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Apple Homepod Review: Locked In (theverge.com)
On Tuesday, the review embargo lifted for full reviews of Apple's new HomePod smart speaker. The Verge's Niley Patel shared his thoughts on Apple's new HomePod in video and written form. Patel found that while it offers best-in-class sound for the price, Siri is frustratingly limited and the voice controls only work with Apple Music. Furthermore, Siri can't tell different voices apart, therefore raising some privacy concerns as anyone can come up to the speaker and ask Siri to send and read text messages and other private information aloud. Here's an excerpt from the report: The HomePod, whether Apple likes it or not, is the company's answer to the wildly popular Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers. Apple is very insistent that the $349 HomePod has been in development for the past six years and that it's entirely focused on sound quality, but it's entering a market where Amazon is advertising Alexa as a lovable and well-known character during the Super Bowl instead of promoting its actual features. Our shared expectations about smart speakers are beginning to settle in, and outside of engineering labs and controlled listening tests, the HomePod has to measure up. And while it's true that the HomePod sounds incredible -- it sounds far better than any other speaker in its price range -- it also demands that you live entirely inside Apple's ecosystem in a way that even Apple's other products do not. The question is: is beautiful sound quality worth locking yourself even more tightly into a walled garden? As for technical specifications, the HomePod comes in at 6.8 inches high, 5.6 inches wide, and weights 5.5 pounds. It features a high-excursion woofer with custom amplifier, array of seven horn-loaded tweeters, each with its own custom amplifier, six-microphone array, internal low-frequency calibration microphone for automatic bass correction, direct and ambient audio beamforming, and transparent studio-level dynamic processing.
How much does it spy on you?
Why is Snark Required?
"Apple is very insistent that the $349 HomePod has been in development for the past six years and that it's entirely focused on sound quality,"
C'mon. HiFi has been around since the 1950's. It doesn't take six years for a multi-billion dollar company to R&D good sound. I'll give them a bit of a break, though - they did buy Beats, which definitely set them back a bit.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
As a lifelong Wintel guy who recently bought a MacBook Pro, I'm shocked how well it works with my iPhone, and how many angles of real functionality there are.
I'm shocked at how long the battery lasts with Safari, and I'm shocked at how well Office 365 runs on Safari.
We're well past the age of landline telephones, where things just had to work, even during a natural disaster. Most products, with their promises of infinite configurability and infinite interoperability, just plain don't work these days. I'm sure some Slahdotter will set me straight, but Apple also seems like one of the few companies to actually give a damn about privacy enough to go toe to toe with the Feds. Privacy is a *huge* issue with these machines, probably the biggest.
Yeah, I'll live in Apple's walled garden. I already live in a 'walled garden', no matter what products I buy. They might as well just work.
-It has an Apple(tm) Logo.
-It comes in Apple(tm) color scheme.
-It has an Apple(tm) power plug.
-It has an Apple(tm) App.
-It has an Apple(tm) Case.
-It runs Apple(tm) software.
-It has Apple(tm) pricing.
It checks all the boxes, it's much better than Google, Amazon et-al put together, since none of those check ANY of the above boxes.
Recommendation: PURCHASE! Purchase One for every member of the family! for every room!
Ah yes, The Verge. The DailyMail of the tech blogpost publications.
Also, why does Nilay Patel look like a rapist?
The amazon dot allows you connect to any speakers you want via 3.5mm; so sound quality can be mixed and matched to your budget. Plus you get Alexa which is the most mature and usable of the big... I guess 4 now? (Google Home, Echo, Microsofts super creepy spyware thingy that haunts your PC and now siri).
Yeah, Apple cares so much about privacy they go toe-to-toe with the Feds in a mutual PR play for theatrically challenged people,
while FBI gets the info in the background from China in a trade deal, since China actually has full access to Apple devices as part of a deal where Apple gets to keep its cheap massive factory force and infrastructure in China including access to 1.3 billion people of potential buyers in return for giving its balls to China. Nothing like using an external source while making an internal playact of conflict for the retards.
Not sure about you guys but I'd pay a cover to see these two mud wrestle topless.
I can't be alone with this question. Conceivably I could replace my ok but bulky floor standing speakers with a pair of Homepods. Provided they indeed sound good to my taste.
