds. Of course the speaker works well with Apple Music. You can talk to the speaker to play anything in your Apple Music library and more. You can say "play more songs like that," or "I like this song." [...] It's going to cost $349. It comes in white and space grey. It starts shipping in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. Other countries will get HomePods next year.
Why is that Bullshit? They're pretty much the only one of the big tech companies that are promising privacy. If they were caught not honoring that at this point, they'd lose everything. It seems a pretty good bet that they're serious.
Driver size doesn't meaningfully limit bass response. An 8 inch driver all else equal if going to go 2hz lower than a 6 inch driver. At 10 inches you are adding less than 1hz. With piano and a very trained ear you'll notice the missing 3hz. With modern bass heavy music you wont even realize its missing. The larger size lets you go 3db louder though. That's a lot.
The lack of actual cabinetry to promulgate bass energy is a much bigger problem than the smaller driver. To promulgate bass with that volume of space to work with you have to sacrifice midrange accuracy. This is why dialog from Sonos soundbars sounds so "weird." To get the convincing bass they have to sacrifice on the midrange. The midrange tweeter is being drowned out with interference.
A 10 inch drive necessitates a room of at least 400sq feet too. Small rooms cant accommodate 10 inch drivers. It's just going to be far too loud. A 10" driver is something like a Tannoy DC-10 DC-10A. Those are $8-16k speakers. They are amazing, but they need a very big room. I used to own a pair of Tannoys with 15" drivers. Those things were AMAZING. But not I live in a small apartment and cant use speakers like those.
It just seems a massive strategic oversight that this isn't going to be ready until December. Most of the world will probably be waiting till this time next year to get their hands on the units. Any hype they hoped to generated with the announcement will have been long forgotten by December, and the delay will give Google/Amazon plenty of time to develop a game plan to disrupt their launch. I mean, what is the point of keeping it secret if you're going to make everyone wait 7 months before they can get it?
I remember Jobs once pointed out that one of the most important sentences Apple included in their keynotes was 'ships now'. He was right. Since the whole airpod delays I thought they would have got this stuff under control.
At $50....how can I not be happy? And if I want better sound, it has a 3.5mm jack (because Amazon doesn't have the "courage" to remove it) and bluetooth.....hell for $350....I can put one in every room in my house.
> Can i use it without any form of internet connection to Apple
Can you use the remote voice processing device that streams stuff from the internet without sending data outside your local network? I mean, I expect not.
There is a legitimate need for a solution that is like: the "smart speaker" talks over wifi to your desktop, which acts as a server and processes the voice, then searches the locally built index of your locally built library. I suspect this would be a possible thing to build, but much harder for a company to sell it to you like that.
Ultimately, most of these "it just works (assuming you have an internet connection)" type products are all over the place because they sell, and the extra work to get a language processor and something to categorize your MP3s in a way that doesn't require a bunch of tech support would be more expensive and have fewer takers- they wouldn't really sell, I don't think.
When Apple says "something something privacy", they normally mean: you can use local features without any remote drama, and remote features won't be tied to your username or real name or sold or whatever. Sometimes they mean more than that. But at the end of the day, if you don't trust Apple with your voice requests if it sends the data to a remote server, then you shouldn't be trusting Apple (or ANY) company with your voice requests, and you should be doing it all locally in Linux or BSD or whatevs.
The Apple HomePod can do most of what Alexa can do, and it only costs twice as much.
I like how Apple calls it a breakthrough even though they're the 4th company to offer one of these.