HomePod
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Basically, Apple is making Sonos more affordable, while Amazon is making a bet that there is a new platform to be built/won in the form of voice and they're going to push hard into it with a bunch of low-cost appliances.
Apple's approach is fool-proof, but fairly limited. It could be worth a couple billion a year, but at their scale that hardly matters.
Amazon's approach is contingent on changing customer behavior and the development of an app ecosystem, but if it works it could be massive. I wouldn't be surprised if all this focus on voice doesn't eventually lead them back into making smartphones that tie into the hardware/services ecosystem they're developing. Apple could, of course, start making HomePod minis once the use cases are hashed out by Amazon.
At the end of the day, it's important to judge the product on its merits. It may not jibe with your macro view of the tech industry, but that's not the most relevant axis upon which to review a single product offering.
I’m reminded of Microsoft and Xbox. Microsoft saw the Xbox as a strategic way to get a computer into the living room. But all of these years later, Xbox is still primarily used for gaming by gamers.
I think Amazon will find that Alexa will primarily be used as a speaker and not an assistant for quite some time, corporate strategy be damned.
Homepod will distort/control the "voice controlled assistant" market by Apple's sheer size.
Also I agree with Apple's approach to privacy. I'm still not convinced I need a Homepod, but if i were to get a voice enabled speaker I'd get that.
Alexa skills sound nice, but I've yet to hear of a meaningful usage of them that isn't just "a slightly nicer way to do X". For the price of my privacy, I'm not ready to buy that.
I bought it for the sound and the algorithm they are using inside it to distribute sound with the x tweeters and y mics and all that. I think it's something that hasn't been done before, or I've never owned something that's done that. It might be over hyped, but I hope not.
It feels like HomePod is there to server users and the Echo is there to sell to users. Google's device is there doing what Google does - ingest all the data.
Since I can check my history of Alexa commands, I can see that I haven’t said anything that Homepod couldn’t do in like, months. But, $40.
I have to admit, I'm a sucker for things like Apple's claim that their device measures the room acoustics and adjusts itself for better sound. I don't know if it's true, but I kind of want one in my office now.
HomePod might have incredible sound but unless you have an Apple computing device in your house it is useless. And the majority of the World doesn't.
So overall it looks like part of an cross-sell strategy; want this nice speaker, add an iOS device to your order.
Different to Amazon's 'sell all the things' strategy but still a means of expanding sales.
I would bet that Sonos has a "smart" Alexa enabled version of both the Play:3 and Play:5 in the works. When they launched the "One" they launched it at the same price point as the old Play:1 and dropped its price point by £50, again I would bet the same will happen.
Apple needs to make the "smartness" of Siri the selling point to win over Sonos customers...
I know it's not the same, but there's a Sonos skill now, so I can control, and play music on, my Play:5 using my Echo Dot.
However, I cannot stream all music on the Sonos. There are either license restrictions or arbitrary Amazon limitations on what songs I can stream from the Amazon Prime catalog.
Voice controlled smart assistants is Google's bread and butter, and Amazon is only tangentially connected to that world while Apple is a hardware company looking in.
Both of these companies will have to "re-invent" themselves to compete with Google, and again, Amazon's speed into the market has given them an artificial moat with certain skills, but I think it's inevitable that Google's voice recognition and assistant will be far superior to what Amazon and Apple can ultimately produce.
I already get a lot of eyeballs from Alexa users when they see what Google Assistant does, that's only going to escalate as Google gets more and more serious about leveraging their very unique skills and data into a moat that Amazon and Apple will struggle to compete with.
I'm happy to have our Echos, but we mostly use it exactly as you describe - for timers, music, and weather. We also use a grocery list app that lets us say "Alexa add peanut butter to the shopping list". That's kind of nice to have in the kitchen.
With all due respect to Everett Dirksen:
"A couple billion here, a couple billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money."
To me it seems like it is an important part of broadening the income base, so Apple is no longer as dependent on a single product category, and often enough a single product. Each "well this isn't so important"-product that rakes in a few billion a year in revenue is fantastic.
