I have a pair of original HomePods. Love them dearly.
Just read through the page and couldn't figure out what's new. I was expecting much more from a new version.
Just read through the page and couldn't figure out what's new. I was expecting much more from a new version.
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
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.