Temperature and humidity sensor is a nice perk for those of us with acoustic guitars and orchids. Presumably it can be used with Apple Shortcuts to trigger notifications. Might upgrade my first gen HomePod eventually, but it still sounds great.
"With its built-in sensor, HomePod can detect and tell you the temperature and humidity of the room.8 And you can set it in automations so the blinds close if the temperature hits 80 degrees."
I think it depends on HW version. I got a Mini right when it came out, and with the latest beta 16.3 firmware it still says "I'm sorry, I can't do that" for requests about room temperature or humidity.
I don’t think so, the sensor was reported fairly shortly after the initial release, and there hasn’t been a second gen of the mini. It’s probably just a staged rollout.
I still don't know why it doesn't come with an equalizer built into Home. Sometimes I want grumbly bass; sometimes I want to understand Bane without subtitles.
Not an equalizer but Reduce Bass setting does exactly this. I actually have it on at all times because it makes the HomePod sound more flat, the default has too much bass for my taste.
The description of the tweeters has changed on the spec page as well. I wonder if they're still using balanced mode radiators (BMRs) like the first gen HomePods? Perhaps these use a newer generation BMR?
I don't think they're BMRs, they're just conventional full range drivers, similar to what Apple has been using for almost two decades, going all the way back to the iMac.
I love my OG HomePods that I got on close-out at Best Buy, but both of them have given me near constant connection issues over the last few months -- excited to have something to replace them with. I much prefer the appearance of the Big HomePod over the (not-really) equivalent Sonos One.
I’ve got two first gen HomePods here which died slightly out of warranty, and AppleCare wanted $300 a piece just to take a look at them. Makes me quite gunshy about spending yet another $300 on a product which may not last more than 2-3 years.
Exact same experience here. Mine died after a botched firmware update. Woke up one morning after it had auto-updated the night before. 100% Apple's fault because they pulled the update shortly after but the damage was done. Took it in thinking they would just reset it and shocked they wanted $300 to repair. Unless this one has a UCB-C port like the mini that allows user resetting I'll skip this one.
And I think it works out to about $80 once you include shipping. Ive got a dead one right now - trying to decide if I want to source air gun to fix it myself or just send it to him. Less than $100 to have it fixed is kind of a steal.
Very helpful y’all, thanks! Gonna see if I feel up to tackling the repair (good excuse to buy a reflow setup) and or get in touch with this gentleman. Cheers!
I'm not the parent commenter but I'm using Siri on my HomePod minis all the time. Turning on / off lights. Regulating the temperature, setting timers, asking for temperature outside, stopping the music.
Unfortunately Siri isn't that great so you'll often run into "Waiting for it", "One moment" and "Working on it" replies.
There's one thing keeping my Echo plugged in: AnyList integration. I can say "Alexa, add eggs" and it adds eggs to my AnyList shopping list. With a HomePod, I have to say something like "Hey Siri, using AnyList add eggs to my grocery list" or something like that. It's way too clumsy.
tbh find the full size a bit expensive for my personal needs - more interested in the mini (still overpriced). Certainly makes the mini a more compelling option however if they add more functionality.
"Apple's HomePod mini includes a dormant hidden sensor that can measure temperature and humidity, potentially providing the means to power upcoming features that could arrive in a future software update, according to Bloomberg."
In our house we have Google's home speakers and the original Nest cameras and also some new cameras which only work with the Google home app and over the years I could see a gradual decline in reliability, functionality and just in general a decline in the usefulness of those things.
The camera feed is so slow since Google took over Nest, it barely works with the Google home app and keeps cutting out, doesn't load at all or keeps hanging sometimes. When someone rings the door bell then it takes forever to bring up the feed and let me talk to the person by the door. The Nest doorbell has become completely useless in its latest iteration combined with the Google home app. The person is long gone before I get to see who it was, which makes it really annoying and super unreliable to receive parcels when not at home.
I have never tried Alexa + Ring, but speaking to friends they are also getting more frustrated with the Amazon brand.
Is Apple a viable option today? If this stuff works well then it's worth having, but currently I wouldn't go for any smart gadgets and actively refuse anything from Google. I don't think they care about their hardware products. I've seen the same decline with their Pixel series.
I played with a cheap wifi camera vs an actual wired (network) cctv camera. The difference is night and day, even just viewing the stream in VLC. Speed, stability etc. "Consumer" stuff just feels underpowered and little more than a toy.
I hope matter brings a better landscape for all this stuff - but then I have been sitting on my hands waiting for years as the next version of everything is just 12 months away.
The switches I bought with Matter support are from Eve. Previously the Eve devices have only been supported through their own app on iOS, and that was the only reason to be able to read the kWh usage.
I hope the Matter support will let me access it from my other devices.
My fear of mission out is being overridden by my fear of buying the obsolete technology at an inflated price a week before they start making the good version that actually works!
Same thing here. I dumped Alexa stuff 4ish years ago for Google Home devices and its become somewhat of a let down. They really don't seem to have anything new while Amazon keeps releasing new displays/speakers.
My Nest Hub Max will only show the camera in the old Nest app while it never loads in the Google Home app.
I'm thinking I may have to try something else in the near future.
I have a mixed Google/Apple smart home environment. I don't know how fast Nest was before, but I find it slow-but-not-unusable nowadays, still useful enough that I wish Apple would introduce a HomePod with a screen. That said, I also wish Google would finally kill Nest and just go forward with Google Home, since it's a pain to have to remember which one configures some of my devices and which does the rest.
Apple needs hardware partners to more deeply invest in HomeKit, particularly in the camera space. It's coming along but still feels behind. A compatible camera (or one bridged to HomeKit) will show up on the AppleTV pretty quickly. The official HomeKit devices I have work consistently and well, and the ones I bridge in with HomeBridge work most of the time without intervention. It is super cool to ask Siri to open the garage door when I'm walking the dog and it's cold out. I would say it's viable, if not improving all the time.
> Apple needs hardware partners to more deeply invest in HomeKit
I think Apple themselves need to invest in it more. It's so basic as to be almost unusable.
I have a supercomputer in the form of Apple TV just idling there, and the best HomeKit can barely do is perhaps turn lights on at a certain time, and then complain that it couldn't reach Apple TV.
We have the original HomePod. The sound quality really has been great and would be even better with stereo pairing. Even HomePod minis with stereo pairing feel very immersive. We got minis for the kids rooms because those were the only ones with privacy controls I was ok with.
We also extensively use HomeKit for all our smart home devices and a huge reason was the privacy, vs Ring and Google.
So the video doorbell we have is entirely local and so sarhad worked really well (logitech). And I like how it’s end to end encrypted so nobody gets access to our video feeds. Plus the chime is the HomePod itself.
As usual though, Siri sucks. Just… sucks. so that’s always the weakest link.
I too have noticed a serious decline in the software reliability of my smart-home devices that went away after replacing them with newer models. I don't know if the software support for older models gradually winds down and atrophies or if some component starts to degrade causing things like wireless signal degradation (which would definitely result in poor connections and high latency). Does anyone have some insight here? I'm sure we have people from the IoT space here.
I dont have any cameras but have about 7 Google home items for years and have had no issues. I many use them for assistant which runs circles around competition and routines such as turning off/on lights when it senses I'm home or have left. If assistant is a main use for you I wouldn't switch.
I'm holding out to see if Matter fills the gaps I see in Apple Home. I have too many devices that are not supported in Apple Home. Many of which are not easily replaced, such as an appliance.
