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Sold on everything, price etc but I have a HomePod and the wire is the most annoying thing. This mini needed to be portable and it isnt
 
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Hard to say the extent until we can hear one in person, but it will definitely not sound as good as the full size HomePod. My guess is that it will sound similar to a full size Amazon Echo, which is to say pretty good.

My scale for smart speakers I've heard so far:

Amazon Echo Dot: okay
Amazon Echo full size: pretty good
Google Home full size: pretty good
Apple HomePod full size: very good

Note that nothing on that list says great.

I returned the original Apple HomePod - because it was overly hyped in the base. It sounded horrible for spoken word material. Perhaps it works well for drum-and-bass
 
I don't see any mention of connecting to external speakers, whether through cable or airplay...was hoping for that. otherwise I'm not sure I would get one.
 
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I was actually hoping I could pair it with my Mac to be a laptop speaker.

You can. At least I'm assuming you can, because while they didn't specifically talk about AirPlay 2, of course it will have it. And that's an AirPlay feature.

Edit: no longer an assumption. It's listed as a feature on Apple's site.
 
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once availability and the pandemic times will allow for an in person listening somewhere, I'll do so.
 
I'm interested. But I also want to know how many of these features will be coming to the homepod as well?
 
"Hey Siri, XYZ." – "Nice of you asking me about XYZ. Now processing the query XYZ. Ok, here's the result for XYZ": <playing music>. Very annoying.
 
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