Apple HomePod 2nd Generation
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I can't relate at all to the bike-shedding of Siri complaints. It's like we're experiencing totally different products. Does anyone actually want to use smart speaker features beyond simple cooking timers and controlling music? These features work great. I thought we'd already determined (4 years ago) that voice/audio was a poor user interface even with google/Alexa? I always felt this was a remarkable speaker that got unfairly panned in reviews for performance on silly and contrived smart-assistant use cases.
Despite the fact that I love these speakers and could care less about Siri, this release has me a little disappointed. I don't see much stated improvement. Kind of seems like a processor bump type release, which is not what I expected in V2 after so many years.
Though in the kitchen I bought those 100 bucks Ikea Sonos made speakers that sound amazing too. Much cheaper...
One issue though is that I can not pass thru audio over the Apple TV, so the cinema setup would only work when using the Apple TV.
Except sometimes volume control goes haywire and only one side adjusts.
Then there’s weird stuff like asking “play the beatles” responds “I couldn’t find Beatles in your library” even when you got music subscription.
Overall biggest pain point is same as all apples - debugging
I’m hoping someone will leverage contemporary chat based LLMs to finally make these assistants work like we expect.
Maybe it would work if you set one to Mom and the other to Dad. I understand the intent of being inclusive, but sometimes one must pragmatically bend like a reed to avoid exhaustion.
But a human being can use their "theory of mind" and rule out any implausible interpretations of what a fellow human being means when they complain Siri is texting Dad, not Mom, when they say text Mom.
Yes, I work on that a lot, kinda. It’s tricky, like learning to move one’s ears the first time. When my spouse first brought it up I thought it was “theory of mine” and I kept expecting a name for what it is.
Even worse, I think Siri used to work better 3 or 4 years ago.
It seems weird that we still have such a dumb Siri in a world where ChatGPT exists.
But, I recognize that other people have little need for its audio quality, but really wanted a non-Alexa smart voice device, and it was dismaying for them to pay $350 for a household Siri device that was unreliable.
Like you said, since the OG HomePod came out, a lot more people know what Siri is and isn't good for, so expectations should be closer to HomePod 2nd gen's real-world performance. At least I hope so.
Other possible "solutions" I read about that aren't as good as what you're currently doing:
- Keep Hey Siri on, but create custom shortcuts to automatically respond with your preferred admonishment for things you don't want them asking over and over again
- Keep Hey Siri on, but set HomePod volume to 0
(By the way, thanks for mentioning HN Notify in your profile. Had no idea that existed. Now I'm using it.)
What would you improve? Sounds like they nailed it the first time around based on the rest of your post.
1. No audio line-in! It's a $300 speaker, it sounds great...sometimes I'd like to be able to just plug something into it. If you have a record player, you have to have a separate set of speakers for it, because this thing won't work.
2. No EQ. Apple claims their room-sensing tech will pick the best EQ for your room/the music, but for my personal preference it's always too bassy-sounding (also, I live in an apartment, I don't want to disturb my downstairs neighbors with the bass). Apple added a limited "bass-reducer" mode, but I want more control.
3. Siri tries (and frequently fails) to identify me and my wife by our voice, and then won't do things (like turn off the music, find our iPhone, etc.) because she can't figure out who we are. Every time Siri refuses to obey my wife, and then does something when I make the same request, it ratchets up the marital tension a notch.
I should probably get rid of the thing, but it's actually convenient when it works, the kids use it constantly to play music, and I assume (naively?) that it has a better privacy stance than the competing Google/Amazon products.
Edit: for those downvoting, don't fall for the marketing hype. This isn't a conspiracy - the evidence is out in the open.
I've never had this issue in my household. Have you tried re-training it?
I tried setting it up the other day after seeing a fork that has addressed some of the isuses, but I only had about 2 hours to try getting it working before giving up.
For those interested, just keep in mind the chances of it working are pretty low without some debugging, and most people run into issues with it
However, combined with an AppleTV 4K (2nd gen upwards), HomePods can be used as HDMI eARC devices. This enables playing sound without delay from any HDMI output.
