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Comment by emsy | Hacker News Reader

The HomePod is the worst Apple product I’ve ever owned, especially for what it’s supposed to do. I need to restart it every few days to even be able to connect to it and playing music with Siri stopped working a few months ago. It also mixes up HomeKit devices that don’t sound similar at all.

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I use mine all the time and haven’t had these issues. Just the occasional Siri misunderstanding. My family loves it for playing music and a few other simple tasks like timers.

Same. We use it all the time. It's incredibly useful.

No issues here either, but I've stuck to version 14 and refuse to update after reading so many reports of issues with lag.

Echo this - I have 5 of these OG HomePods across two different places, and they've always "just worked" for me. Great multi-room audio, fantastic sound, and good for tasks like timers.

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.

This is mostly my experience with one notable exception. I can't get phone calls to work on my HomePods but they always work fine with my HomePods mini (ugh, I hate saying that). I have no idea what the difference is and no amount of resetting or restarting fixes it. I can never say "Hey Siri... call my mom" and have it work on the HomePod and starting a call on my phone and trying to Handoff to a HomePod fails every time. I have 2 of them so I know it's not an individual hardware failure. There's just something wrong with it and I'm guessing it's something iCloud related that is syncing the bad setting to both of them. Why the minis are exempt is a mystery to me.

How is it as a speakerphone? I've considered getting one for conference calls.

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