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Apple Drops HomePod Price to $299, Down From $349
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It’s not that I don’t think it sounds good. It does. It’s just that it provides zero utility over using “Hey, Siri” on my Watch, iPhone, and iPad. It’s also not flexible enough to hook up to other equipment like a home theater system. I don’t want anyone in my family to be able to access my iCloud since it doesn’t distinguish between people. Imagine my kid sending an email or text to my boss accidentally. Yeah. Too limited, lacking utility, sounds good, premium price. Something has to change for more people to want it. The problem is most people don’t want it. I’d argue most people don’t care about audiophile level audio quality and just want something that makes their life easier and isn’t fussy when it comes to connecting to equipment.
That’s the only time I can think of that wasn’t a foreign currency adjustment. They might have adjusted Mac pricing for different configurations at some point for a Mac that didn’t get an update when others got spec bumps or something, but that’s not as significant.
On purchasing my first HomePod I gave away my stereo and donated my CD collection to charity. I’m not an audiophile by any means but the sound quality is so nice.
You do realize not everyone speaks the same, has the same tone, dialect, etc, right? Just because your experience was good doesn't mean so will everyone else's.
I don't doubt at all that the quality of the sound is terrific. It seems to me that HomePod was just incorrectly marketed. Apple mistakenly tried to go after the smart speaker market with a speaker whose price is, frankly, just far and beyond what anyone is willing to pay for a smart speaker. People purchase smart speakers for functionality, not necessarily sound quality.
Again, I think it was just a mismatch between the marketing and engineering teams. What do you think?
You can. Sometimes you can choose directly from the App itself (for instance by swiping down on the remote when using Netflix and then choosing the HomePod as audio out). Or you can route all the audio from the AppleTV to the HomePod: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/homepod-as-apple-tv-speaker/
Get over it man, Google doesn't care about your side conversations, you're not important. What exactly do you think is going to happen with that information? Some ad space buyer will know you turned on the lights, oh scary! Let's just say you don't use Google at all, you're still being tracked by apps, your ISP, your cell service provider, your credit card company, your bank, your work computer queries and I can keep going. Your data is already out there. Also you'd be a fool to believe Apple doesn't collect data, they need to know how people use their devices and what they do to them.Hey Google... are you listening to other stuff before I say hey google? Why of course I am... because the T&Cs don't specifically say I don't
Oh dear - and supposedly they were already selling it at a loss. Don't think this sort of product is one a huge number of people want in the first place, and those who do can get better and cheaper by going with rivals. If apple want to continue in this market they need to come up with more of a differentiator to make it worth the money. Even then, with the privacy concerns I don't honestly know if this is going to be even a moderate seller by Apple's standards.
Which one would that be? The discontinued one? The Sonos Play:5 with a 500$ price tag is definitely a different device category.
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How does it "prove" that? If it flopped, they would have lowered the price earlier than 14 months after release.
No, the comparable one (and the one that beat the Home Pod in blind testing) is the Sonos One which is much cheaper.
To be fair, that's what I would expect someone to say who paid $350 for it!
Nope. When I got my HomePod, I sat it beside my Play:5 and invited friends (some anti-Apple folks included) over to compare. Everyone felt that they were quite similar. Added to that, the HomePod adjusts itself to its enviroment automatically, and I can talk to it.
Also, If you watch the Verge's HomePod review, you can hear the similarity between the Play:5 and the HomePod there. That review is quite consistent with my experience.
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Oh, I know all about the audiophile market. My dad was sucked into it for a long stretch of time. He spent stupid amounts of money. At least I got a nice pair of KEFs out of it.
"""Real""" audiophiles considered Bose the McDonalds of speakers.
Just got one on sale at bestbuy. It sounds good. But not worlds better than my sonos one. And in some cases the sonos sounds better. Though I can just airplay 2 to the homepod and my sonos's and it all sounds great.
Though I do have a real stereo system that destroys the homepod and sonos's. But that's to be expected.
Hey siri on it works very well, it can hear me across the room speaking at normal volume. Definitely better than any of my other smart speakers and I have 1 of everything. And it can do almost everything I want to use a smart speaker for.
The one thing it's missing that I use often is a list of news sources such as alexa's flash briefing or google news. Where I get snippets of news from a variety of sources I choose played in the order I want. I've attempted to recreate this in the podcast app along with shortcuts but it's not even remotely the same thing and much of the content isn't available in podcast form.
I can of course airplay audible to it but it would be nice to have native support.
Though I do have a real stereo system that destroys the homepod and sonos's. But that's to be expected.
Hey siri on it works very well, it can hear me across the room speaking at normal volume. Definitely better than any of my other smart speakers and I have 1 of everything. And it can do almost everything I want to use a smart speaker for.
The one thing it's missing that I use often is a list of news sources such as alexa's flash briefing or google news. Where I get snippets of news from a variety of sources I choose played in the order I want. I've attempted to recreate this in the podcast app along with shortcuts but it's not even remotely the same thing and much of the content isn't available in podcast form.
I can of course airplay audible to it but it would be nice to have native support.
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Sonos software is very glitchy and for the price the HomePod has unreal sound. Put two together and when I am listening it blows my B&O $2,000 setup away.
Edit: The only good thing about Siri on HomePod is the new shortcuts, allows me to get a bunch of info weather/news/commute time info and control my lighting in the morning and evening with a simple command. For general info it SUCKS! Good for asking it to play music as well.
Yes. The Apple TV 3rd gen dropped from $99 to $69 about 6 months before Apple announced the new AppleTV 4th gen with tvOS.
People here aren’t realizing it but HomePod is a Trojan horse. Its hardware is pretty much perfect and it has a powerful a8 chip giving it tons of room for growth in software. Meanwhile, Apple has been investing heavily in machine learning and AI, rebuilding Siri from the ground up. As that investment starts to result in significant improvements in Siri, existing Siri devices, including HomePod, will suddenly become gateways for conversational computing.
