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Apple Announces New HomePod for $299 With Full-Size Design, S7 Chip, and More
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Yeah thanks man, that article was posted after my question and I also didn’t wade through 22 pages of comments. My bad. Thanks though!!
Interesting. So only whilst it has power/ moved whilst AC tethered? I'd imagine it'd still want re calibration after unplugged and relocated. I don't know.
It does - Thread with Matter
New HomePod vs 2018 HomePod - compared | AppleInsider
The new HomePod has a lot of new technology versus the retired original HomePod from 2018 it replaces — but see how it compares before you spend the $300.
To all those saying it’s the “same thing,” did you even read? It’s not the same. For one, it will have two fewer drivers. So the OG may still have better sound quality. Another diff is the new temp and humidity sensor.
I have had a draft on eBay for sometime now to sell our OG HomePod. Some people have been getting nearly what they paid for them out of them. Dang!
Let's try to not speak in absolutes, yeah?
I have 1 OG Homepod and 10 Minis. That's 11 for those counting at home. Have I had issues? Sure, but I can fix most of them, and overall the good far outweighs the bad. The OG is markedly fuller even compared to two paired Minis. Wish I could just get one HP2 to pair with my OG, but that looks to be not possible. Regardless, when they're all playing the same thing and tuned appropriately, it's magical.
YayArea, buy 10, if that's what you want to do. I can't imagine how good that could sound.
No way will I waste any more money on HomePods, since iOS 14 or whenever they introduced the on device processing they have been awful, every command is “one sec” “one moment”, even for the simplest task of turning on and off lights.
Set a timer, 10 minutes later how long is on the timer “there’s no timers set”
Set a timer, 10 minutes later how long is on the timer “there’s no timers set”
You should bug Spotify about that. The APIs have been there for awhile now. Other providers are already doing it. For all their complaining, Spotify is the slowest to adopt stuff that they request.
Did not see this coming. Perhaps sales of the Original version at $299 were "good enough" - but they needed to redesign so its good on profits at $299 (since the original was more expensive than that originally) and here we are.
Still rather stunned about this, lol.
Still rather stunned about this, lol.
That’s true, the smart functionality will be obsolete long before the speaker hardware. Speakers can last forever. There needs to be a way to make use of them at the end of their “smart” life, rather than tossing them and wasting resources. Hopefully someone will figure out a good hack to keep using existing hardware indefinitely. If a line-in can’t be added to the HomePod directly, maybe somehow using an old idevice as a dedicated intermediary. But then that setup will end when the idevice’s life ends.. We need some sort of line-in.
Same as the original with less twitters and less microphones, so Siri has another excuse to say hmmmmmmm I’m not sure who’s speaking.
No thanks.
No thanks.
Hmm. I had been curious about picking up a second OG HomePod to pair with my existing one, to use for my TV speakers and the Dolby Atmos capability. I find it weird you can't do Apple Card payments on $600 of (2) speakers when you can on a $60 iPhone case (lol), as previously pointed out. Maybe that saved me from wasting money though. If the OG HomePod has superior specs, sounds good (it does), and now I can pick up a good condition one on eBay way less all of a sudden? Maybe that's the way to go! 
“In terms of specifications, the new HomePod has five tweeters, which is down from the seven tweeters in the original full-size HomePod. It’s powered by the S7 chip, compared to the A8 chip in the original HomePod and the S5 in the HomePod mini. The mic array has also dropped from six microphones down to four microphones.”
“Apple seems to think these changes won’t have an impact on sound quality…” — “Another Apple News Site”
It appears Apple has taken the original HomePod with its exceptional, room-filling sound quality that rivaled many competitor speakers including even stereo speakers, and the original’s exceptional microphone quality, and the iPhone-caliber A8 processor, and found a way to make the Cost Of Goods Sold cheaper in order to maintain margins or even increase margin$.
Apple may think they’ve “cured” this new HomePod’s new hardware limitations to produce amazing sound and microphone quality through highly intelligent new software, but we won’t know conclusively until someone does a head-to-head audio quality comparison between the original HomePod and this new version.
Personally, I suspect software can accomplish only so much in place of actual hardware like quantity of speakers and microphones.
Also, people in a room on a speakerphone call should be able to communicate with the caller(s) in a normal tone of voice via the HomePod.
We’ll see.
P.S. I wish it had Bluetooth 5.3 instead of 5.0 at least for Bluetooth 5.3’s low-latency/no-latency enhancement. I would think this would be of prime importance to a new wireless speaker. Almost all of Apple’s recent hardware product releases have adopted Bluetooth 5.3 except for this one. (?) Makes no sense except in the cost-cutting context.
“Apple seems to think these changes won’t have an impact on sound quality…” — “Another Apple News Site”
It appears Apple has taken the original HomePod with its exceptional, room-filling sound quality that rivaled many competitor speakers including even stereo speakers, and the original’s exceptional microphone quality, and the iPhone-caliber A8 processor, and found a way to make the Cost Of Goods Sold cheaper in order to maintain margins or even increase margin$.
Apple may think they’ve “cured” this new HomePod’s new hardware limitations to produce amazing sound and microphone quality through highly intelligent new software, but we won’t know conclusively until someone does a head-to-head audio quality comparison between the original HomePod and this new version.
Personally, I suspect software can accomplish only so much in place of actual hardware like quantity of speakers and microphones.
Also, people in a room on a speakerphone call should be able to communicate with the caller(s) in a normal tone of voice via the HomePod.
We’ll see.
P.S. I wish it had Bluetooth 5.3 instead of 5.0 at least for Bluetooth 5.3’s low-latency/no-latency enhancement. I would think this would be of prime importance to a new wireless speaker. Almost all of Apple’s recent hardware product releases have adopted Bluetooth 5.3 except for this one. (?) Makes no sense except in the cost-cutting context.
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It’s up to YT and Spotify to hook into the APIs. Spotify won’t do it because of their intent to get the EU to crack down on Apple. YT won’t do it because they want to sell Google speakers to you. You pay for a service. You should provide feedback to the service provide.
It’s a really competitive landscape. Unfortunately - not all vendors want to work with each other. There’s a variety of reasons why that is the case and we consumers have to make the choices that fit our needs.
It had a habit of dying though. I kept one of my broken ones until there's a repair program. It's a resistance which kept getting fried. Not a hard thing to fix, I would have thought.
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