I enjoy the HomePod mini we were gifted in the kitchen. It sounds fine for what it is but Siri is basically a glorified kitchen timer as it fails at least 70% of the time at answering a question or even turning lights on and off.
Is it too much to ask to say “Siri turn off all lights except kitchen island” and expect it to do it? No matter how many times I have reconfigured things in the Home app it just can’t do it I have to ask it to turn off all lights then turn on the kitchen island :facepalm:
Yeah, that sort of low hanging fruit is a bit annoying... although if you find yourself doing that a lot, adding a named shortcut / scene for it is a decent workaround.
Interesting to see a v2, and looking forward to Matter support for more smartphone devices to work natively…right now the device support is kind of ridiculous
It's nice to see Apple continuing to iterate here whereas Google, in comparison and as they often do, killed off their related Google Home Max product.
The last HomePods sounded great, but it’s hard for me to imagine them taking off without fixing Siri. Siri is still remarkably dumb compared to Alexa and certainly when compared to GPT3.5 tools. If you ask Siri “What is 220°C in F” it will correctly hear the words you’re saying, then convert 220F to C.
Because of this, I never use Siri outside of contexts I’m sure Apple has tested thoroughly (e.g. read my last text).
Strangely it’s working for me today, but not yesterday when I was cooking and couldn’t touch my phone with wet hands.
I wonder if background noise has something to do with it. The fact that Siri accurately displayed what I was trying to say made me think it understood me perfectly, but it’s possible it will do something else in the background if it’s not confident it hears you correctly.
I thought that the main reason between the last generation of HomePod flopping was because they're so locked down. And apparently they still don't support Bluetooth streaming even though it has built-in Bluetooth?
Unfortunately, Google’s tendency to randomly sunset products with no good replacement or migration strategy means I’ll never really incorporate it into my life in a big way, but yeah Google Assistant is pretty solid.
Tangential thought: First Gen HomePods, a years old product, are currently selling on eBay for nearly their retail price. Lots of people, myself included, love them purely because of how good the audio is and how easy the pairing is between HomePods and iPhones/Macs/AppleTVs. I’ve had two paired to my AppleTV for years and the audio for music and movies is amazing.
Again, more anecdata: I have never used Siri and wouldn’t even factor in if my audio setup can convert temperatures when purchasing it.
This is extremely exciting, given the audio quality of the HomePod 1. I had been buying new old stock of HomePod 1s off eBay to make sure I have 6 working ones (I use 3 different stereo pairs) for the foreseeable future.
The only real downside of HomePods is that they don't function as bluetooth audio receivers (Apple proprietary AirPlay2 only) and that you need an Apple ID (as well as iCloud enabled on that Apple ID) to set them up - the creation of which these days requires a working phone number, so it's a little expensive (burner SIM) if you want to buy and use them anonymously.
People commenting about how Siri sucks I think are missing the point of these. These (presuming the sound quality is similar to the HP1) are the best consumer self-powered speakers for under $2000, full stop. The fact that they do anything else (mics, voice assistant, wifi streaming, whatever) is mostly unimportant if you understand what these things are. I'd use them even if they didn't have Wi-Fi. As far as I can tell, they (and airpods) were the latest "insanely great" product Apple made until the M1 macs dropped.
I haven't made the assumption that more speakers = better sound.
It's possible it's experiencing the same gradual and nearly imperceptible quality decline (from insanely great to merely extremely good) that most Apple products have been undergoing the last 5-7 years, but I will reserve judgement until I have one (two, actually) in hand. Apple's brain drain and productmanagerization is sadly very real.
Fingers crossed that someone in Apple is holding it to the same standards as AudioAccessory1,1 (HomePod1), but not holding my breath as I think the guy who I believe was the main force behind it (Christopher Stringer) left Apple to create a company called Syng and a product called the Cell Alpha.
A stereo pair of Cell Alphas is $4500. A stereo pair of HomePod2s is $600.
Also, I think one of the main reasons the HP1 flopped is because it was too expensive. If this thing is 95% as good as the HP1 but stays in production because people are buying it because Apple figured out how to sell it for 15% cheaper, then it's a win.
You can get a really, _really_ good pair of professional studio monitors for 2000$. I'll confess that I've never heard the HP1 but that is a bold claim!
I did qualify it with the "consumer" adjective, but I also have several pairs of expensive studio monitors and the HP1 sounds way better (though it lacks the "transparency" you need for mastering, but this is irrelevant as it doesn't even have an audio input anyway - lossy and latent AirPlay2 via Wi-Fi is the only way to get audio into them). They're somewhat of an engineering marvel.
The real value of the original HomePods IMHO was the quasi-omnidirectional radiation pattern. If you have an unusual room configuration, such as an open concept dining area and kitchen and need to locate the speakers medially, they outperform anything you can buy at a reasonable price, especially with the reduce bass setting turned on. It's really quite surprising to hear. But in a typical listening room configuration I wouldn't agree that they sound better than a pair of good studio monitors.
Seems like Apple executed the way Google should have with their Google Home Max. They've added stereo pairing, so you can have two of them sync up together and then connect them to an Apple TV 4k and you basically get a pretty nice wireless sound bar with Dolby Atmos enabled.
Still, at $300 per pod, I really need Siri to do better than the "dumber than a bag of rocks" vibe she currently gives off for this to be at all tempting.
As someone that does applied DL for work, especially NLP, I just don't understand what Apple is doing with Siri. It's like they see low user engagement metrics with Siri and assume it's because people don't want it. Instead, everyone I know that's an Apple fan uses Google Assistant, because it just works most of the time.
They're for sale again for starters. The first generation was discontinued a couple years ago. I think they had some manufacturing issue which meant they kept dying prematurely. It's possible this is basically a small spec bump + they should actually work this time
Apple discontinued the OG size HomePod a while back, and sold only the tiny baseball-sized ones. This is a re-introduction of a larger-size, better-sounding device that I assume is essentially the same form factor as the original one.
I wouldn't discount the difference chipset can make, especially with respect to features it can support - the original homepod had an anaemic processor in comparison to just about any other apple kit.
I’m very much an anecdote here, but want to give a different perspective. I’m an Apple “fan” (at least, I have more of Apple’s devices than other brands), and I don’t want voice activation. I don’t feel comfortable something listening to all my intimate family conversations. Maybe Apple fans are more likely to be privacy conscious.
All that being said, it doesn’t need to be either or. They could have a great Siri product for those who want it, and allow it to be deactivated for those who don’t.
You want a Sonos SL or Ikea Symfonisk (Sonos sw/hw in Ikea design). Great products, no mic, Airplay 2 support, massive group pairing and the same room detection tuning Apple bragged about in the Homepod via the App on a phone instead of mics. (Sonos holds the patent on it and famously made no claims about Apple stealing it while asking Google and Amazon to pay licenses, aka: Apple Ponied up.)
I’m a huge Sonos fan but I think their patent was “volume control for connected/synced speakers” and apple had a UI to control each speaker volume separately.
I also suspect that apple shared Airplay with them j stead of paying. I know lots of people that bought Sonos instead of the HomePod because it supported airplay.
Room detection isn't exclusive to Sonos, unless you're claiming YPAO/Dirac/Audyssey also licensed it. The HomePod is different because it does detection at the source, where everything else needs you to sample with a mic or phone app.
I use Siri for mundane things. Horses for courses.
For music though, I prefer browsing through a playlist or artist discogs. Recalling a track from memory and requesting an assistant to play it isn’t very intuitive.