In my setup I use an eARC capable HDMI splitter and a $10 Thunderbolt to HDMI adapter to create an audio device for my mac that has virtually no delay. The video output of the HDMI adapter is set to just mirror my first screen, which avoids additional video processing load.
I am an old-school Apple fanboy. I learned HyperCard on a Macintosh SE/30—I am that old.
I still appreciate the Apple ecosystem, and I do like certain aspects of my HomePod mini…but Siri. C’mon. Get it together. It just fails at the absolute basics.
The basics being: please add stuff to my shopping list when I yell it into the aether while in the kitchen. It either completely mangles the speech-to-text (starches, Siri, not starships), or just…fails. It times out, or sits there, blankly pulsing a light at me.
I would really appreciate a higher-quality speaker with easy integration with my iOS/Mac devices. But $299 or something that has artificial stupidity like Siri? Nah.
Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original?
Oh also ... what's the "next song pls" command in German? With Alexa I can say "Alexa, weiter" and the next track plays. With Siri? "Weiter" won't do anything. I have to say "Hey Siri, nächstes Lied" ... or I can just switch to English and say "Hey Siri, next" which then works.
Oh another one: The German Siri pronouncing English song titles with the German voice-set makes my ears hurt. Like you would read an English word but pronounce it like you would a German word.
But then again some Band/Song Titles she gets perfectly right. Cannibal Corpse sounds like perfect English.
Those AI assistants are a hot mess and get worse with time. Seems like feeding more and more data into your model won't make it better.
(This is especially infuriating when it does it on CarPlay)
I heard the original implementation of Alexa had a banned list of words that shouldn’t appear in the song title unless there are no alternatives, including “remix”, “live”, and “explicit” (among others).
Seems such an obvious and easy solution.
Voice assistants really need to get away from their pretense that they're magical at understanding languages and just provide a long documentation page showing what you can say... and also take feedback on that page so people can provide more idiomatic ways to express that same command.
Apple do actually have such documentation[1 English][2 German] but it's far from comprehensive, and the examples are tediously long ("Hey Siri skip this song", when I know "Hey Siri skip" works)
1: English: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/siri / https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208279
2: German: https://support.apple.com/de-de/siri / https://support.apple.com/de-de/HT208279
Even if it works - it's still way too long. "weiter" is a very short word. "überspringen" is like having a deep conversation with my mp3 player :)
I think I have worked out a way to do this with a custom Shortcut (using an If condition on Device Name to use the Music Skip Forwards action on the device executing the Shortcut), but I'm pretty sure it would end up as a longer interaction.
Edit: Drat, Shortcut approach doesn't work, looks like the Shortcut runs on your iPhone, so the device name is always the iPhone's
We had endless problems with cover bands and tribute songs rather than the mainstream song when we used Alexa with Spotify (which baffled us as I expect that would be the most common configuration).
We currently use Apple Music and Google Nest devices since our mesh network has them built in. Music works fine. Podcasts are a curse on humanity — if you say “play podcast”, it always defaults to the last episode you played, even if it was months ago. You have to specify the latest episode of so and so podcast EVERY TIME, and even then it’s flaky. It’s like it forgot that podcasts are a derivative of “broadcast” where timeliness is relevant.
I have an ongoing sort-of faux-competition with my wife about how to ask Siri for things. She asks questions and gets frustrating replies, but when I ask them slightly differently I get good data.
I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...".
I SUSPECT it's mostly specificity, or asking for simple facts ("when was King Charles born?") and not derived facts ("how old is King Charles?"), but it comes up a LOT.
That same history of software means that I don't even ATTEMPT some of the stuff Siri is notionally capable of, like maintaining a shopping list. (Though I routinely use Siri on my watch or phone to add appointments or reminders.)
But also I didn’t know about named timers. So I appreciate that, that’s actually really useful. Huh, something I didn’t know about a voice assistant, it’s almost like there are issues with discoverability, who would have thought…
OTOH, thinking of something to try and then being delighted it works (which is how I found the named timers) was a pretty cool experience.
