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Physically speaking, it obviously can't rival audiophile quality, nor is it designed to.

However, with an announced down-firing woofer and seven-tweeter array it could still sound amazing and be a great improvement over the multitude of inexpensive 'junk' powered speakers a lot of people use for shared listening.

I have my doubts, maybe for just listening to music on the background.
The woofer is just too small, and it's not only the woofer which makes the speaker a great speaker, midtowns and high tones are also very important, plenty of tweeters in this one, where's the midrange.
 
What good is a smart speaker if you have to issue voice commands using Siri? 50% of the time I just give up trying on my iPhone and do whatever I want using the UI. If Apple is going to relay on Siri, they’ve got some major work to do. Siri doesn’t “learn” and get more accurate with time. Apple needs to produce a method where you can correct Siri’s understanding of certain words you speak or it’s going to remain next to useless for a lot of us.
 
Yes I agree. But Apple Watch is only that popular because it is an Apple product, and not on its own merit, I would argue.

Say what? Does it really have much competition? The Samsung Gear watches are a mess, barley gets any updates, runs Tizen OS so third-party software and development is stagnant and its fitness capabilities are limited by its hardware as the HR-tracking for instance isn't all that accurate.

When it comes to Android Wear watches the market is really limited and you often have to choose between big and bulky that can do fitness, or slimmer ones that don't offer much in terms of fitness at all.

Fitbit and Garmin have various devices but they are sorely lacking in terms of "smart features" at they are limited by their closed ecosystem with hardly any third-party API's and development tools. So what comes with the product is pretty much all you get. And Fitbit have a really bad track-record when it comes to defective units and surprisingly bad HR-tracking for a strictly fitness focused product.

Garmin has some awesome fitness products, but they are big and bulky and again they don't really have any smart features at all.


The Apple Watch strikes a really good balance between style, function and fitness that no one else seems to be able to match at this point.
 
I still am not understanding how this product, without being hooked up to an e-commerce site, is going to be better than the competition in a space that has been flooded by a more affordable product with more features.

Actually, it not being hooked to an e-commerce site (that I boycott as much as possible) or a search engine that auctions of my data to the highest bidder is big plus for me.

Thus, it's great for us post-materialists who can find purpose in life without ordering something online every single day.
 
Have you ever used the HomePod? When would you expect the consumer to actually purchase the HomePod if it's not on day one? Day two?

Why does Steve Jobs name have to be brought into the equation for every Apple product/marketing when it doesn't have to be?

And here we have it fellas, the current Apple consumer, "Day two.." my god. Good one.
 
But if it flops they'll just cover it up like they did with the Apple Watch. I actually hope these surveillance speakers go the way of the dodo.
Watcha got to hide?
[doublepost=1516739228][/doublepost]Too late to market? Amazon Echo has a screen and plays video and the sounds good enough if you use it mainly as a radio.
 
Yes I agree. But Apple Watch is only that popular because it is an Apple product, and not on its own merit, I would argue.

No, the Apple Watch has dominated because of being a decent fitness device, stylish and its functionality/features paired with the iPhone is well executed.
 
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Awesome, this is the Apple product I've pined for: everything I say being passed along to the cloud for all to hear (if somebody really cares to know).
 
I still am not understanding how this product, without being hooked up to an e-commerce site, is going to be better than the competition in a space that has been flooded by a more affordable product with more features.

How about adaptive beamforming and dynamic self-equalizatio driving much better sound?
 
An older article as to why Siri on Apple TV only in a few countries. I would imagine the same reason for the Homepod. An explanation for what is worth.

“This is despite the fact Siri on iPhone is actually available in 30 countries, so it wasn’t clear why Apple had pinpointed only a subset of those. It turns out, according to a chat with Apple by MacPrime, that there are some clever optimizations Apple makes with Apple TV Siri to improve speech recognition.

Because a core feature is the movie and TV show search, Apple tunes Siri in every country by teaching it about pronunciation characteristics for movie and TV show titles. Phonetic speech of actor names, films and directors vary drastically in different countries.

