HomePod is a speaker first and a smart speaker second. It sounds amazing. All of my research told me a HomePod sounds better and two HomePods sound incredible. I have two HomePods and love them. Once you have your placement correct it’s a beautiful experience. But just one is amazing too. I had one for a month before I bought a second one.
I’ve been an Music user since launch. I’m heavily invested in HomeKit so that’s another major reason why to choose a HomePod over the competition.
I, also, use Pandora because I got it a year free for being a T-Mobile customer. I don’t mind AirPlaying it, I’m used to AirPlaying a lot. Audible, also, only works through AirPlay and I listen to a lot of books. With that said I wouldn’t want to AirPlay Pandora all the time if it were my only source of music. When my year is up I will not continue my subscription. Music and HomePod is just too convenient. I don’t mind AirPlaying Audible because that’s mostly a start/stop situation. But with music you’re constantly changing tracks.
It’s also nice to listen to podcasts. HomePod can do it natively. I have my audio podcasts in playlists so I tell Siri to play whatever playlist and she does. iOS devices are not required. You can also just say the name of the podcast and it will play. But that gets kind of dicey since so many podcasts have the same name.
Long story short if you aren’t heavily invested in the ecosystem then choose something else. I’d go Sonos before I went Echo, but that’s just me.