Hah, very much the same. My partner will always end up asking me to ask siri to ask something because my slightly differently worded requests tend to succeed more often
Usually, if you're better than someone else at something, there are things you KNOW you are doing differently, and you can give pointers/instruction, right? In my bar-going youth I was a better than average pool player, but I could also help YOU with YOUR pool game by showing you what I was doing, right?
But sometimes these things exist at an unconscious level. The main example of this in my life is animal interaction, which I am pretty sure is due to countless inarticulateness lessons I learned from my dad, and by working with him at his veterinary clinic in high school.
I have joked for decades that I simply inherited the Kindly Veterinarian Vibe, because while I definitely CAN tell you simple things to do if you have trouble connecting with a dog or cat, but I can't transfer everything because I don't even know everything that I'm doing. A huge chunk of it is understanding the animal body language, and it seems like lots of people just suck at that, e.g.
Well, in fairness, it’s designed first as a music device, the Siri seems like almost an afterthought. That said,
Spend $299 on a wireless speaker where the stereo pairing often fails, has random Wi-Fi connection issues (that no other Apple device has), and is otherwise hindered by issues?
Nah, fooled me on the first gen, fooled me again on the HomePod minis, think I’ll pass this time.
It’s not an amazing voice assistant. It’s OK as a wireless speaker, but Sonos is almost assuredly better, and similar aesthetics and ease of use.
So this is targeting…uh?
https://www.rtings.com/speaker/tools/compare/apple-homepod-v...
I run a Pi4 running a Navidrome instance after spending a long time ripping all my thousands of CDs.
The Pi goes via a USB audio interface (better than the audio output on the Pi) and an EQ (Behringer DCX2496) to a set of Yamaha HS8s. I am pretty sure that works out cheaper than buying a pair of Apple speakers.
You can use Mopidy to get it to play audio on the Pi over the speakers (as in, use Mopidy mobile to tell the Pi to play from its local library of mp3s, out to its connected speakers). I use this for playing guitar along to songs without having to look at a computer screen.
Alternatively the Pi also acts as an Airplay receiver so you can play from your iPhone to it, either from your Apple/Amazon music subscription or via a Sonic API compatible app.
From Windows you can pipe your audio remotely to it using palink to stream your local audio to the Pi (it runs a pulseaudio player via SSH if I recall correctly). I actually use that to run Studio One on a PC in a room upstairs but sit on a Linux laptop in the sunshine, RDPing to the PC but listening to the audio over palink (better quality audio than RDP).
Adding a Wireguard server to the Pi (and pihole) and putting the VPN on my phone and I can stream my music whilst out and about and also get all adverts/home dialling blocked. I also gave my brother VPN access but to the specific IP instead of routing all traffic over it so he can enjoy my music too.
Best of all worlds and no vendor lock-in.
"I'm sorry, I'm having trouble connecting to the internet. Please try again later."
They need to license/acquire Nuance Dragon, or do something to improve it.
I appreciate that they aren’t overbuilding Siri though. Alexa (which recent experienced an unfortunate gutting vis layoffs) was amazons attempt to build a consumer ecosystem, which meant a lot of crappy features no one uses (notifications?). Siri feels like it definitively lives on that device and is just a fancy hands-free control. No extraneous feature creep in an attempt to build out a platform. Apple resisted a lot of opportunities to grow Siri while Alexa et al dramatically increased headcount and features, and it seems that voice assistants never really caught on as a general purpose tool. I imagine smarthome/weather/music still dominates all queries by a huge margin.
I still don’t know why anyone would buy a $300 HomePod. As the owner of two original HomePods, they’re fine. This one looks like it has less speakers in it, but I assume it sounds comparably good. If you want good sound I assume you’d be buying a Sonos or something more versatile, but this is an equal but apple-loving choice. The real pro is that it sounds like it has a removable cable.
I still want a screen-based apple smart speaker. Smart speaker+clock is a sweet spot in terms of usability, and the Google home I’ve been loving. It gets you some richer visual for that 1% of queries that benefit, and a glanceable clock for the rest of the time. I can’t imagine apple making a UI that is one-off though. Hopefully the iPad goes the way of the pixel tablet
Why did you get yours?
We have since bought Alexa devices, then after the release of the HomePods Mini, prompted threw away Alexa. One too many “by the way” interjections for us.