Siri aside, I’m very much looking forward to this update.
Stereo pairing was a feature of the original first generation HomePods . Siri has always been a limitation of buying this product due to the best bang per buck for the audio quality.
I would go so far as to describe Siri as "aggressively useless".
I try to squelch my alarm in the morning and she replies with "sorry you'll need to continue in the app" (silencing the alarm anyways but not actually dismissing it). If I wake up before my alarm and want to stop it from sounding, I tell her to turn it off, she says she has done so (with a follow-up question confirming that I have no alarms enabled)… And then the god damn alarm goes off at the usual time anyways.
Most recently she has started replying to my requests to send text messages and start phone calls with "who is speaking?" I don't know maybe the only person who matters on this single user device? If I don't say my name to her satisfaction then the call doesn't get made. I never did any kind of voice training or enabled any kind of restriction based on voice matching so what the fuck?
The last straw which led to me unplugging my home pod was when both it and the phone started triggering at nearly the same time with the result that the speech of one started interfering with the requests to the other one.
Bonus points: the speech recognition tech is bad enough that I tend to wait for acknowledgment before speaking a command. The "Boop" that you get from Alexa and Google. Not only does Siri not have this, it triggers, waits for a moment, and then says something. One of these responses is a annoyed sounding teenager "yeah?" that has more than once had me fantasizing about the immediate defenestration of the speaker.
Bought Google Max for the parents, & holy cow the pairing is terrible. Unusable entirely with a TV, huge lag.
I have the "headphones out" line coming from the tv, which I split, and then send to the line-in on each speaker. At least there is a line-in! Less and less smart speakers have a line in, it feels like. Absurd. (Different story, but also, really wish the Chromecast Audio were still a thing. Some inventory left but what a great product for adding amazing connective capability to any sound system! Smart being counter-analog-line-level stuff is such a shite hellworld thing.)
> Seems like Apple executed the way Google should have with their Google Home Max
Google properly executing on Google TV would require them to not build hardware with 1/12th the single core performance of an Apple TV. (Seriously, it has single core performance around that of a 2011 Intel Atom while the Apple TV has an A15 throwing 12th gen Intel laptop numbers. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19594628)
Seriously, what is with The Chromecast with Google TV? People are like "It's laggy!" and Google is like "We do update!" and people are like "Now it's laggy AND crashes!" My entire experience with my three of them. Software is great, hardware is pure eWaste and they should feel bad about that.
I’ve seen the GTV on sale for $20, the ATV is almost $200. That’s a 10x in price difference.
I think the most sensible way to use both devices is as a dumb “cast” target.
FWIW, the fireTV literally had a bug where it’d crash because the ad data collecting daemon used up too much processing power. For $20, just be thankful Google has that much self control.
To be fair, google extend this to software on the Apple TV too - the YouTube and YouTube TV apps are both complete trash that don’t respond to scrolling properly because they’ve been built using some cross platform garbage instead of for the target platform. HBO Max is another offender.
Worth noting that Google has gone to extra effort here to make YouTube bad on AppleTV; their original first-party AppleTV app was actually significantly better.
> Instead, everyone I know that's an Apple fan uses Google Assistant, because it just works most of the time.
Really? I know lots of Apple fans and I've never seen any of them use Google Assistant on their iPhone or anything else. How do your friends do this? Via a Siri shortcut that passes requests through? Or by opening up a Google app every time they want to use the voice assistant?
I live with my partner and I’m debating whether a homepod or two minis is the correct choice for our 3 room apartment. Seems cool you can have a mini in each room and just walk around and there’s music all over. But also seems a bit like a hastle having to link/unlink them depending whos where. My airpods already give me enough trouble connecting to my comp/ipad/iphone. 1 regular homepod might just be the simpler, better choice.
The homepod had too much bass for me to comfortably use it in my apartment. At a decent listening volume, the bass was overwhelming. EQ only worked for music streamed via Apple Music at the time. They have added a "Reduce Bass" to the settings for the homepod now, but I returned mine within the 14 day return policy around the time the original homepod came out.
I switched my Alexa devices over to homepod mini's after one too many "by the way" suggestions by Alexa. Homepod mini has decent audio but I wouldn't use it for my primary music listening.
If you care for music quality, buy a decent portable bluetooth speaker and carry it with you from room to room - there is a lot to be said for the flexibility, and you can also toss it in your luggage when traveling.
If your eARC TV has a ATV 4K hooked up, then a pair of HomePods can be wireless Atmos speakers for anything hooked to TV, such as an Xbox console. Still works for music, without TV on, just push to the ATV's AirPlay name.
You don't need a receiver / AVR, this lets the eARC tv drive HomePods.
Happy to see this, I will be buying a couple of pairs if the sound quality is anything close to the prior generation. I love my current pair and have considered paying over retail for another eBay pair. I wish Siri were better -- it is good enough that I use it for stuff often but glitchy enough that I don't like trying new use cases.
I would love to hear the inside story about why the old one was discontinued and it took so long for the v2.
The HomePod mini is the "first device" we have given to our children. No screen, I am comfortable with apple privacy, access to music and podcasts, etc.
The mini has shockingly good sound for $100 and what it is.
kudos to you! I know they will cherish a device like that. Growing up I had a similar tech item that was my "thing", it was a tiny MP3 player that I used for years. Having a HomePod Mini is a great way to get them access to super helpful tech without the drawbacks (ads, social media, privacy) of screen-based devices.
"The mini has shockingly good sound for $100 and what it is. "
It's really something, isn't it? I mean, I'm an audio nut with genuine crazy-person speakers in my living room, but goddamn if that single mini Homepod in our bedroom isn't stupid good.
I was going to get one for my kid but don't want her to be able to ask arbitrary questions and basically access web search just yet. When I looked into it, the only way to accomplish this was to turn off Siri entirely, and just make it into a speaker for source iOS devices. Any chance they have more fine-grained controls for this yet?
I am an old-school Apple fanboy. I learned HyperCard on a Macintosh SE/30—I am that old.
I still appreciate the Apple ecosystem, and I do like certain aspects of my HomePod mini…but Siri. C’mon. Get it together. It just fails at the absolute basics.
The basics being: please add stuff to my shopping list when I yell it into the aether while in the kitchen. It either completely mangles the speech-to-text (starches, Siri, not starships), or just…fails. It times out, or sits there, blankly pulsing a light at me.
I would really appreciate a higher-quality speaker with easy integration with my iOS/Mac devices. But $299 or something that has artificial stupidity like Siri? Nah.
Siri complain time? Well, my newest problem with Siri is: Let's say I want to play some classic song (like Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd). So I say "hey siri, play sweet home alabama" - and what I get is not the original one but some newish remake/remix/reinterpretation.
Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original?
Oh also ... what's the "next song pls" command in German? With Alexa I can say "Alexa, weiter" and the next track plays. With Siri? "Weiter" won't do anything. I have to say "Hey Siri, nächstes Lied" ... or I can just switch to English and say "Hey Siri, next" which then works.
Oh another one: The German Siri pronouncing English song titles with the German voice-set makes my ears hurt. Like you would read an English word but pronounce it like you would a German word.
But then again some Band/Song Titles she gets perfectly right. Cannibal Corpse sounds like perfect English.
Those AI assistants are a hot mess and get worse with time. Seems like feeding more and more data into your model won't make it better.
I've also been baffled by this. Some syntax helps (".. by $band"), especially when an album and a track have the same name (which is a related issue for me).