So Apple has to go through each country, add the differences in speech to the Siri database, so the overall user experience of searching for things is faster and more accurate. In the post, MacPrime uses the example of actor name Matthew McConaughey as something that is often pronounced in wildy different ways across languages and dialects.

It doesn’t do this for Siri on iPhone specifically because movies and TV shows is not a core function of using that device. But for Apple TV, it’s almost essential that those features work well so Apple will only add Siri for the country once it has gone through those training steps. In addition, on Apple TV there is no keyboard input for Siri so accuracy with voice recognition is doubly important so you can successfully find the content you are looking for.

Apple has therefore started by training Siri in the eight most popular countries (like USA and UK) and is working on expanding more soon.”
Thank you for the tip. Unluckily it's not a new software by a start up. We're talking about Apple and a 2010/11 feature. It's a shame.
 
Physically speaking, it obviously can't rival audiophile quality, nor is it designed to.

However, with an announced down-firing woofer and seven-tweeter array it could still sound amazing and be a great improvement over the multitude of inexpensive 'junk' powered speakers a lot of people use for shared listening.
Agree with half of that. Without good extended bass, I’d certainly not call it amazing.
I’ll keep my sub thanks.
I’d be interested to see what an audiophile actually says about the sound quality and soundstage though.
 
I'm still in shock after learning that the Apple Homepod is incompatible with my Apple Mac and that my legally purchased music collection, acquired outside of iTunes, isn't accessible through Homepod. If I'm wrong about this I would love to corrected. As it stands my $15 bluetooth speaker offers more functionality for me than the Homepod, which appears to be just an Apple Music subscription funnel device.
 
I'm still in shock after learning that the Apple Homepod is incompatible with my Apple Mac and that my legally purchased music collection, acquired outside of iTunes, isn't accessible through Homepod. If I'm wrong about this I would love to corrected. As it stands my $15 bluetooth speaker offers more functionality for me than the Homepod, which appears to be just an Apple Music subscription funnel device.

Doesn't the home pod support Airplay? I'd assume you can use it as a speaker for your mac, playing anything you've selected?

I do agree the wording on Apple's site is confusing.
 
So in other words: there‘ll be many countries that‘ll never get Siri on their speakers, as is currently the case with Siri on AppleTV.

It‘s a shame that such a big company is unable to support all of their markets within reasonable time. Non-english speakers are always second class customers.


It is an American company. Did you expect Germany to come first?
 
I've set my iPhone to English - as Siri "knows" most of its tricks when it's set to English. The only problem is that when it's set to English, it doesn't really understand (nor can it correctly pronounce) German names of people or towns.

This is especially a problem when you're dealing with towns or addresses that have umlauts.
 
What a ridiculous price.
Interesting you've already heard how it sounds and played with it to come to such a conclusion. Since we don't have your access, we'll have to wait to reserve judgment on value.
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Yes I agree. But Apple Watch is only that popular because it is an Apple product, and not on its own merit, I would argue.
Think about what you just said.
 
So in other words: there‘ll be many countries that‘ll never get Siri on their speakers, as is currently the case with Siri on AppleTV.

It‘s a shame that such a big company is unable to support all of their markets within reasonable time. Non-english speakers are always second class customers.
Never ever forget that Apple is an extremely USA centric company.

English will always be their primary care. Secondary languages will always take a back seat to releasing their products at home
 
Never ever forget that Apple is an extremely USA centric company.

English will always be their primary care. Secondary languages will always take a back seat to releasing their products at home

If find that a rather poor business attitude. A company should try to fulfill its customers needs equally in all their markets. That‘s what Apple‘s competitors do as well. Alexa works almost everywhere and is so much better than Siri.

Here in Austria we have to pay much more for their products, yet we only get a fraction of their festures. And I‘m not speaking of ‚America first‘ and other countries a few months later - we simply don‘t get some of their services (like iTunes radio in the past or Siri on Apple TV now). There‘s no technical reason for that - it‘s simply ignorance.
 
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