Oh and now I bought a Google home hub v2. Great device, but we’re an apple household.
I have near-zero interest in HomeKit (too limited, too locked in, I don't want wifi smart devices) and so while I have hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of smart devices in my house (Z-wave with a few zigbee, all run by HomeAssistant) I can't even use HomePod device to control my lights/etc. Yes, I know about HomeBridge and HA's HomeKit integration, every time I've tried this it's fallen over after a month or less and you have to set it all up from scratch again, the Home app drives me batty, it's so bad.
Maybe Matter will improve things (not holding my breath) but for now I'll stick with my Echo's. They do a decent job of controlling my smart house, are way cheaper, and integrate perfectly with HA. If Siri would actually talk directly to HA then I'd probably switch. It's really not a money thing, it's a reliability thing.
EDIT: After reading some more comments (and from things I've read online or heard on podcasts) I have no doubt the audio quality is amazing. My issue is that I just don't really care about feature as much. I have my AirPods Pro in 90%+ of the time I listen to anything and the other <10% is when I'm in the shower and use a Sonos Roam or in my car. My #1 use case for a "smart speaker" is smart home control followed closely by setting reminders/timers. Siri does great with timers/reminders, smart home (or rather MY smart home), not so much.
I remember the initial setup wasn’t exactly intuitive, but what I like is that HomeKit communicates using your own devices rather than via an exposed web service
Will for sure be getting a few of these.
As far as Siri being "Stupid", idk it does exactly what I need it to do for playing music, controlling my home, measurement conversations, timers, and the occasional ask about if someplace is open or not.
I have long been wondering if Apple would expand the stereo audio for TV to more than 2. If they were to introduce a generic receiver (or actually make the Apple TV able to have inputs and not just use eARC) and allow me to have 4 or more HomePods for my stereo setup. I seriously wonder how that would compare to my current Atmos 5.1.2 setup. It would sure as hell be cheaper to buy 4 or 5 HomePods than this setup was.
Edit: Also the addition of the H1 chip was seriously the best thing to be added to the Mini and unsurprisingly it is coming here to make sending music from my phone to my HomePod easer when I get home. Not enough to replace the big ones I have but likely over time.
The HomePod mini is the "first device" we have given to our children. No screen, I am comfortable with apple privacy, access to music and podcasts, etc.
The mini has shockingly good sound for $100 and what it is.
It's really something, isn't it? I mean, I'm an audio nut with genuine crazy-person speakers in my living room, but goddamn if that single mini Homepod in our bedroom isn't stupid good.
I bought the first HomePod when they first came out and I heard it in the apple store and couldn't believe a single speaker was producing that sound. I use it constantly to play music in my office, set reminders and timers, asking about the weather and controlling the lights. I seem to be lucky in that Siri mostly understands what I'm saying.
This is once piece of tech I just take for granted, it does what it does very well with no fussing. I'm really happy to see Apple bring out a new version.
For me a smart speaker has to be a very good speaker first as my primary use for it is listening to music. Everything else is just icing on the cake and only really saves me from picking up my phone and authenticating to it to use Siri.
- We lost two tweeters (7 down to 5)
- We lost two mics (6 down to 4)
Really curious how the sound compares to the original.
Also see the comparison table at the bottom of this page: https://www.apple.com/uk/homepod-2nd-generation/
Maybe the update also requires iOS 16 on a connected device, I’m still on 15.
Just read through the page and couldn't figure out what's new. I was expecting much more from a new version.
Know how you can be playing music on your iPhone and hold it up to your HomePod and it will transfer? But it is kinda hit or miss on the original HomePod. On the HomePod mini thanks to that chip it is nearly perfect. This seems to just add that.
Couple other things, but at least it brings parity.
I can't find anything on the page saying exactly which chip it is. Regardless it was a chip that was missing from the original but is in the Mini that made this feature work.
That would be awesome, I would love some feature that it could actually be room aware and knowing where devices are in that space instead of just relative to your phone when searching for an AirTag.
But I imagine that would likely require a workflow of mapping your space with your phone first.