It's somehow managing to get worse in this area. You were once able to say "not this version" and it would try a different version of the same song. Now it just replies "I found some results on the web, but I can't show them here".
(This is especially infuriating when it does it on CarPlay)
> Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original?
I heard the original implementation of Alexa had a banned list of words that shouldn’t appear in the song title unless there are no alternatives, including “remix”, “live”, and “explicit” (among others).
Voice assistants really need to get away from their pretense that they're magical at understanding languages and just provide a long documentation page showing what you can say... and also take feedback on that page so people can provide more idiomatic ways to express that same command.
Apple do actually have such documentation[1 English][2 German] but it's far from comprehensive, and the examples are tediously long ("Hey Siri skip this song", when I know "Hey Siri skip" works)
If you do insist on speaking German, is it any wonder you need to use long words? :-) /s
I think I have worked out a way to do this with a custom Shortcut (using an If condition on Device Name to use the Music Skip Forwards action on the device executing the Shortcut), but I'm pretty sure it would end up as a longer interaction.
Edit: Drat, Shortcut approach doesn't work, looks like the Shortcut runs on your iPhone, so the device name is always the iPhone's
Are you using Spotify or Apple Music as your streaming service.
We had endless problems with cover bands and tribute songs rather than the mainstream song when we used Alexa with Spotify (which baffled us as I expect that would be the most common configuration).
We currently use Apple Music and Google Nest devices since our mesh network has them built in. Music works fine. Podcasts are a curse on humanity — if you say “play podcast”, it always defaults to the last episode you played, even if it was months ago. You have to specify the latest episode of so and so podcast EVERY TIME, and even then it’s flaky. It’s like it forgot that podcasts are a derivative of “broadcast” where timeliness is relevant.
We have an original large-size HomePod in the kitchen. Its MAIN job is music-in-the-kitchen, and it excels at that. It's secondary job is "Siri portal" for random information or timers or whatever (btw, did you know you can set multiple timers and give then names, like "set a pasta timer for 10 minutes" and then also "set a simmer timer for 30 minutes" and ask it for status on those by name?).
I have an ongoing sort-of faux-competition with my wife about how to ask Siri for things. She asks questions and gets frustrating replies, but when I ask them slightly differently I get good data.
I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...".
I SUSPECT it's mostly specificity, or asking for simple facts ("when was King Charles born?") and not derived facts ("how old is King Charles?"), but it comes up a LOT.
That same history of software means that I don't even ATTEMPT some of the stuff Siri is notionally capable of, like maintaining a shopping list. (Though I routinely use Siri on my watch or phone to add appointments or reminders.)
Aye, I have some history in software development as a UI designer. Including for something with natural language processing. So I have some heuristics for what and how to ask. But I feel like “add [x] to my Shopping list” where [x] is a fairly common would should be doable.
But also I didn’t know about named timers. So I appreciate that, that’s actually really useful. Huh, something I didn’t know about a voice assistant, it’s almost like there are issues with discoverability, who would have thought…
Yeah, I never really articulated it before, but Apple is a company with a history of emphasizing discoverability in interfaces. That maybe doesn't work quite as well for a voice interface.
OTOH, thinking of something to try and then being delighted it works (which is how I found the named timers) was a pretty cool experience.
> I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...".
Hah, very much the same. My partner will always end up asking me to ask siri to ask something because my slightly differently worded requests tend to succeed more often
It's topic drift, but this is a great example of a scenario that I think is interesting: the apparent existence of a skill that you cannot articulate.
Usually, if you're better than someone else at something, there are things you KNOW you are doing differently, and you can give pointers/instruction, right? In my bar-going youth I was a better than average pool player, but I could also help YOU with YOUR pool game by showing you what I was doing, right?
But sometimes these things exist at an unconscious level. The main example of this in my life is animal interaction, which I am pretty sure is due to countless inarticulateness lessons I learned from my dad, and by working with him at his veterinary clinic in high school.
I have joked for decades that I simply inherited the Kindly Veterinarian Vibe, because while I definitely CAN tell you simple things to do if you have trouble connecting with a dog or cat, but I can't transfer everything because I don't even know everything that I'm doing. A huge chunk of it is understanding the animal body language, and it seems like lots of people just suck at that, e.g.
> Buy $299 or something that has artificial stupidity like Siri?
Well, in fairness, it’s designed first as a music device, the Siri seems like almost an afterthought. That said,
Spend $299 on a wireless speaker where the stereo pairing often fails, has random Wi-Fi connection issues (that no other Apple device has), and is otherwise hindered by issues?
Nah, fooled me on the first gen, fooled me again on the HomePod minis, think I’ll pass this time.
Yeah, the equivalent Sonos product was the 3, but it's EOL and there is currently a hole in the Sonos line there. Not sure if they'll bring something back, maybe now that Apple has Homepod 2 they will, or the medium-sized bi-directional speaker we saw go through the FCC last month.
I used to have Wi-Fi connection issues that magically went away when I swapped my Linksys Velop network for an eero Pro system. HomeKit works every time now, there are never any unresponsive devices, and all my HomePods work great. I'm not sure this is a HomePod issue based on how immediately the router switch helped.
It’s not an AP related issue in my case and AirPlay as well as all other Bonjour / mDNS based things work great. It’s something specifically broken with HomePod stereo pairs that’s a known issue to the team (details of which my source won’t share).
This is why I still run all my Sonos on Sonosnet (lucky to live in a brick walled detached house, so 2.4 GHz noisy channels aren't a show-stopper). Never had any sync or pairing issues.
I avoided all this smart speaker stuff by going for a Marshall Acton II in the kitchen (music via Bluetooth). My wife uses Amazon or Apple music and I use Subtracks on Android to play to it.
I run a Pi4 running a Navidrome instance after spending a long time ripping all my thousands of CDs.
The Pi goes via a USB audio interface (better than the audio output on the Pi) and an EQ (Behringer DCX2496) to a set of Yamaha HS8s. I am pretty sure that works out cheaper than buying a pair of Apple speakers.
You can use Mopidy to get it to play audio on the Pi over the speakers (as in, use Mopidy mobile to tell the Pi to play from its local library of mp3s, out to its connected speakers). I use this for playing guitar along to songs without having to look at a computer screen.
Alternatively the Pi also acts as an Airplay receiver so you can play from your iPhone to it, either from your Apple/Amazon music subscription or via a Sonic API compatible app.
From Windows you can pipe your audio remotely to it using palink to stream your local audio to the Pi (it runs a pulseaudio player via SSH if I recall correctly). I actually use that to run Studio One on a PC in a room upstairs but sit on a Linux laptop in the sunshine, RDPing to the PC but listening to the audio over palink (better quality audio than RDP).
Adding a Wireguard server to the Pi (and pihole) and putting the VPN on my phone and I can stream my music whilst out and about and also get all adverts/home dialling blocked. I also gave my brother VPN access but to the specific IP instead of routing all traffic over it so he can enjoy my music too.
I'm often surprised at how far away I can be from the device and have it hear the trigger, but I also notice that it has a habit of trying to guess what you are saying when the input is weak instead of telling you that it didn't hear it well. I.e. if I move a few feet closer and repeat the same input string it will execute correctly. It feels like they should be less shy about having Siri just tell you that that the signal to noise ratio was too low for it to be sure of what you said.
So Siri is mediocre at best, we also probably agree. Lots of things to complain about… how Siri works inconsistently across devices, punts most queries to a web search, etc.
