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HomePod Early Hands-On Reviews: 'Seamless' Siri Commands and Audio Quality 'Feels Like You're at a Live Performance'

My biggest question is this:

How is there even a comparison to this and a Sonos? This is a 7.1 omnidirectional speaker designed to fill a room with sound (like music, and Siri’s unsexy voice), not a directional driver intended for focused attention, like a show or film would perform best with.

Can we please get back on track with the fact this is an over engineered, although likely superior option to an Alexa or Google speaker?
 
H3LL5P4WN said:
I'm waiting to find out if the Apple TV can Airplay to it, without perceptible lag. That's really my only use case; I want better sound but just don't want a sound bar.
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Same here but wait for the AirPlay 2 update for tvOS. You can’t pair two HomePods until then and the current airplay has 2 seconds latency (or something like that)
 
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deanthedev said:
I'm an audiophile and it's plenty good enough for me.

Do you have Martin Logans in your kitchen? Den/office? Bedroom? Rec room? Do you refuse to listen to music when you're in any other room except your listening room because the sound isn't "good enough" for your ears?
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no offense but your not a audiophile if you think it is plenty good. these are great for background music
 
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gnomeisland said:
I agree I don't think it will be a HiFi speaker. I also think that if you're comparing to traditional HiFi/direction speakers you're missing the point.

I'm certain it will be very colored compared to my Focal CMS monitors I use for work. But then, when I'm listening for pleasure I'm less concerned about accuracy and more about pleasing.
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Funny. I just posted a similar argument. Great monitors. I have Focal twin6 be’s.

There’s no substitute for real equipment... Whenever I get a rental car, I can’t even listen to its sound system. Even a base A4 from Silvercar sounds like junk compared to my B&O in my own Audi.
 
deanthedev said:
Images better or sounds better? The Sonos Ones in a stereo pair would not have the capacity to generate as much sound (or bass) as a single HomePod - not with those tiny drivers they use. Further, to actually notice the imaging you need to be sitting within a small defined area. If you're not, having a stereo pair means nothing.

The real takeaway from his is that Sonos felt threatened enough to offer a pair of Sonos Ones for the exact same price as the HomePod, literally when the HomePod was announced as going on sale.

Sonos should be worried. The type of customer that buys their products is the same type of customer that will consider a HomePod. Every HomePod Apple sells is a lost potential sale for Sonos.
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Hate to tell you but HomePod uses tiny drivers too
oneMadRssn said:
Either that guy is an Apple shill, or has never been a live performance.
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these are the kind of reviews someone gives when they are paid to review it
 
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I don’t care if the music is so good that it makes it seem like Taylor Swift is sitting on my lap and singing in my ear. It’s still overpriced for me. lol!
 
deanthedev said:
The whole thing seems odd. They list all the iOS devices as being "compatible" but no mention of Macs. Not being able to stream music from my MacBook seems weird.

Edited: If I have a playlist with my ripped CD content, I should be able to tell Siri to play that playlist. Not ideal, but should work.
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I believe the lack of "macbook" is an ommision. Anything that supports Airplay should be fine to use this as a speaker.

But yeah, it sounds like an ommission that they made to get the product out the door. I imagine once Apple gets home sharing protocols included in HomePod that functionality should work.

I can't believe Apple thinks this is the endgoal functionality.

Unless they're banking on HomePod users being exclusive Apple Music / iTunes purchasers. However, that's not a tiny market, so there's a large enough, even if limited market who can fully use the full blown functionality with their libraries.

For those like me, who has most of his music ripped from his own CD's though, it's a bit of a let down compared to functionality I can put together on my own using competitors products.

(This obviously isn't taking into account sound quality since i have no way of knowing if I'd like it)
 
4jasontv said:
"Just connect your speakers." There in is my biggest concern for this product. If you are not an audiophile than the echo speakers are fine. If you are one than you likely have multiple speakers you switch between based on what you are listening to. Why spend $300+ in a speaker when you could spend $30 + $0 to $10k+ what sounds best to you.

I'm sure they are great for it's size, but I'm not convinced that the selling point will drive sales. This isn't the same as the ipod making iPods mainstream. Echo is already mainstream. They have had multiple Black Fridays pushing their products at the largest stores in the world.

I hope it does well, but Its hard to see how it will.
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I think the reasons you describe are precisely why it will sell many. Most people have aspirations to experience an audiophile's sound quality without the setup hassle and expense. HomePod might not beat a $2k speaker setup but anyone who buys a HomePod probably won't truly hear the difference anyway.

It's kind of like HD vs. 4K. Most viewers cannot see the difference but that doesn't stop people from choosing 4K TVs over HD.
 
"If you close your eyes it's easy to feel like your at a live performance" ?? Really? What kind of live performance is this guy going to ..
 
chabig said:
It doesn't run apps, so how do you propose such support? As it is, it's pretty much the same as the Sonos system, which people seem to be happy with, since you can stream anything to the speaker from your Mac, iPhone, iPad, or AppleTV. With Sonos, you run an app on your device to stream to the speaker. With iOS, you run an app on your device to stream to the speaker.
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I'm not sure you understand fully how Sonos speakers work.