I could see that confusing in my place where I have 2 HomePods in my office against a wall that is shared with my living room.
Not discounting the idea, but without mapping I just see there being extra confusion.
It covers the language only in Pinyin, covering the core grammar etc. very quickly, and giving you big dialogs with a lot of vocabulary. If you work hard with it, (ignoring introductory time figuring out the sound system) a month with 2-3 hours a day will give you about 3000 words of vocabulary and a good handle on the language.
While the structure of Chinese is very simple, besides getting used to the phonetics, the writing system constitutes the majority difficulty of the language (but very helpful to understand a lot of complex vocabulary, due to its composition) so ignoring it first will help a lot. The normal Chinese textbooks will cover as much material as this small book in 4-5 volumes, intended for multiple years of university classes.
To then learn how to read:
The books "The Most Common Radicals" and then "Rapid Literacy in Chinese" are amazing. ("Intensive Spoken Chinese" is meant to be done first, but the Colloquial book is better in my opinion.) I covered these two books in about 40 hours.
Then use various readers like "A new China. Intermediate reader of modern Chinese" by Chou Chih-ping, Chiang J., Eagar J or read forums, checking what each character/group of them is in the dictionary to build vocabulary.
thanks for the comment, I'll make sure to check these out asap
On a side note, I still have my old Apple Hifi and it continues to sounds great. I use it as computer speaker via optical audio.
I also have a pair of Sonos Ones and a Sonos Move. I am fairly underwhelmed by the Sonos One sound quality, but the Move sounds great and is very convenient as a portable speaker.
The only real downside of HomePods is that they don't function as bluetooth audio receivers (Apple proprietary AirPlay2 only) and that you need an Apple ID (as well as iCloud enabled on that Apple ID) to set them up - the creation of which these days requires a working phone number, so it's a little expensive (burner SIM) if you want to buy and use them anonymously.
People commenting about how Siri sucks I think are missing the point of these. These (presuming the sound quality is similar to the HP1) are the best consumer self-powered speakers for under $2000, full stop. The fact that they do anything else (mics, voice assistant, wifi streaming, whatever) is mostly unimportant if you understand what these things are. I'd use them even if they didn't have Wi-Fi. As far as I can tell, they (and airpods) were the latest "insanely great" product Apple made until the M1 macs dropped.
It's possible it's experiencing the same gradual and nearly imperceptible quality decline (from insanely great to merely extremely good) that most Apple products have been undergoing the last 5-7 years, but I will reserve judgement until I have one (two, actually) in hand. Apple's brain drain and productmanagerization is sadly very real.
Fingers crossed that someone in Apple is holding it to the same standards as AudioAccessory1,1 (HomePod1), but not holding my breath as I think the guy who I believe was the main force behind it (Christopher Stringer) left Apple to create a company called Syng and a product called the Cell Alpha.
A stereo pair of Cell Alphas is $4500. A stereo pair of HomePod2s is $600.
Also, I think one of the main reasons the HP1 flopped is because it was too expensive. If this thing is 95% as good as the HP1 but stays in production because people are buying it because Apple figured out how to sell it for 15% cheaper, then it's a win.
We'll see!
If "people commenting about how Siri sucks are missing the point" then so are Apple's copywriters.
These are my success rates talking to home devices across brands in last 5 yrs. Yes - I am complaining, Siri is horrible. Can't believe I'm complimenting Google (Chromecast Audio, Stadia, that RSS thing) at the same time, but I am in the realm of voice recognition.
The biggest critique I have is that after relatively major OS updates, it may take a day or two it seems for them to get "in sync" and have stuff like multi-room audio work without funky issues.
Mostly happy about this announcement because if one of my HomePods break, I can get another one without risking a random eBay purchase.
Also worth saying that the HomePod Mini audio quality is appalling and barely useful for anything other than podcasts.
Amazon and Google have the "works with Amazon/Google" so you can buy any brand of hardware (smart plugs for ex) and control them all with one device.
You don't need a receiver / AVR, this lets the eARC tv drive HomePods.
Alexa & Google just bypass it in cleverness while also understanding my accent way better.
The only major plus of Siri is tight integration into ios.