I find Apple Music awful. It has a terrible UX on both mobile and Desktop that I've tried and failed to get used to several times now. From what I recall, simple behaviors like buffering the next song in local cache hardly worked (or weren't even implemented).
There have been plenty critiques of Siri, the large one being in my mind: the 3rd party development support is super limited, especially if you compete directly with Apple in any capacity (e.g. Spotify). Crippling consumer choice as a way of coercing consumers to your inferior products is such an awful part of the Apple ethos.
Apple refuses to allow you to migrate music tracks from one phone to another. They demand that you re-download them from iTunes. But iTunes as music library management software is utterly unreliable and can't be trusted.
As a result, whenever I buy a new iPhone, I manually make a list of all the music on my current phone, by literally typing out song names and artists into a text editor. Software tools to do this have proven unreliable.
I then, on the new phone, download every single track individually. I then run down my checklist and make sure that every single track is accounted for.
I've been collecting ideas in my head for a phone music player that allows you to safely store your library externally. I doubt I could ever get it into the App Store, unfortunately, but at least it would fix my personal problem.
I would recommend just about any other process – including, not using iTunes, or not using an iPhone. The amount of effort you're investing seems far too great for the reward you reap: parity.
I've read that the average number of songs in a library is somewhere around 7000. Assuming you're quite efficient at 1) manually recording every song in a text file, 2) re-downloading the song, and 3) verifying that song has been downloaded, maybe it would take you 60s / song.
That's 116 hours dedicated to this process, or nearly 5 full days non-stop. Seriously, the opportunity cost (even at a minimum-wage salary) is more than a new iPhone costs brand new. This is very peculiar, indeed.
I was hating life at the time, but after it was all said and done I didn't consider the hassle worth the drastic step of switching platforms.
I have a much, much, much larger library of tracks that I don't keep in active rotation. Apple's inability to provide me with a reliable way to keep those two libraries separate is the source of my frustration.
I've considered stopping buying iPhones, but the user experience of Android phones is just nowhere close. Polish matters in a small, complicated device.
I may have to eventually because I don't use MacBooks anymore. After spilling liquid on one twice in a year I decided I needed to wean myself off of them. I thoroughly love MacBooks, but developing the habits to use one safely has eluded me. Without a OSX device, music management on an iPhone is truly impossible. As it is right now, I will need to use my work machine in order to move my library next time.
If I really have to, I suppose I could acquire a Mac Mini.
1. Make a playlist in iTunes 2. Sync the playlist to your phone 3. Sync it to any other phones you may have.
How is that baffling?
As someone else mentioned, VLC does the job as well (I use VLC for movie playback on my phone and love it). Synology is just really nice and easy to use, so I prefer it for music.
If you select a playlist to be synced you only need to maintain that playlist on the Mac. Any change will be synced to the iPhone.
You could also create a smart playlist with conditions that cover any song / album you'd like to include. But at that point why not snyc the whole library?
I either misunderstand you or you are making this way more complicating than it is.
> Or you consider the step of adding a song to your sync playlist harder than checking for every song manually when changing phones? I find that hard to believe.
I tried briefly. I don't always buy new music when I'm sitting next to my laptop. I usually buy music on my phone, immediately after I've Shazam'ed the track. If I don't remember to add it to the playlist later, then it goes unadded, and the next time I sync the playlist, it'll be gone.
I only get the urge to manage my music playlist when I'm listening to it. I usually don't have my laptop handy when I'm listening to it.
You're not misunderstanding and I'm not making this more complicated than it is. Apple simply refuses to make music library management reliable and easy by allowing me to move files from one phone to another, or by allowing third party apps to manage the music library, necessitating a workaround. It's that simple.
There is only one source of truth for my music library, the actual files on my phone. I don't want two sources of truth to manage, especially one that's in a totally different place from where I do my listening. My music library needs to live in one and only one place. I can accept syncing, but I need to be able to manage the process on my phone.
I only buy lossless music from third party stores and physical sources and therefor only use iTunes for music management (without problems I might add), not for buying. However if you often buy from your iPhone I'd guess it's even easier - shouldn't your album/song already be on the phone immediatelly after purchase while any other changes get synced whenever you're in the same network as your laptop?
I still fail to see the issue here.
