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Comment by t3rabytes | Hacker News Reader

I love my OG HomePods that I got on close-out at Best Buy, but both of them have given me near constant connection issues over the last few months -- excited to have something to replace them with. I much prefer the appearance of the Big HomePod over the (not-really) equivalent Sonos One.

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I’ve got two first gen HomePods here which died slightly out of warranty, and AppleCare wanted $300 a piece just to take a look at them. Makes me quite gunshy about spending yet another $300 on a product which may not last more than 2-3 years.

Exact same experience here. Mine died after a botched firmware update. Woke up one morning after it had auto-updated the night before. 100% Apple's fault because they pulled the update shortly after but the damage was done. Took it in thinking they would just reset it and shocked they wanted $300 to repair. Unless this one has a UCB-C port like the mini that allows user resetting I'll skip this one.

In case you still want them repaired, there's a guy online (Nic's Fix) who runs a mail-in $60 repair business for dead first gen HomePods.

He even live streams fixing them.

Here is a video, more on his channel

https://youtu.be/FfGiuh_QH3M

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.

Very helpful y’all, thanks! Gonna see if I feel up to tackling the repair (good excuse to buy a reflow setup) and or get in touch with this gentleman. Cheers!

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