Unfortunately Siri isn't that great so you'll often run into "Waiting for it", "One moment" and "Working on it" replies.
Asked Alexa today:
- ‘Can dogs eat apples’
- ’How far is it to <location>‘ ‘How long to <location>.’
- ‘How many calories does 100g grams of cornflakes have’
Just stuff not worth picking my phone up and typing for the most part.
Though just tried all 3 of them on siri and only how far/long is <location> gave me a voice answer (the other 2 were just search results).
Here is a video, more on his channel
And I think it works out to about $80 once you include shipping. Ive got a dead one right now - trying to decide if I want to source air gun to fix it myself or just send it to him. Less than $100 to have it fixed is kind of a steal.
Still, at $300 per pod, I really need Siri to do better than the "dumber than a bag of rocks" vibe she currently gives off for this to be at all tempting.
As someone that does applied DL for work, especially NLP, I just don't understand what Apple is doing with Siri. It's like they see low user engagement metrics with Siri and assume it's because people don't want it. Instead, everyone I know that's an Apple fan uses Google Assistant, because it just works most of the time.
I have three of the 1st gen models, they're fantastic. I think I paid $200 for each. At that price they're a steal.
I assume a newer chipset but it's not really clear what else has changed?
The new HomePod has 4 microphones and 5 tweeters.
The original HomePod had 6 microphones and 7 tweeters.
New one weighs 5.1 pounds vs. 5.5 pounds previously.
Apple discontinued the OG size HomePod a while back, and sold only the tiny baseball-sized ones. This is a re-introduction of a larger-size, better-sounding device that I assume is essentially the same form factor as the original one.
All that being said, it doesn’t need to be either or. They could have a great Siri product for those who want it, and allow it to be deactivated for those who don’t.
I’m a huge Sonos fan but I think their patent was “volume control for connected/synced speakers” and apple had a UI to control each speaker volume separately.
I also suspect that apple shared Airplay with them j stead of paying. I know lots of people that bought Sonos instead of the HomePod because it supported airplay.
Edit: nevermind
Nope. Google turned the trueplay knockoff off real fast (as it was easy to remove) and took time to disable group volume control.
For music though, I prefer browsing through a playlist or artist discogs. Recalling a track from memory and requesting an assistant to play it isn’t very intuitive.
Siri aside, I’m very much looking forward to this update.
I rarely walk into a records store knowing exactly what I want, and live the process of discovery.
I try to squelch my alarm in the morning and she replies with "sorry you'll need to continue in the app" (silencing the alarm anyways but not actually dismissing it). If I wake up before my alarm and want to stop it from sounding, I tell her to turn it off, she says she has done so (with a follow-up question confirming that I have no alarms enabled)… And then the god damn alarm goes off at the usual time anyways.
Most recently she has started replying to my requests to send text messages and start phone calls with "who is speaking?" I don't know maybe the only person who matters on this single user device? If I don't say my name to her satisfaction then the call doesn't get made. I never did any kind of voice training or enabled any kind of restriction based on voice matching so what the fuck?
The last straw which led to me unplugging my home pod was when both it and the phone started triggering at nearly the same time with the result that the speech of one started interfering with the requests to the other one.
Bonus points: the speech recognition tech is bad enough that I tend to wait for acknowledgment before speaking a command. The "Boop" that you get from Alexa and Google. Not only does Siri not have this, it triggers, waits for a moment, and then says something. One of these responses is a annoyed sounding teenager "yeah?" that has more than once had me fantasizing about the immediate defenestration of the speaker.
I have the "headphones out" line coming from the tv, which I split, and then send to the line-in on each speaker. At least there is a line-in! Less and less smart speakers have a line in, it feels like. Absurd. (Different story, but also, really wish the Chromecast Audio were still a thing. Some inventory left but what a great product for adding amazing connective capability to any sound system! Smart being counter-analog-line-level stuff is such a shite hellworld thing.)