But, I would want to use it for ALL my audio sources. I also have an AV preamp that is used for several sources: tv audio, CDs (these can perhaps be dropped) and BluRay discs, and eventually a game console when the kids are old enough.
Ideally I would take the analog out of my AV preamp (or alternatively extract digitally from the hdmi out) and convert it to an airplay stream towards the home pods.
However I am not aware of a simple device (a mac mini would be overkill, and is there software that would do it? not sure) that does this? I also checked raspberry pi projects. An airport express would NOT work as it is a receiver, not a sender. Any tips?
Those are not Technical Specifications. They are artsy-fartsy drivel.
The "real" technical specifications are:
Frequency Response: 200 Hz to 12 kHz +/- 20 dB
The -3dB response is 1kHz to 8kHz.
Apple does it again.
Did they even test the thing?
Get a pair of SONOS Play:5 speakers. MUCH better sound quality, and they have an analog input - so you can use your older gear. Oh, and they also stream all the other services, not just Apple Music.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
apple thought they were going to make a Echo killer?
Airfoil and Airfoil Satellite are in the vein of what you’re looking for, so far as software goes. There’s also AirParrot that can act as a sender. You might be able to use Airfoil Satellite with an old iPod Touch receiving audio through the 3.5mm headphone/mic jack, which then transmits it back to Airfoil on a PC/Mac, which then transmits it via AirPlay to the HomePods, but I have no idea if that’d actually work and it sounds like way too brittle of a workflow.
Besides which, why introduce latency concerns, especially if you’re watching movies or talking about hooking up consoles? It’s one thing for music, where latency isn’t a problem, but it’s something else when you now have lips out of sync with the words being spoken or audio cues that don’t correspond to the inputs you’re providing or the action on the screen.
Actually I was not impressed by the sound of any Sonos speaker. I have not yet heard the Homepod, not sure if I’ll find it good enough but eager to see it in action - the reviews are uniform in extolling the audio quality. In the end I might give up on the idea and just replace my big floorstanders with small speakers, though I like the idea of using the homepods for music streaming without switching on the hifi, and only switching it on for other sources incl tv sound.
Exactly - “brittleness” of the chain and latency are worrying. Currently the best option seems to be an old tascam acquisition module that can accept line in next to mic to the digital connector of an old iphone/touch and then use a software that acts like an airplay megaphone. If it works well, remains to be seen.
It looks to me like the kind of device that would be successful on kickstarter.
Forgot to mention that direct support of apple music is sufficient for me. Some other services can be airplayed. I think that I could airplay netflix audio from the apple tv to it but must check (can anyone confirm?). It is for me really a matter of also adding non-computer sourced audio from analog line level or derived from hdmi.
Well, on the good side, it sounds like reducing latency has been a major focus for Airplay 2, which is due out for the HomePod via software update in a few months, so it may become more viable. Even so, I not convinced there’s a huge market for that sort of thing. Seems to me they could simply enable Bluetooth support using the existing hardware the HomePod has to eliminate the market for a device like that, given that you could then use one of the existing analog to Bluetooth adapters that exist.
citation needed
Honestly, all the engineering done here seems to be with the intention of mitigating shortcomings inherent in having all your speakers sitting in a tiny box that gets placed on the kitchen shelf, or on top of a bar in the center of the room, or some other suboptimal spot. Cool, it's got automatic bass response correction... but where is that bass going to go when it leaves the plastic speaker container? The laws of physics, specifically acoustics, still apply - where the speakers are placed will have a *huge* effect on the sound. Placing the speaker in a corner is the best way to get bass that really fills and shakes the room. You'd need to stand the thing on its side to angle it right to take advantage of the acoustics of being in that corner. What's that going to do to the mics and the tweeters?
Where is the stereo image going to come from? Is it possible to link two together and have them split the channels properly? Why 7 tweeters? It sounds like this thing is designed to be placed into the center of a room and sort of radiate the sound evenly around it... meaning no stereo image.
Bass, bass, bass. The laws of physics again - no matter how high the excursion is on your woofer, if it's only measuring something like 3-4 inches, and it's sitting on a countertop, your low frequency response is going to be seriously limited.
