With the HomePod mini's affordable price, we're excited to start phasing out our alexa devices.
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Canalys: Apple 'Still Has Much to Prove' With HomePod Mini in Crowded Smart Speaker Market
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I have no doubt that HomePod sounds better than Echo for music, but we use the devices to control our smart home. Music is a secondary function for us. When we started down this road, there wasn’t an Apple equivalent available and more devices were Alexa enabled. For households like ours that already had a smart home set-up, I think it will be more difficult, or at least take longer, for Apple to get the set-ups converted to HomePod.
9,10,11 are pretty professional features. Does Sonos have that level of granularity? I don't think any consumer is doing EQ on their iOS device or Mac. EQ still exists but it's pretty buried in the settings.
Also, if you're doing a subwoofer setup, I don't think AirPlay2 is going to work for you. I'm with you though, it would be fantastic for Apple to take a Sonos approach and provide the option for someone to configure a home theatre with 5 HomePods and a HomePodBass but that would make the price $300 * 6 to get that. Most consumers are struggling to buy 1 full priced one.
I'm very surprised that Apple hasn't just started making their own home appliances. I'm not talking about microwaves but 1st party bulbs that were guaranteed to work every time versus Hue which requires a dongle would be awesome. I would switch to an Apple HomeKit solution if they offered it. It's only a matter of time, Amazon is buying up their 3rd party integrations (Ring, Eero) and Google owns Nest. Apple purchasing August/Elgato or just doing their own thing would be great.
I'm thinking of trying a HomePod mini but I'm 5 speakers into Sonos and have no intention of changing. They don't sound like oversized cell phone speakers, and Siri works for sending music through Airplay to them just fine so no google or amazon either. There are more than 3 options in the game these days.
i want apple to catch up so much u can tell you have i have alexa and google and siri at home for all my devices and more often siri cant complete reqeusts or takes wat to long for no reason, all the other speakers almost always get it right... i have lights garage door openers and outlets that im using them for
Spot-on. It's not competing in the "global smart speaker market."
Apple went their own way designing a premium speaker for their ecosystem, primarily for playing music via Apple Music, and controlled by the owner's voice.
B&W MM-1 use 1 speaker each and a pair sound better than the 16 speakers in a pair of HomePods 9 years after their release and have both inputs and outputs. ( I know i own both)
This is what facts look like.
Really? Is your B&W system always on, waiting for a voice command to play music, without needing to have a computer/phone or other music source powered up?
That's what HomePod is. And it works remarkably well. Facts.
The idea that they never show the attached cords is deceptive advertising, in my opinion. With so many rechargable speakers on the market, why Apple would come up with these is so odd... *shrug*
So you’re now qualifying your opinion to incorporate the entirety of all speakers. I’m sure my old KBLs blow away your 9 year old desktop speakers so they must be utter garbage as well.
I don't use google or alexa and use Siri sparingly. I'm probably one of the few in the world, who get's annoyed by these smart assistants. I could care less asking about the latest scores in the world series, for example. Homepod to me is perfect for what I use it for. Airplay streaming and Apple music. At $199 sale it's a good buy. The mini at $99 hits the sweet spot.
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I'm genuinely curious about users complaining about this. If you live in Europe, what impedes you to buy one on eBay UK and ship it to your country? I'm 10.000 miles away from USA and managed to get one 🤷🏻♂️
This sounds like a competition talking point. First. When it comes to sound quality the reviews say different. Then playing catch-up is subjective. When compacted head to head in test they all came close but had different strengths. Google and Alexa do a poor job of controlling device functions like Apple has been good at since 2000 on the Mac then the iPod and on to the iPhone. There was a hit taken in the last couple of years as Siri moved to on device processing for security reasons. That is the primary reason the developed the neural engine. As it gets into more of a percentage of their active user base, all bets are off. Apple haters tend to forget history. They always tend to end up winning the war. The small battles are short term. They plan much further down the road.
just stop it, mate. you’re embarrassing yourself.
Don't expect a person who literally doesn't understand basic concepts like fact and opinion to be an expert on anything.
I’m in the Sonos camp because I wanted great music in my living room and great home theater, and had very little space to work with. The Arc and Play:1’s do a fantastic job of both. I‘d love for Apple to do a proper home theater setup based on HomePods, but two HomePods faking surround isn’t it.
Setting EQ and and speaker cutoff frequencies aren’t professional features, they’re just nonsensical in a system that is using a bunch of electronics and software to automatically tune to the environment (HomePod does this continuously, Sonos does it on demand with TruePlay). It’s like looking at a car and complaining that there’s no place to put the saddle - complaining there’s no way to do tasks that no longer need to be done. Sonos has some limited controls for adjusting the sound, buried in the menus, but you’re better off not messing with them and letting TruePlay do the work of balancing the sound for the room - the results are spectacular.
You can, already, today, send Airplay2 stereo to a subwoofer-equipped Sonos system, and it directs the proper frequencies to the subwoofer. I’d still very much like to see Apple make a HomePod sound bar, or proper center channel. I’m not really interested in having two HomePods pretend to do surround sound. But I’d love to see Apple do a real, convincing, home theater setup.
I’m looking at getting a HomePod mini almost entirely to AirPlay music to my Sonos speakers (also to control lights) - it looks like I can say, “Hey Siri, play (musical selection) on Sonos” and it’ll work, since I can do similar from my iPhone. The feature that would really sell it is if HomePod could stream arbitrary URLs, so I could put, say Soma.FM’s Groove Salad on my iPhone with a URL (like I can on my Mac), and then tell the HomePod mini “Hey Siri, play Groove Salad on my Sonos” (I don’t care if Groove Salad is available in their Internet Radio catalog or some such - I have a handful of subscription-based streams with private URLs that will never be in their catalog, so the URLs are key).
I digress but it is amusing to see the crowd that values privacy okay with a device that is always listening. Not I am not talking about Apple devices specifically.