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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.
I didn't want the Echo. I didn't want the Home. I don't want this, either.
In fact, I'm not exactly sure why anyone would want something like this. I really don't want something in my home that's always listening and potentially sending my speech out to computers that I don't control.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
copying Amazon?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I have a Rythmik F15 sub with a 15" driver.
I can't imagine listening to bass on a wimpy 4" driver. You want at _least_ a 10" driver for music, bigger for movies.
Who is this targeted at? All the iHipsters who thinks Beats headphones sound good??
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.
At least in the Keynote, they mentioned that all information sent over the internet (Siri context search) uses an anonymous "siri ID" instead of your name/login/userid. And encrypted end-to-end.
I want Nintendo to make a home speaker, and I want them to call it the HomeBoy, and I want Flavor Flav to star in the commercials. And, it would be cool, because it would know what TIME it is.
sig: sauer
Even better is the Echo Dot, $300 less than the Homepod and you can easily connect it to any decent bluetooth speaker for much better sound than the Homepod will provide.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
Agreed. Further, their business model is very pro-consumer, because the majority of their revenue comes from their end consumers. They're the one tech company that is treating mere moral consumers as their customer, instead of their product.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
> 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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All jokes about Apple and replaceable batteries aside, there's no way that thing would run on less than a spare diesel locomotive. Do you see the picture in the article? Must be a good 25 feet tall next to the guy on stage. And people complained the Infinity RS-1's were big.
The Apple HomePod can do most of what Alexa can do, and it only costs twice as much.
I'm getting a huge kick out of reading all the critiques of this device...considering that nobody who loves or hates it has ever seen one in person.
How about this, guys...let's actually wait until they start selling them to decide how much they rock/suck balls? You know, just an idea...
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Excellent! Another Apple product not to buy. As always: Fuck Apple
I like how Apple calls it a breakthrough even though they're the 4th company to offer one of these.
And still less storage than a Nomad. Lame.