Sure, it sounds good... compared to a tinny phone speaker, or the awful crap they put into the new TVs, "sound bars", and $30 Bluetooth tabletop speakers. But if you are looking to spend $350 on speakers, you can get a real serious set for that sort of money. This overpriced Apple gadget is no replacement. You're spending $350 on Siri. If you've got that money to blow, go ahead and blow it. But don't let the Reality Distortion Field get you.
By all accounts the Homepod has much better sound than the Sonos 5
I haven't seen a single person in real life, even talking about one of those spying devices, let alone having one at home. Every single person that I asked either considered them creepy as fuck, or didn't even know they existed. (And now everyone of them thinks the former.)
The (fake) "news" regarding them, remind me of when a news outlet declares "AMERICA THINKS $X", until it is true, as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[It seems /. swallowed my other comment due to the subject. So to repeat...]
I haven't seen a single person in real life, talking about those things, let alone having one at home. Everyone I asked, either found them super-creepy or didn't even know they existed. (And now they all think the former.)
The (fake) "news" surrounding these products are like when a news agency declares "AMERICA THINKS $X", until it is true, as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A friend's ex had one of those things, and it was just about impossible to get it to do any of the normal things, like attach a line audio cable, play mp3s from a USB stick or phone, etc. It was exclusively limited to using ways typical of iDiot products. Like special Apple protocols over wifi, for example, worked fine. But nothing that any normal audio equipment would do. So fuck them sideways, with a large rough brick.
The Bose Companion will be all the sound you audiophiles need, outside that walled garden that Jobs built.
If you still went out and bought the item referred to in TFS, go get help.
This is the fourth comment you spammed about your shitty "speakers", you Sonos sock puppet. Like writing the name in uppercase-only letters every time wasn't making it obvious enough.
The lack of analog input (let alone output in one of their other devices) was precisely the problem we had with their "speakers" around here!
So you're straight-up lying with a straight face.
Also, they can't do anything else that a normal (non i-) person would expect.
... and it's a total non-starter in this, otherwise all Apple, household, because it's simply too expensive to risk setting out in the open, in a house full of highly destructive children. Honestly, nothing at all about the HomePod seems to take into account typical multi-member households, and yet the keystone feature seems to want to shout, "Share my wonders with all your friends!"
Such a shame. But, ya know... perhaps next year's revision will be worth a look, eh?
Or, we can take a look at the design of the thing a do a little critical thinking.
Most bluetooth speakers have one speaker aiming forward or up. So they sound OK if you are in front of a front-firing speaker, or mediocre if you are near an upward-firing speaker. We have a Riva X that has three speakers in an angled array, so if it's against a wall it fills the room pretty well.
The Apple device has speakers surrounding it, which is the design you want if you want to be able to place it anywhere in a room. I've seen a commercial Bose ceiling speaker system that has an array of speakers around it to fill the area with sound, and it works pretty well for that application.
So, from a design perspective, it makes more sense than an upward firing speaker or a front firing speaker, if the application is 'throw it anywhere.'
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
New Monster Dongles
And those accounts are? I've read lots saying it's better than the Play:1 - but that's a $149, small speaker. I would be VERY surprised if the HomePod equaled the Play:5. Simple physics says the bottom decade will be dramatically different, as the Play:5 uses three 4" high-stroke woofers, with significantly more displacement than the HomePod. Combined with the much larger enclosure, you have much more bass extension and output capability.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Actually, make that $700 since we're talking about buying two. That'll get you into professional studio monitor territory... I know $700 is the going rate for entry into cramped luxury living at Apple Apartment Homes... but out in the real world it'll buy you a whole lot.
Is this worse than the repair policy on the Amazon Echo? I couldn't find a number anywhere with a quick search, but it wouldn't shock me to learn that it costs 70-80% of the original retail price to send the thing back to Amazon for an out of warranty repair.
The real question is in how user-repairable the device is. Can you easily replace individual speakers (the part most likely to fail)? Given Apple's recent history I'm not overly optimistic...but we'll see what iFixit has to say.
Conceivably I could replace my ok but bulky floor standing speakers with a pair of Homepods. Provided they indeed sound good to my taste.
But, I would want to use it for ALL my audio sources. I also have an AV preamp that is used for several sources: tv audio, CDs (these can perhaps be dropped) and BluRay discs, and eventually a game console when the kids are old enough.
Why replace something that is working?
Upgraditis?