I appreciate that they aren’t overbuilding Siri though. Alexa (which recent experienced an unfortunate gutting vis layoffs) was amazons attempt to build a consumer ecosystem, which meant a lot of crappy features no one uses (notifications?). Siri feels like it definitively lives on that device and is just a fancy hands-free control. No extraneous feature creep in an attempt to build out a platform. Apple resisted a lot of opportunities to grow Siri while Alexa et al dramatically increased headcount and features, and it seems that voice assistants never really caught on as a general purpose tool. I imagine smarthome/weather/music still dominates all queries by a huge margin.
I still don’t know why anyone would buy a $300 HomePod. As the owner of two original HomePods, they’re fine. This one looks like it has less speakers in it, but I assume it sounds comparably good. If you want good sound I assume you’d be buying a Sonos or something more versatile, but this is an equal but apple-loving choice. The real pro is that it sounds like it has a removable cable.
I still want a screen-based apple smart speaker. Smart speaker+clock is a sweet spot in terms of usability, and the Google home I’ve been loving. It gets you some richer visual for that 1% of queries that benefit, and a glanceable clock for the rest of the time. I can’t imagine apple making a UI that is one-off though. Hopefully the iPad goes the way of the pixel tablet
I bought one when it was the only Siri speaker. My partner did the same, we now share a household.
We have since bought Alexa devices, then after the release of the HomePods Mini, prompted threw away Alexa. One too many “by the way” interjections for us.
Oh and now I bought a Google home hub v2. Great device, but we’re an apple household.
It would also be pretty nice to have Siri works in several languages on a shared device like the Homepod. Not everyone has the same native language in my house.
For me the biggest addition is the h1 chip finally being added.
Know how you can be playing music on your iPhone and hold it up to your HomePod and it will transfer? But it is kinda hit or miss on the original HomePod. On the HomePod mini thanks to that chip it is nearly perfect. This seems to just add that.
Couple other things, but at least it brings parity.
Maybe it was U1? There are too many apple chips that it is easy to confuse now.
I can't find anything on the page saying exactly which chip it is. Regardless it was a chip that was missing from the original but is in the Mini that made this feature work.
That would be awesome, I would love some feature that it could actually be room aware and knowing where devices are in that space instead of just relative to your phone when searching for an AirTag.
But I imagine that would likely require a workflow of mapping your space with your phone first.
The chip is directionally aware. It would be able to tell you that your item is in a specific direction. (e.g., using Find My will give you an arrow that points toward your devices)
Your Chinese thread's too old to reply to, sadly. But as another learner of many languages: check out "Colloquial Chinese: by Ping-cheng T’ung and David E. Pollard. (Not newer versions by other authors!)
It covers the language only in Pinyin, covering the core grammar etc. very quickly, and giving you big dialogs with a lot of vocabulary. If you work hard with it, (ignoring introductory time figuring out the sound system) a month with 2-3 hours a day will give you about 3000 words of vocabulary and a good handle on the language.
While the structure of Chinese is very simple, besides getting used to the phonetics, the writing system constitutes the majority difficulty of the language (but very helpful to understand a lot of complex vocabulary, due to its composition) so ignoring it first will help a lot. The normal Chinese textbooks will cover as much material as this small book in 4-5 volumes, intended for multiple years of university classes.
To then learn how to read:
The books "The Most Common Radicals" and then "Rapid Literacy in Chinese" are amazing. ("Intensive Spoken Chinese" is meant to be done first, but the Colloquial book is better in my opinion.) I covered these two books in about 40 hours.
Then use various readers like "A new China. Intermediate reader of modern Chinese" by Chou Chih-ping, Chiang J., Eagar J or read forums, checking what each character/group of them is in the dictionary to build vocabulary.
Interesting to see a follow up. I didn’t think we would get another HomePod. I suspect they realized it was priced too high and the first version was just too expensive to produce.
On a side note, I still have my old Apple Hifi and it continues to sounds great. I use it as computer speaker via optical audio.
I also have a pair of Sonos Ones and a Sonos Move. I am fairly underwhelmed by the Sonos One sound quality, but the Move sounds great and is very convenient as a portable speaker.
To answer your question the way you meant it, no. You can use Spotify on a mac or iPhone/iPad and then set the AirPlay output device to the homepod, playing Spotify music out of them just fine. I literally do this every day.
The reason is that Apple wants a cut of the Spotify subscription money when users sign up for Spotify on an iOS or iPadOS device. IMHO, it's a bad look for Apple. They should either get out of the music business or stop taking a cut of the money from apps that compete with Apple services.
My first Mac was a 12” 867 mhz (I think?) PowerBook. It had the footprint of a sheet of paper in 2003.
I genuinely don’t understand this product. And I similarly don’t understand the appeal of Siri. I thought the first one was a failure and they’d either walk away or change things dramatically. Like go the actual audio playback path and make it a respectable tower speaker. Add in a sound bar and satellites too. That could get a purchase from me. Or just make the Minis the interface and make Siri something people want to use.
Talking to computers at this point still feels like the 3D/VR products that get introduced periodically and ultimately fail. I also similarly don’t want to be around people talking to their smartphones in the places they’re already glued to them.
If you scroll down to “Cinematic Experience” you’ll see a TV with two HomePod’s next to each other.
I do an identical setup with two Alexa Studio devices. The only difference being I have to use Fire TV and there’s actually a third Alexa Studio Base only device.
The setup is really good. It’s definitely not a replacement for surround sound. I argue it’s better sound than a Sound Bar though. It is even better for music.
The big thing though? As much as I love Apple stuff, everything and anything is always Alexa integrated. These synced speakers beep when my garage opens, vacuum, doors, connected to lights, my security system, fans, cameras, etc…
With Apple, your product selection is more limited or you need HomeBridge for ideal home automation. For me, I’d definitely rather have the Apple products but (hate or love it) Amazon is way more open and the only reason I settled for them.
Finally, I am not sure why and I would never personally do this setup, but if you look at the details of both Alexa Studio and HomePod “Home Theatre” setups, they both do not support connecting additionally to Echo’s or HomePod Mini’s for additional speakers. A fun option —- but equally not supported.
Bandwidth limitation of being wireless? Too few of people willing to do this?
Slightly different product, but there's a wireless quad speaker system from Sony (HT-A9) that even supports adding a wireless subwoofer that probably provides a much better cinematic experience with full immersion (review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHcjvdGbaa0).
I really wish Apple released a soundbar + Apple TV + FaceTime camera combo product. All I want is to be able to do FaceTime calls on my TV with my parents who live halfway across the world and have the camera track me around the room (like Facebook Portal TV).
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[ 8.9 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadAlso see the comparison table at the bottom of this page: https://www.apple.com/uk/homepod-2nd-generation/
Maybe the update also requires iOS 16 on a connected device, I’m still on 15.
- We lost two tweeters (7 down to 5)
- We lost two mics (6 down to 4)
Really curious how the sound compares to the original.
Here is a video, more on his channel
https://youtu.be/FfGiuh_QH3M
And I think it works out to about $80 once you include shipping. Ive got a dead one right now - trying to decide if I want to source air gun to fix it myself or just send it to him. Less than $100 to have it fixed is kind of a steal.
Alexa & Google just bypass it in cleverness while also understanding my accent way better.
The only major plus of Siri is tight integration into ios.
Unfortunately Siri isn't that great so you'll often run into "Waiting for it", "One moment" and "Working on it" replies.
Asked Alexa today:
- ‘Can dogs eat apples’
- ’How far is it to <location>‘ ‘How long to <location>.’
