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Lets the speaker determine if it has been moved in order to re-calibrate its sound.
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.
 
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.
 
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Love the sound of my OG HomePods. Siri does what I need it to but I just use it for basic queries anyway. If I didn’t have a pair of my original generation HomePods, I’d consider the new version.
 
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I hated the original HomePod, couldn’t stand the way it sounded. Hope the second gen sound is much improved, or would be even better if it has an equaliser. The consumer should have some way of tailoring the sound to their taste.
 
I hope you realise that there is a weird, secret, but understood arbitrary limit of HomePods in one house of 6. Any more gives real issues with multi room options not working, going wrong and struggling.

I have 7 - I have issues.....

but i hope that 16.3 resolves them - are we even supposed to be buying more than 6 - Apple seemed to not think so!


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.
 
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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”
 
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.
 
the killer upgrade would be able to use it as a speaker sans any of this smart crap. Let to have speaker wire inputs and mounts for a nice set of bookshelf speakers
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.
 
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! :D
 
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“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.
 
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I was aware that’s the case but I understand Siri still doesn’t work with YTM or Spotify on a HomePod. And it may be the case that those third parties haven’t done the work to enable it, but I don’t care about blame, only whether it works.

If someone knows different I’d love to be corrected!
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 LIVES!!!! The OG HomePod is the best sounding speaker, especially stereo paired. I am so happy to see this product back!
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.
 
was hoping for some new features (other than the humidity sensing)...I just hope theyʻre built better, as my first gen died after a year...might pick up a pair later on when Costco starts selling them.
 
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