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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 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
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.
I like how Apple calls it a breakthrough even though they're the 4th company to offer one of these.