Personally I keep my personal music in Plex, and my Plex server is available to me at any time. I can locally sync whatever music I like. I’d gladly use iCloud Music library but I’m well north of 100k tracks.
I actually sort and organize my music and its metadata with Swinsian.
Plex?
- Get an iPhone that has enough storage to store your entire music collection. Sicne mine is lossless that phone doesn't exist, but luckily iTuens has an option to transcode to a lossy format on the fly before syncing to your iPhone.
- Alternatively and if storage is a concern, just put everything you'd like to sync in a playlist and only sync this palylist.
There's really no need to write everything down.
With the HomePod, it seems to be a similar story. I am eagerly awaiting the HomePod becoming available in Germany, because I am fufilling the criteria listed above. For me, the sound quality is the relevant thing, and that seems to be there.
For expanding the possible user base, Apple has of course to continue working on the software and enable more sources for the music played on the HomePod.
A lot of folks keep mentioning Apple Music but I don’t believe they understand that’s not the only option
I personally cannot imagine myself asking Siri(or alexa/google) to play music because I usually don't know what I want to listen to while working, so I need to find it, visually, play some bits, and then settle on something. Ofcourse, N=1, but that would be my use-case.
Don't get me wrong - I'm confident that Apple made a great speaker...for its size. And that's my concern - it seemed they have created a 4 inch speaker that sounds like a 6 or 7 inch speaker, which is impressive, but there's already a wide range of affordable, great speakers operating in true stereo in that category. I can understand that effort if it was a mobile speaker, but it's not and I simply don't see the value of the slightly smaller footprint compared to a traditional bookshelf speaker, which is still rather small, when used at home in a fixed position.
I would have liked them to put that effort into a larger speaker and see if they can really give much more expansive options a run for their money.
I'm wondering if it's a similar situation to the iPhone camera? The iPhone's camera sensor (AFAIK) isn't exceptional. It's their software that holds the magic. Could that be the case here - the speaker isn't exceptional, but the processing is?
That's the important question, which I obviously can't answer yet. However judging by early reports, even by audio enthusiasts, it seems to be an incredible speaker for its size and DSP is indeed one of the features that can really make difference in modern speaker design.
But then again it's a 4 inch speaker and I'm wondering if they have limited their potential with such a small form factor. If it sounds as good as other, slightly larger, yet affordable bookshelf speakers that's impressive, but those speakers have been widely available (and work with any source) for a long time.
So to stay with your analogy, I worry that Apple has managed to turn a needlessly small sensor into a competetive camera and wonder what they could have done if they used a decently sized, already competetive sensor with the same software magic.
And while I agree that with speakers like Dali Zensors or Denon MC41s affordable solutions exist.. you'd still need an amp with airplay, calibration etc.
Also you can't just put stereo speakers on your table in the middle of the room. If there would be a good spot for them something like the airSOUND AS 30 (active speakers) would be an alternative. Plus subwoofer you'd be at the same price point.
It is expensive compared to what Amazon sells and that's why Apple is smart to have focused on the speaker rather than the smart.
When you compare it to their previous speaker system (the HiFi), it's a huge step up for the same amount of money.
Maybe, but as indicated before I think if that’s the case and sound quality is the focus those customers could very likely do a lot better with a pair of bookshelfs.
The private issues are concerning, but the way Apple approaches privacy, it's less concerning to me. That may be foolish of me, but Apple seems to be the most interested in security (and has the least to gain from taking your data).
FWIW, I bought a Bose sound bar (the wide one) and wasn't overly impressed with it, particularly at $500. I'm hoping the "radar" technology of the HomePod will deliver a better single point surround sound. The technology sounds compelling.
Google Home, Amazon Echo, and all others do the same thing, they are continuously "listening" but only within the device itself. Audio is looped through an on-device audio processor which looks for the wake-word. If the wake-word is found that audio is sent to the cloud, but otherwise it just loops back over itself wiping out the previous audio sample. This can be easily verified with network monitoring or by reading about e.g. Qualcomm's Smart Audio Platform or competitors.
The next major privacy objection is typically "what if it gets hacked?!" Which, while impossible to address, ignores the smart elephant in your pocket. Which too has an always on speaker accessible to baseband as well as the primary OS.
