My last day is Friday and I'm fairly sure I'm keeping it. It's an expensive bugger and I was very torn over getting it.
The thing that keeps me a tiny bit on the fence is it really feels like a product that's still in Beta. The lack of a custom alarm is a huge one for me. It's a smart speaker whose whole mission is MUSIC, and yet you can't set an alarm to wake you up to music like every other smart speaker. That's a feature I would use and just seems like such an obvious basic one that I don't understand how they left that out unless it's the ol' Apple trick of saving an obvious feature for gen 2. I'm hoping a software update will address this. Same goes for Siri volume. Siri is uncomfortably loud for nighttime use if you have sleeping co-habitants or neighbors just on the other side of the wall. Just such a basic function.
The sound quality is pretty nice but I agree that it is kinda heavy on the bass. To be fair, so was my Bose Soundlink Mini, which I loved anyway. I put my JBL Flip 3 next to the HomePod and flipped back and forth playing the same material on them. The HomePod is certainly better, but with the Flip going for $85 possibly not $270 better, lol.
That said there are things about it that I love. I like the design and sound quality (the only thing that keeps me from being SUPER enthused about the sound quality is it doesn't seem commensurate with the price.. if the HomePod was $199 I'd be over the moon). I love the little Siri light, and I'm coming to enjoy asking for music and not having to stream from my phone (for music anyway). I like that I can move it around my home. And there's also that little hard-to-describe Apple-ness about it that makes me want to play with it and use it and have music on more often that I normally would before.
The thing about it that impresses me the most is how it can hear you even when you're speaking softly while loud music is playing. That is extraordinary. The accuracy of the word-recognition is also really impressive (the one caveat being song names with foreign words.. Siri has issues mixing languages). It can't be overstated how cool this part of it is. After hearing my friends yelling and E-NUN-CI-A-TING for Alexa, I think this is the game-changing aspect of the HomePod.
My brother suggested I buy a higher-end bookshelf type speaker and a little bluetooth box to attach to it. And while that might have better sound quality, it's another one of those balancing acts of better-but-less-convenient boxy things in my house vs a portable little beauty that sounds better than most bluetooth speakers and you can talk to it.
If it were cheaper I wouldn't have the slightest 2nd thought, but it feels a bit overpriced for a product that is obviously still in its formative stages. But, that's also how Apple often rolls. Their first-gen products are always very different than future incarnations and it is their real-world feedback that often leads to the improvements. I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep it, but I do think they should've priced this at $250 and taken the hit like Sony did with PlayStation to get this into homes as a beta product.. but again, the hardware is so damn nice I think a few software updates will bring it up to speed.
[doublepost=1520370689][/doublepost]And if my long rambling post didn't make it clear enough- the ability of this thing to hear and almost always understand you, even over loud music, is really THE breakthrough of the HomePod. I've seen my friends shouting and over-enunciating to be understood by Alexa (on its flagship Echo) and Cortana (on the Xbox) and you can speak to the HomePod in a conversational soft-spoken way. I'm still wowed by this after almost 2 weeks.