Google properly executing on Google TV would require them to not build hardware with 1/12th the single core performance of an Apple TV. (Seriously, it has single core performance around that of a 2011 Intel Atom while the Apple TV has an A15 throwing 12th gen Intel laptop numbers. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19594628)
Seriously, what is with The Chromecast with Google TV? People are like "It's laggy!" and Google is like "We do update!" and people are like "Now it's laggy AND crashes!" My entire experience with my three of them. Software is great, hardware is pure eWaste and they should feel bad about that.
I think the most sensible way to use both devices is as a dumb “cast” target.
FWIW, the fireTV literally had a bug where it’d crash because the ad data collecting daemon used up too much processing power. For $20, just be thankful Google has that much self control.
I get that that is a big jump but it's not 12 times the price. The performance per dollar tends to go down as you go up in price, not up.
Really? I know lots of Apple fans and I've never seen any of them use Google Assistant on their iPhone or anything else. How do your friends do this? Via a Siri shortcut that passes requests through? Or by opening up a Google app every time they want to use the voice assistant?
HomePods OG do stereo pairing, and with ATV can act as eARC playback so you can play your console sound via HomePods stereo pair.
For a couple years now, though weirdly the full firmware revamp landed after discontinuation.
I am a little surprised that it's more or less the same device re-launched but the more I think about it I'm not really sure what I expected. It's a speaker, its' main requirement is to sound good and the OG HomePod sounds great. I can't think of many other features you can add to the speaker itself.
As a recovering Audiophile, I'm gonna stay away from r/audiophile lest they temp me to sell my kidney to afford that extra 5% in "acoustic fidelity." Seriously, I'm happy with the 95%.
Now, how do I go about putting together that sound system? Or in Audiophile terms, what is the DT 770 Pro of home stereo setups?
I clearly don't know much about amplifiers, but the specs say "RMS output power: 20W+20W (1 kHz, 10% THD 6 ohm)" which is terrible, right?
https://www.intl.onkyo.com/downloads/manuals/pdf/cs-n575d_ma...
> 12W+12W (1kHz, 0.9%, T.H.D 6ohnm)
Which isn’t terrible. I have no idea how to read these spec sheets.
I can vouch for the JBL 305Ps sounding pretty damn good. If you aren’t keen on spending that amount, though, the Presonus Eris line looks decent, as well.
> Or in Audiophile terms, what is the DT 770 Pro of home stereo setups?
You want speakers with a weird treble hump and sibilance?
Or Sonos ARC with sub and their version of surrounds.
Or ATV4 + HomePods OG or these, then anything hooked to an eARC tv plays through these once TV+ATV4K set to eARC mode.
I do an identical setup with two Alexa Studio devices. The only difference being I have to use Fire TV and there’s actually a third Alexa Studio Base only device.
The setup is really good. It’s definitely not a replacement for surround sound. I argue it’s better sound than a Sound Bar though. It is even better for music.
The big thing though? As much as I love Apple stuff, everything and anything is always Alexa integrated. These synced speakers beep when my garage opens, vacuum, doors, connected to lights, my security system, fans, cameras, etc…
With Apple, your product selection is more limited or you need HomeBridge for ideal home automation. For me, I’d definitely rather have the Apple products but (hate or love it) Amazon is way more open and the only reason I settled for them.
Finally, I am not sure why and I would never personally do this setup, but if you look at the details of both Alexa Studio and HomePod “Home Theatre” setups, they both do not support connecting additionally to Echo’s or HomePod Mini’s for additional speakers. A fun option —- but equally not supported.
Bandwidth limitation of being wireless? Too few of people willing to do this?
Surely you can link Apple Music?
I’m currently limping along with the latest gen Time Capsule and AirPort Express, hoping that Apple gets back in the game…
Because after they started winding down that business unit, those employees basically went and founded Ubiquiti.
I genuinely don’t understand this product. And I similarly don’t understand the appeal of Siri. I thought the first one was a failure and they’d either walk away or change things dramatically. Like go the actual audio playback path and make it a respectable tower speaker. Add in a sound bar and satellites too. That could get a purchase from me. Or just make the Minis the interface and make Siri something people want to use.
Talking to computers at this point still feels like the 3D/VR products that get introduced periodically and ultimately fail. I also similarly don’t want to be around people talking to their smartphones in the places they’re already glued to them.