One can point out potential privacy/security flaws in one device while still recognizing the are other privacy/security flaws in other devices (smartphones, in this case).
I've never seen privacy/security minded individuals not acknowledging the latter.
If the police approach Amazon with a court order saying they want to the microphone turned on in Someone1234's home, what do you think Amazon will do?
Comcast, TWC, etc. Record everything over the wire since the patriot act and store it. Search with a FISA warrant. They could pay a private company to infiltrate it.
Apple doesn’t run an advertising and sales business and they’ve made privacy a major selling point. That gives many people reason to believe they won’t quietly change functionality in an update or start selling data from the cloud services backing these systems.
You can see this happening in the mobile space where Apple has been proactive about privacy concerns and Google has generally waited for public outcry or impending regulations before cleaning up their app store.
Isn't this normal for Bose products? Usually you buy Bose for the looks and the prestige, not for the sound quality.
Well people wouldn't buy Bose if they sounded bad. I don't think anyone who buys Bose hasn't been told they can get better sound for the money, but Bose does a few things well that can make them an easy purchase decision. They sound pretty good to the average person (to the non-audiophiles I know, they sound great), they look nice, they're well made and they're easy to set-up/use. In other words, the tradeoffs are worthwhile to their prospective buyers.
Bose is like the Starbucks of speakers -- they're the "premium mediocre" choice.
[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...
But especially with movies the difference between left and right is kinda important.
Am I alone in this? How much space does a home need before it has multiple rooms where an expensive audio setup makes sense? Wouldn't the single user limitation be an issue at that sized home?
And the homepod is fairly tiny. It's just a little bit bigger than a sonos one.
AppleTV is Apple's answer and I bought heavily into the Apple ecosystem. However, I still use other audiosources daily.
You will have to listen to it yourself and make a judgement. But given how i like most Apple's product sounded, and the changes / improvement they have made to the recent Beats, I think those speaker will likely well worth $350.
Although I really wish they open up AirPlay Video for TV manufacture. Or actually make a God Damn Apple TV Set. I dont understand how I cant use my speaker for my TV.
Nobody said that :) The knock on Beats from the jump was that they're stylish, comfortable, and sound like shit.
I've also simply accepted that many people just don't care that much about the quality of their headphones, largely because their preferred music doesn't require high fidelity; their music rewards heavy bass and doesn't punish muddled mids. My own preference for headphones directly reflects my choice in music: you just can't listen to classical music on crappy headphones, as entire groups of instruments can be lost to the mud and the bass.
As far as being deliberate, Apple has kinda always had botched software release since the iPhone. Steve Jobs touted web apps that you would bookmark as the way to build initial iOS apps until Apple released an SDK for the second iPhone. The iPad's software is finally coming into form with iOS 11. The Watch struggled for the first two versions. They seem to be on a pattern of — Try stuff, keep what works, throw away what doesn't.
Now that the hardware is faster and watch apps can be more standalone there are lots of good ones: Carrot Weather, Fantastical, Drafts, Authy, and 1Password spring to mind
I don't think this is actually true is it?
> First, “What if we turned ____ into a small advanced computer?” is arguably Apple’s mantra for entering new product categories.
> The difference between HomePod and Amazon Echo isn’t that they’re in different product categories. [...] The difference is in the priorities behind the devices. [...] HomePod’s first priority is clearly audio quality. That’s why it costs $350. Amazon has placed a higher priority on price
I think Apple's philosophy towards products is "What does a user want to do, and how can we uniquely enable that through design and hardware." Apple has seen that people really want to play music in their home, and with HomePod they have a unique hardware solution and premium experience.
That's why I think Gruber is correct in his thinking re: Apple Music exclusivity:
> It is unclear at this point whether third-party “Hey Siri” playback support is the way Apple wants HomePod to be, simply something they haven’t gotten around to yet, or still up in the air internally (like native apps on iPhone back in 2007). Some people seem convinced that HomePod doesn’t support external services through “Hey Siri” out of competitive spite with Spotify. I would say that’s certainly possible, but I’m not convinced. [...] my gut says they’ll make the most money by making HomePod more useful, even if that means opening up an SDK that allows for competitors to Apple Music.