- ‘How many calories does 100g grams of cornflakes have’
Just stuff not worth picking my phone up and typing for the most part.
Though just tried all 3 of them on siri and only how far/long is <location> gave me a voice answer (the other 2 were just search results).
"Apple's HomePod mini includes a dormant hidden sensor that can measure temperature and humidity, potentially providing the means to power upcoming features that could arrive in a future software update, according to Bloomberg."
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/22/homepod-mini-temperatur...
The camera feed is so slow since Google took over Nest, it barely works with the Google home app and keeps cutting out, doesn't load at all or keeps hanging sometimes. When someone rings the door bell then it takes forever to bring up the feed and let me talk to the person by the door. The Nest doorbell has become completely useless in its latest iteration combined with the Google home app. The person is long gone before I get to see who it was, which makes it really annoying and super unreliable to receive parcels when not at home.
I have never tried Alexa + Ring, but speaking to friends they are also getting more frustrated with the Amazon brand.
Is Apple a viable option today? If this stuff works well then it's worth having, but currently I wouldn't go for any smart gadgets and actively refuse anything from Google. I don't think they care about their hardware products. I've seen the same decline with their Pixel series.
I hope matter brings a better landscape for all this stuff - but then I have been sitting on my hands waiting for years as the next version of everything is just 12 months away.
I only have 3 light switches in my apartment, but I made sure they had Matter support.
The switches I bought with Matter support are from Eve. Previously the Eve devices have only been supported through their own app on iOS, and that was the only reason to be able to read the kWh usage.
I hope the Matter support will let me access it from my other devices.
My Nest Hub Max will only show the camera in the old Nest app while it never loads in the Google Home app.
I'm thinking I may have to try something else in the near future.
Apple needs hardware partners to more deeply invest in HomeKit, particularly in the camera space. It's coming along but still feels behind. A compatible camera (or one bridged to HomeKit) will show up on the AppleTV pretty quickly. The official HomeKit devices I have work consistently and well, and the ones I bridge in with HomeBridge work most of the time without intervention. It is super cool to ask Siri to open the garage door when I'm walking the dog and it's cold out. I would say it's viable, if not improving all the time.
I think Apple themselves need to invest in it more. It's so basic as to be almost unusable.
I have a supercomputer in the form of Apple TV just idling there, and the best HomeKit can barely do is perhaps turn lights on at a certain time, and then complain that it couldn't reach Apple TV.
We also extensively use HomeKit for all our smart home devices and a huge reason was the privacy, vs Ring and Google.
So the video doorbell we have is entirely local and so sarhad worked really well (logitech). And I like how it’s end to end encrypted so nobody gets access to our video feeds. Plus the chime is the HomePod itself.
As usual though, Siri sucks. Just… sucks. so that’s always the weakest link.
Is it too much to ask to say “Siri turn off all lights except kitchen island” and expect it to do it? No matter how many times I have reconfigured things in the Home app it just can’t do it I have to ask it to turn off all lights then turn on the kitchen island :facepalm:
Because of this, I never use Siri outside of contexts I’m sure Apple has tested thoroughly (e.g. read my last text).
I wonder if background noise has something to do with it. The fact that Siri accurately displayed what I was trying to say made me think it understood me perfectly, but it’s possible it will do something else in the background if it’s not confident it hears you correctly.
Either way, I have issues with Siri all the time.
Google has snuck a pretty large lead for a large category of queries over Siri and Alexa has fallen behind considerably.
Again, more anecdata: I have never used Siri and wouldn’t even factor in if my audio setup can convert temperatures when purchasing it.
The only real downside of HomePods is that they don't function as bluetooth audio receivers (Apple proprietary AirPlay2 only) and that you need an Apple ID (as well as iCloud enabled on that Apple ID) to set them up - the creation of which these days requires a working phone number, so it's a little expensive (burner SIM) if you want to buy and use them anonymously.
People commenting about how Siri sucks I think are missing the point of these. These (presuming the sound quality is similar to the HP1) are the best consumer self-powered speakers for under $2000, full stop. The fact that they do anything else (mics, voice assistant, wifi streaming, whatever) is mostly unimportant if you understand what these things are. I'd use them even if they didn't have Wi-Fi. As far as I can tell, they (and airpods) were the latest "insanely great" product Apple made until the M1 macs dropped.
It's possible it's experiencing the same gradual and nearly imperceptible quality decline (from insanely great to merely extremely good) that most Apple products have been undergoing the last 5-7 years, but I will reserve judgement until I have one (two, actually) in hand. Apple's brain drain and productmanagerization is sadly very real.
Fingers crossed that someone in Apple is holding it to the same standards as AudioAccessory1,1 (HomePod1), but not holding my breath as I think the guy who I believe was the main force behind it (Christopher Stringer) left Apple to create a company called Syng and a product called the Cell Alpha.
A stereo pair of Cell Alphas is $4500. A stereo pair of HomePod2s is $600.
Also, I think one of the main reasons the HP1 flopped is because it was too expensive. If this thing is 95% as good as the HP1 but stays in production because people are buying it because Apple figured out how to sell it for 15% cheaper, then it's a win.
We'll see!
If "people commenting about how Siri sucks are missing the point" then so are Apple's copywriters.
Still, at $300 per pod, I really need Siri to do better than the "dumber than a bag of rocks" vibe she currently gives off for this to be at all tempting.
As someone that does applied DL for work, especially NLP, I just don't understand what Apple is doing with Siri. It's like they see low user engagement metrics with Siri and assume it's because people don't want it. Instead, everyone I know that's an Apple fan uses Google Assistant, because it just works most of the time.
I have three of the 1st gen models, they're fantastic. I think I paid $200 for each. At that price they're a steal.
I assume a newer chipset but it's not really clear what else has changed?
The new HomePod has 4 microphones and 5 tweeters.
The original HomePod had 6 microphones and 7 tweeters.
New one weighs 5.1 pounds vs. 5.5 pounds previously.
Via https://twitter.com/rsgnl/status/1615719411813593097
Apple discontinued the OG size HomePod a while back, and sold only the tiny baseball-sized ones. This is a re-introduction of a larger-size, better-sounding device that I assume is essentially the same form factor as the original one.
All that being said, it doesn’t need to be either or. They could have a great Siri product for those who want it, and allow it to be deactivated for those who don’t.
I’m a huge Sonos fan but I think their patent was “volume control for connected/synced speakers” and apple had a UI to control each speaker volume separately.
I also suspect that apple shared Airplay with them j stead of paying. I know lots of people that bought Sonos instead of the HomePod because it supported airplay.
Edit: nevermind
Nope. Google turned the trueplay knockoff off real fast (as it was easy to remove) and took time to disable group volume control.
For music though, I prefer browsing through a playlist or artist discogs. Recalling a track from memory and requesting an assistant to play it isn’t very intuitive.
Siri aside, I’m very much looking forward to this update.
I rarely walk into a records store knowing exactly what I want, and live the process of discovery.
I try to squelch my alarm in the morning and she replies with "sorry you'll need to continue in the app" (silencing the alarm anyways but not actually dismissing it). If I wake up before my alarm and want to stop it from sounding, I tell her to turn it off, she says she has done so (with a follow-up question confirming that I have no alarms enabled)… And then the god damn alarm goes off at the usual time anyways.
Most recently she has started replying to my requests to send text messages and start phone calls with "who is speaking?" I don't know maybe the only person who matters on this single user device? If I don't say my name to her satisfaction then the call doesn't get made. I never did any kind of voice training or enabled any kind of restriction based on voice matching so what the fuck?