From footnote #3: Creating a HomePod stereo pair requires two of the same model HomePod speakers, such as two HomePod mini, two HomePod (2nd generation), or two HomePod (1st generation).
But buying two and ending up with a spare old one. No
* Allow you to set white noise / background sounds for sleeping
* But -doesn't- allow you to turn off the glowing light on the top of the HomePod while playing those background sounds (in a pitch dark room while you're trying to sleep)
Why would it work this time?
I switched my Alexa devices over to homepod mini's after one too many "by the way" suggestions by Alexa. Homepod mini has decent audio but I wouldn't use it for my primary music listening.
If you care for music quality, buy a decent portable bluetooth speaker and carry it with you from room to room - there is a lot to be said for the flexibility, and you can also toss it in your luggage when traveling.
"Apple's HomePod mini includes a dormant hidden sensor that can measure temperature and humidity, potentially providing the means to power upcoming features that could arrive in a future software update, according to Bloomberg."
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/22/homepod-mini-temperatur...
Is it too much to ask to say “Siri turn off all lights except kitchen island” and expect it to do it? No matter how many times I have reconfigured things in the Home app it just can’t do it I have to ask it to turn off all lights then turn on the kitchen island :facepalm:
The camera feed is so slow since Google took over Nest, it barely works with the Google home app and keeps cutting out, doesn't load at all or keeps hanging sometimes. When someone rings the door bell then it takes forever to bring up the feed and let me talk to the person by the door. The Nest doorbell has become completely useless in its latest iteration combined with the Google home app. The person is long gone before I get to see who it was, which makes it really annoying and super unreliable to receive parcels when not at home.
I have never tried Alexa + Ring, but speaking to friends they are also getting more frustrated with the Amazon brand.
Is Apple a viable option today? If this stuff works well then it's worth having, but currently I wouldn't go for any smart gadgets and actively refuse anything from Google. I don't think they care about their hardware products. I've seen the same decline with their Pixel series.
I hope matter brings a better landscape for all this stuff - but then I have been sitting on my hands waiting for years as the next version of everything is just 12 months away.
I only have 3 light switches in my apartment, but I made sure they had Matter support.
The switches I bought with Matter support are from Eve. Previously the Eve devices have only been supported through their own app on iOS, and that was the only reason to be able to read the kWh usage.
I hope the Matter support will let me access it from my other devices.
My Nest Hub Max will only show the camera in the old Nest app while it never loads in the Google Home app.
I'm thinking I may have to try something else in the near future.
Apple needs hardware partners to more deeply invest in HomeKit, particularly in the camera space. It's coming along but still feels behind. A compatible camera (or one bridged to HomeKit) will show up on the AppleTV pretty quickly. The official HomeKit devices I have work consistently and well, and the ones I bridge in with HomeBridge work most of the time without intervention. It is super cool to ask Siri to open the garage door when I'm walking the dog and it's cold out. I would say it's viable, if not improving all the time.
I think Apple themselves need to invest in it more. It's so basic as to be almost unusable.
I have a supercomputer in the form of Apple TV just idling there, and the best HomeKit can barely do is perhaps turn lights on at a certain time, and then complain that it couldn't reach Apple TV.
We also extensively use HomeKit for all our smart home devices and a huge reason was the privacy, vs Ring and Google.
So the video doorbell we have is entirely local and so sarhad worked really well (logitech). And I like how it’s end to end encrypted so nobody gets access to our video feeds. Plus the chime is the HomePod itself.
As usual though, Siri sucks. Just… sucks. so that’s always the weakest link.
Because of this, I never use Siri outside of contexts I’m sure Apple has tested thoroughly (e.g. read my last text).
I wonder if background noise has something to do with it. The fact that Siri accurately displayed what I was trying to say made me think it understood me perfectly, but it’s possible it will do something else in the background if it’s not confident it hears you correctly.
Either way, I have issues with Siri all the time.
Google has snuck a pretty large lead for a large category of queries over Siri and Alexa has fallen behind considerably.
Again, more anecdata: I have never used Siri and wouldn’t even factor in if my audio setup can convert temperatures when purchasing it.