HomePod might not be a success, and it definitely has some shortcomings. But, given Apple's ability to iterate and change, I probably wouldn't bet against the HomePod being successful at some point in the future.
I think, if anything, some of HomePod's most glaring shortcomings are actually Siri's architectural shortcomings. There is a different Siri on each device, with different capabilities. That seems like one of the biggest technical challenges making SiriKit advancements non-trivial.
Well, it is early days. I wouldn't judge HomePod's success until it's been around for a year or more. Let's not forget all the criticism of the original iPhone. Apple's MVP products tend to be open to criticism on release, but over time, as they add wishlist functionality, silence a lot of the critics too.
I kind of agree that most modern playback devices feature wireless technology anyway, but Bluetooth audio is still crap and AirPlay requires an Apple device. Gruber seemingly welcomes every removal of ports on Apple devices with the puck quote. The problem is that in recent years, Apple doesn't replace them with newer, open standards but retracts to their proprietary garden that slowly looses appeal as the time goes by.
That puck better be headed towards 'connecting with TV/XBox/PC' because who wants to have multiple speakers in a house for different services? Especially considering better speakers take more space.
Does Apple expect everyone to buy a separate TV for Netflix, HBO, and NBC?
Speakers are one-item-serves-all. HomePod needs connectivity options to connect to your TV/Xbox/PC. Otherwise it'll have very limited utility as a Siri assistant.
Also, fixed consumer electronics devices should always be wired. You're just increasing the noise floor for your other devices in your house if they're not.
Everyone saying the thing is doomed, or Siri is useless… I dunno, maybe I don't use Alexa to the fullest but I pretty much ask Alexa the weather and to turn my lights on and off and I find Apple Music better than Amazon Music. It will also integrate with my notes/reminders, timers and calls seamlessly.
I'm sure Alexa integrates with all of this at some level, but I'm willing to bet that for people into Apple's ecosystem Siri (despite lacking the thousands of questionably useful skills) will work pretty well for a lot of people.
Siri has a lot of room to improve, but I don't think that HomePod is somehow useless because it doesn't have my roommate's Alexa fart skill. The main thing will be getting support for third party entitlements over time -- they can't let that languish forever, but I think for the moment they've got more breathing room than people think.
I also trust Siri a lot more than I trust Alexa/Google with listening all the time or being used by others in the house given the nature of business models.
> I’ve seen a lot of commentary along the lines up “Well, of course Apple is promoting HomePod’s audio quality, because Siri sucks compared to Alexa and Google Home as a voice assistant.” I would argue that’s not true across the board, but it’s inarguably true that Alexa and Google Home are far better than Siri at certain things, and if those things are important to you, you probably aren’t even reading this review, because you know HomePod isn’t for you.
"This product is perfect, if it isn't perfect for you is because this product isn't for you"
> The harder decisions are choosing between HomePod, the Alexa-equipped Sonos One, and Google’s Home Max. Based on my side-by-side listening experience — admittedly, in a demo set up and conducted by Apple, but in a residential room that I would describe as very typical in terms of its size and acoustics — HomePod does sound better.
Pure advert.
> THE NOTCH: It offends me. It’s ungainly and unnatural. Clearly, the ideal of an “all-screen” design — to use Apple’s own words — has no notch at all. This is not that. But what I dislike more than the notch isn’t the notch itself but that Apple is fully embracing the notch in software. I really wish their software design rendered the “ears” with black backgrounds while using apps. I’d be fine with embracing the notch on the home screen and lock screen.
> It’s the front-facing equivalent of the camera bump. It offends me because it’s not just imperfect but glaringly, deliberately imperfect. But — again, exactly as with the bump — I understand why it’s there. I don’t like it but it wouldn’t keep me from buying the phone.
One can be a fan, yet also critical. The best ones probably are given fans also tend to know the ins and outs better than most. Disqualifying Gruber's analysis because he's often a dick and likes Apple just means you're pre-judging information from one of the people who knows Apple best.
PS: Perhaps it's because iPhones don't support aptX via Bluetooth - yet another incomprehensible omission.