The last straw which led to me unplugging my home pod was when both it and the phone started triggering at nearly the same time with the result that the speech of one started interfering with the requests to the other one.
Bonus points: the speech recognition tech is bad enough that I tend to wait for acknowledgment before speaking a command. The "Boop" that you get from Alexa and Google. Not only does Siri not have this, it triggers, waits for a moment, and then says something. One of these responses is a annoyed sounding teenager "yeah?" that has more than once had me fantasizing about the immediate defenestration of the speaker.
I have the "headphones out" line coming from the tv, which I split, and then send to the line-in on each speaker. At least there is a line-in! Less and less smart speakers have a line in, it feels like. Absurd. (Different story, but also, really wish the Chromecast Audio were still a thing. Some inventory left but what a great product for adding amazing connective capability to any sound system! Smart being counter-analog-line-level stuff is such a shite hellworld thing.)
Google properly executing on Google TV would require them to not build hardware with 1/12th the single core performance of an Apple TV. (Seriously, it has single core performance around that of a 2011 Intel Atom while the Apple TV has an A15 throwing 12th gen Intel laptop numbers. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19594628)
Seriously, what is with The Chromecast with Google TV? People are like "It's laggy!" and Google is like "We do update!" and people are like "Now it's laggy AND crashes!" My entire experience with my three of them. Software is great, hardware is pure eWaste and they should feel bad about that.
I think the most sensible way to use both devices is as a dumb “cast” target.
FWIW, the fireTV literally had a bug where it’d crash because the ad data collecting daemon used up too much processing power. For $20, just be thankful Google has that much self control.
I get that that is a big jump but it's not 12 times the price. The performance per dollar tends to go down as you go up in price, not up.
Really? I know lots of Apple fans and I've never seen any of them use Google Assistant on their iPhone or anything else. How do your friends do this? Via a Siri shortcut that passes requests through? Or by opening up a Google app every time they want to use the voice assistant?
HomePods OG do stereo pairing, and with ATV can act as eARC playback so you can play your console sound via HomePods stereo pair.
For a couple years now, though weirdly the full firmware revamp landed after discontinuation.
I switched my Alexa devices over to homepod mini's after one too many "by the way" suggestions by Alexa. Homepod mini has decent audio but I wouldn't use it for my primary music listening.
If you care for music quality, buy a decent portable bluetooth speaker and carry it with you from room to room - there is a lot to be said for the flexibility, and you can also toss it in your luggage when traveling.
Amazon and Google have the "works with Amazon/Google" so you can buy any brand of hardware (smart plugs for ex) and control them all with one device.
You don't need a receiver / AVR, this lets the eARC tv drive HomePods.
The HomePod mini is the "first device" we have given to our children. No screen, I am comfortable with apple privacy, access to music and podcasts, etc.
The mini has shockingly good sound for $100 and what it is.
It's really something, isn't it? I mean, I'm an audio nut with genuine crazy-person speakers in my living room, but goddamn if that single mini Homepod in our bedroom isn't stupid good.
I am an old-school Apple fanboy. I learned HyperCard on a Macintosh SE/30—I am that old.
I still appreciate the Apple ecosystem, and I do like certain aspects of my HomePod mini…but Siri. C’mon. Get it together. It just fails at the absolute basics.
https://imgur.com/q0H788Y
The basics being: please add stuff to my shopping list when I yell it into the aether while in the kitchen. It either completely mangles the speech-to-text (starches, Siri, not starships), or just…fails. It times out, or sits there, blankly pulsing a light at me.
I would really appreciate a higher-quality speaker with easy integration with my iOS/Mac devices. But $299 or something that has artificial stupidity like Siri? Nah.
Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original?
Oh also ... what's the "next song pls" command in German? With Alexa I can say "Alexa, weiter" and the next track plays. With Siri? "Weiter" won't do anything. I have to say "Hey Siri, nächstes Lied" ... or I can just switch to English and say "Hey Siri, next" which then works.
Oh another one: The German Siri pronouncing English song titles with the German voice-set makes my ears hurt. Like you would read an English word but pronounce it like you would a German word.
But then again some Band/Song Titles she gets perfectly right. Cannibal Corpse sounds like perfect English.
Those AI assistants are a hot mess and get worse with time. Seems like feeding more and more data into your model won't make it better.
(This is especially infuriating when it does it on CarPlay)
I heard the original implementation of Alexa had a banned list of words that shouldn’t appear in the song title unless there are no alternatives, including “remix”, “live”, and “explicit” (among others).
Seems such an obvious and easy solution.
Voice assistants really need to get away from their pretense that they're magical at understanding languages and just provide a long documentation page showing what you can say... and also take feedback on that page so people can provide more idiomatic ways to express that same command.
Apple do actually have such documentation[1 English][2 German] but it's far from comprehensive, and the examples are tediously long ("Hey Siri skip this song", when I know "Hey Siri skip" works)
1: English: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/siri / https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208279
2: German: https://support.apple.com/de-de/siri / https://support.apple.com/de-de/HT208279
Even if it works - it's still way too long. "weiter" is a very short word. "überspringen" is like having a deep conversation with my mp3 player :)
I think I have worked out a way to do this with a custom Shortcut (using an If condition on Device Name to use the Music Skip Forwards action on the device executing the Shortcut), but I'm pretty sure it would end up as a longer interaction.
Edit: Drat, Shortcut approach doesn't work, looks like the Shortcut runs on your iPhone, so the device name is always the iPhone's
We had endless problems with cover bands and tribute songs rather than the mainstream song when we used Alexa with Spotify (which baffled us as I expect that would be the most common configuration).
We currently use Apple Music and Google Nest devices since our mesh network has them built in. Music works fine. Podcasts are a curse on humanity — if you say “play podcast”, it always defaults to the last episode you played, even if it was months ago. You have to specify the latest episode of so and so podcast EVERY TIME, and even then it’s flaky. It’s like it forgot that podcasts are a derivative of “broadcast” where timeliness is relevant.
I have an ongoing sort-of faux-competition with my wife about how to ask Siri for things. She asks questions and gets frustrating replies, but when I ask them slightly differently I get good data.
I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...".
I SUSPECT it's mostly specificity, or asking for simple facts ("when was King Charles born?") and not derived facts ("how old is King Charles?"), but it comes up a LOT.
That same history of software means that I don't even ATTEMPT some of the stuff Siri is notionally capable of, like maintaining a shopping list. (Though I routinely use Siri on my watch or phone to add appointments or reminders.)
But also I didn’t know about named timers. So I appreciate that, that’s actually really useful. Huh, something I didn’t know about a voice assistant, it’s almost like there are issues with discoverability, who would have thought…
OTOH, thinking of something to try and then being delighted it works (which is how I found the named timers) was a pretty cool experience.
Hah, very much the same. My partner will always end up asking me to ask siri to ask something because my slightly differently worded requests tend to succeed more often
Usually, if you're better than someone else at something, there are things you KNOW you are doing differently, and you can give pointers/instruction, right? In my bar-going youth I was a better than average pool player, but I could also help YOU with YOUR pool game by showing you what I was doing, right?
But sometimes these things exist at an unconscious level. The main example of this in my life is animal interaction, which I am pretty sure is due to countless inarticulateness lessons I learned from my dad, and by working with him at his veterinary clinic in high school.