The app you use to control a Sonos actually streams the music FROM the Sonos speaker itself, not from the phone to the Sonos speaker. You can play music from a Sonos without a phone involved whatsoever. You can't play any non Apple Music source on a HomePod without streaming it from the phone over AirPlay 2 or Bluetooth. that's the biggest difference.
 
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ifarlow said:
You missed one:

- Will the HomePod support multiple user accounts? No.

This is enough to cause some of us to hold off and wait to see where this goes.
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The technical specs says it supports “Direct guest access”
 
fokmik said:
depends what sonos you have...but easily 2 homePODS will outperform a lot of systems around 500-1500$ (depends how old)
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How do you know this to be able to state it so factually. Have your own ears got to hear a HomePod yet? At this point in time, have ANY of us got to head-to-head HomePod against ANY speaker?

It could be as you say or it could sound terrible. More likely, it's probably somewhere in between. At this point in time, all we can say in that direction is that Apple is trying to compete with audio speakers in that range BECAUSE 2 HomePods cost $750.

There's also the issue of defining "outperform." For example, out of the box, 2 HomePods can't even synch up as Stereo yet (that, by Apple's admission) is a future software update away.

I'm keeping an open mind as good as I can about this product, but none of us know hardly anything more than what Apple Marketing has told us... or extensions of Apple Marketing via early reviewers hand-picked by Apple Marketing for early reviews. Apple also told us we were holding it wrong. Were we? How about throttle code was inserted for our benefit? Was it?

I hope this product is great. Being Apple, odds are good that it should be great. But I think we should hold back the coronation until we've at least had a chance to see & hear it ourselves and/or at least got to hear reviews from completely objective sources. More competition is always good for us consumers. Hopefully Apple has a home run here. But we don't know much at all at this point.
 
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asdavis10 said:
Even at its price, I think people will try it because the other smart speakers sound so bad.
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Exactly. The speakers in echo and google home are trash - those devices aren’t being sold as immersive audio experiences. I don’t know why that is so complicated for some reviewers. They need to stop comparing the two systems. Play 3 and google max are more accurate comparisons in my opinion
 
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garoto said:
You should have HomePod in your garage next to your Ferrari. So that when you’re walking out the door you continue to experience the HomePod up until the moment you get into your car.
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Ugh, but which Ferrari will he place the speaker beside? Well I guess that’s four more HomePods for the garage.
 
Is it already know if the Homepod can be used as a 'fulltime Mac-speaker' ?
I haven't found a clear answer on this yet and I'd love te replace my Soundsticks with two of these....
 
surely there must be some update for Siri coming with the launch of homepod, no?

Siri is still so very awful on my phone and watch... total crap, they must be updating this?

Will be interesting to see proper reviews once this thing has been tested some more... once people have got over the audio quality and had a think about how it compares in practice to the competition in terms of siri, skills, home automation etc.
 
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Replace the word "HomePod" with "iPod" in the critical analysis quotes. We all know how that turned out for the iPod.
 
H.Finch said:
Is it already know if the Homepod can be used as a 'fulltime Mac-speaker' ?
I haven't found a clear answer on this yet and I'd love te replace my Soundsticks with two of these....
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It supports Bluetooth, so If you're fine using Bluetooth as your full time speakers for your computer, I don't see why not.
 
NewtonPippin said:
Ugh the biggest problem I have is choosing what color. I wanted two, but i want it to match by other devices. Problem is I have a silver iphone X (256GB) and a space grey ipad pro (10.5), plus a space gray iMac Pro... not to mention my stainless steel (black) watch. So I ordered two HomePods in White, and two in Space Gray. I'm hoping that will cover my living room sufficiently. Depending on which color is nicest, I'll order more to place in the other rooms.
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Get the color to match your decor, not your portable gadgets. You don't use your iMac while it's sitting on the mantle above the fireplace, do you?

izyreal said:
Does the HomePod sound better than the competitors? Yes.
Is the Siri integration useful? Yes.
Is the design good? Yes.
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Usually enough for me, too. There's an Echo at my cousin's house and the sound is only good enough for background music (and integration with an existing music library is an unknown; we were gifted one and couldn't easily figure out how to use it).

I'm not sure if we'd get one because we usually like peace and quiet, but it would be the top candidate if we wanted a centralized speaker/home assistant.
 
dugbug said:
Same here but wait for the AirPlay 2 update for tvOS. You can’t pair two HomePods until then and the current airplay has 2 seconds latency (or something like that)
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William Gates said:
I'd imagine it can play with out perceptible lag as the AirPods do exactly that.
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Most of my AirPods experience has been listening to music. I guess I could try some video and see. But yeah, I wouldn't want to spend $700 just to feel like I'm watching a badly overdubbed kung fu movie.
 
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