Why wait, buy, experience it and if you don’t like it return it. That would be the most objective review.
That certainly works too. For me personally, I don't like the trouble of blind faith buying anything and then potentially having to pack it back up and return it... when I can just be a little patient, read some
objective reviews and then decide if I want to make a final review myself, in my own home, listening to my own sources of audio. In short: I don't burn at all to be "first", to potentially win the first "unboxing" thread, etc. This doesn't make or break my life if I get it first day or 50th day or 500th day.
I do NOT have an AM subscription- much prefer the alternative myself (which works fine on all my other Apple stuff but apparently not this thing unless we go the airplay route). I've accumulated thousands of songs in my iTunes library the "old fashioned" (ripped from my CD collection) way, and there is a fairly strong belief that this thing may ONLY be able to see iTunes music via AM or ONLY
purchased from iTunes (CD rips excluded). If that's true (and I can't hardly believe Apple would do that... and yet, all this time later and Siri on
TV still can't "see" my locally-stored
video rips- only the videos purchased or rentable/buyable from the iTunes store), I'd have almost NO use for this product myself. Wait for reviews and someone is going to confirm or refute that one with certainty.
Some are wondering if the one-time "Match" option might overcome this issue too, though "Match" won't actually match up to everything ripped to iTunes.
And then there's the question of which version would HomePod play if the Match option
does grant it access to most of a ripped collection in iTunes- the 256Kbps version via streams or the up to lossless versions on our own Macs in our own libraries? Since so much of the spin about this speaker is about sound quality, at least a big portion of that equation will be
tied to the quality of the source material. Hopefully, it WILL be able to play ripped content from CDs in our own iTunes libraries at whatever quality we've opted to rip those songs. But we'll see soon.
And I completely agree: for those that don't mind potentially boxing stuff up and returning it, nothing beats doing your own review, in your own home, with your own media.