I have joked for decades that I simply inherited the Kindly Veterinarian Vibe, because while I definitely CAN tell you simple things to do if you have trouble connecting with a dog or cat, but I can't transfer everything because I don't even know everything that I'm doing. A huge chunk of it is understanding the animal body language, and it seems like lots of people just suck at that, e.g.
Well, in fairness, it’s designed first as a music device, the Siri seems like almost an afterthought. That said,
Spend $299 on a wireless speaker where the stereo pairing often fails, has random Wi-Fi connection issues (that no other Apple device has), and is otherwise hindered by issues?
Nah, fooled me on the first gen, fooled me again on the HomePod minis, think I’ll pass this time.
It’s not an amazing voice assistant. It’s OK as a wireless speaker, but Sonos is almost assuredly better, and similar aesthetics and ease of use.
So this is targeting…uh?
https://www.rtings.com/speaker/tools/compare/apple-homepod-v...
I run a Pi4 running a Navidrome instance after spending a long time ripping all my thousands of CDs.
The Pi goes via a USB audio interface (better than the audio output on the Pi) and an EQ (Behringer DCX2496) to a set of Yamaha HS8s. I am pretty sure that works out cheaper than buying a pair of Apple speakers.
You can use Mopidy to get it to play audio on the Pi over the speakers (as in, use Mopidy mobile to tell the Pi to play from its local library of mp3s, out to its connected speakers). I use this for playing guitar along to songs without having to look at a computer screen.
Alternatively the Pi also acts as an Airplay receiver so you can play from your iPhone to it, either from your Apple/Amazon music subscription or via a Sonic API compatible app.
From Windows you can pipe your audio remotely to it using palink to stream your local audio to the Pi (it runs a pulseaudio player via SSH if I recall correctly). I actually use that to run Studio One on a PC in a room upstairs but sit on a Linux laptop in the sunshine, RDPing to the PC but listening to the audio over palink (better quality audio than RDP).
Adding a Wireguard server to the Pi (and pihole) and putting the VPN on my phone and I can stream my music whilst out and about and also get all adverts/home dialling blocked. I also gave my brother VPN access but to the specific IP instead of routing all traffic over it so he can enjoy my music too.
Best of all worlds and no vendor lock-in.
"I'm sorry, I'm having trouble connecting to the internet. Please try again later."
They need to license/acquire Nuance Dragon, or do something to improve it.
https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html
I appreciate that they aren’t overbuilding Siri though. Alexa (which recent experienced an unfortunate gutting vis layoffs) was amazons attempt to build a consumer ecosystem, which meant a lot of crappy features no one uses (notifications?). Siri feels like it definitively lives on that device and is just a fancy hands-free control. No extraneous feature creep in an attempt to build out a platform. Apple resisted a lot of opportunities to grow Siri while Alexa et al dramatically increased headcount and features, and it seems that voice assistants never really caught on as a general purpose tool. I imagine smarthome/weather/music still dominates all queries by a huge margin.
I still don’t know why anyone would buy a $300 HomePod. As the owner of two original HomePods, they’re fine. This one looks like it has less speakers in it, but I assume it sounds comparably good. If you want good sound I assume you’d be buying a Sonos or something more versatile, but this is an equal but apple-loving choice. The real pro is that it sounds like it has a removable cable.
I still want a screen-based apple smart speaker. Smart speaker+clock is a sweet spot in terms of usability, and the Google home I’ve been loving. It gets you some richer visual for that 1% of queries that benefit, and a glanceable clock for the rest of the time. I can’t imagine apple making a UI that is one-off though. Hopefully the iPad goes the way of the pixel tablet
Why did you get yours?
We have since bought Alexa devices, then after the release of the HomePods Mini, prompted threw away Alexa. One too many “by the way” interjections for us.
Oh and now I bought a Google home hub v2. Great device, but we’re an apple household.
Just read through the page and couldn't figure out what's new. I was expecting much more from a new version.
Know how you can be playing music on your iPhone and hold it up to your HomePod and it will transfer? But it is kinda hit or miss on the original HomePod. On the HomePod mini thanks to that chip it is nearly perfect. This seems to just add that.
Couple other things, but at least it brings parity.
I can't find anything on the page saying exactly which chip it is. Regardless it was a chip that was missing from the original but is in the Mini that made this feature work.
That would be awesome, I would love some feature that it could actually be room aware and knowing where devices are in that space instead of just relative to your phone when searching for an AirTag.
But I imagine that would likely require a workflow of mapping your space with your phone first.
I could see that confusing in my place where I have 2 HomePods in my office against a wall that is shared with my living room.
Not discounting the idea, but without mapping I just see there being extra confusion.
It covers the language only in Pinyin, covering the core grammar etc. very quickly, and giving you big dialogs with a lot of vocabulary. If you work hard with it, (ignoring introductory time figuring out the sound system) a month with 2-3 hours a day will give you about 3000 words of vocabulary and a good handle on the language.
While the structure of Chinese is very simple, besides getting used to the phonetics, the writing system constitutes the majority difficulty of the language (but very helpful to understand a lot of complex vocabulary, due to its composition) so ignoring it first will help a lot. The normal Chinese textbooks will cover as much material as this small book in 4-5 volumes, intended for multiple years of university classes.
To then learn how to read:
The books "The Most Common Radicals" and then "Rapid Literacy in Chinese" are amazing. ("Intensive Spoken Chinese" is meant to be done first, but the Colloquial book is better in my opinion.) I covered these two books in about 40 hours.
Then use various readers like "A new China. Intermediate reader of modern Chinese" by Chou Chih-ping, Chiang J., Eagar J or read forums, checking what each character/group of them is in the dictionary to build vocabulary.
thanks for the comment, I'll make sure to check these out asap
On a side note, I still have my old Apple Hifi and it continues to sounds great. I use it as computer speaker via optical audio.
I also have a pair of Sonos Ones and a Sonos Move. I am fairly underwhelmed by the Sonos One sound quality, but the Move sounds great and is very convenient as a portable speaker.
Surely you can link Apple Music?
https://timetoplayfair.com/timeline/
I genuinely don’t understand this product. And I similarly don’t understand the appeal of Siri. I thought the first one was a failure and they’d either walk away or change things dramatically. Like go the actual audio playback path and make it a respectable tower speaker. Add in a sound bar and satellites too. That could get a purchase from me. Or just make the Minis the interface and make Siri something people want to use.
Talking to computers at this point still feels like the 3D/VR products that get introduced periodically and ultimately fail. I also similarly don’t want to be around people talking to their smartphones in the places they’re already glued to them.
I do an identical setup with two Alexa Studio devices. The only difference being I have to use Fire TV and there’s actually a third Alexa Studio Base only device.
The setup is really good. It’s definitely not a replacement for surround sound. I argue it’s better sound than a Sound Bar though. It is even better for music.
The big thing though? As much as I love Apple stuff, everything and anything is always Alexa integrated. These synced speakers beep when my garage opens, vacuum, doors, connected to lights, my security system, fans, cameras, etc…
With Apple, your product selection is more limited or you need HomeBridge for ideal home automation. For me, I’d definitely rather have the Apple products but (hate or love it) Amazon is way more open and the only reason I settled for them.
Finally, I am not sure why and I would never personally do this setup, but if you look at the details of both Alexa Studio and HomePod “Home Theatre” setups, they both do not support connecting additionally to Echo’s or HomePod Mini’s for additional speakers. A fun option —- but equally not supported.
Bandwidth limitation of being wireless? Too few of people willing to do this?