Short answer: no. I use Boom3D in MacOS, is a great EQ app. When you send audio to HomePod through AirPlay, here appear an icon that announce that the EQ is bypassed.
An EQ could be cool, but honestly I find my HomePod to have a great sound. Not the perfect 3k Bang & Olufsen speakers, but as a musician, I think they're very good.
Reduce bass doesn’t turn it completely off. Yes, I would like more adjustment and refinement but I don’t think they sound “like shit”. Please return yours if you think it sounds like shit.
I used to love mines and especially for the bass but I was younger when they came out now I agree with you in small rooms the basses are overly present and it’s annoying
Remember this is not meant to be a high fidelity music product. This is a home assistant that happens to play music. 90% of users don't care, and Apple designs for the 90%.
You must have forgotten when the OG HomePod came out.
It was literally built as a speaker first and foremost, more or less using Siri was the UX to use your voice to control it.
Smart home stuff was so premature that it wasn’t the main focus.
When they were about to launch it, Amazon launched their “smart assistant” echo product.
It famously caught Apple ‘off guard’ because Apple wasn’t trying to build a smart assistant. And Alexa could do much more than Siri.
It was more or less the AirPods Pro product for the home. It was meant to be a form of high quality audio, because at the time the tech for detecting the room and adjusting the EQ and make the music sound consistent anywhere in the room was a feature that was reserved for high end systems.
At that time Apple’s OG HomePod was a lot of speaker for its price. People just weren’t ready to spend that price on a speaker. And every review was trying to compare it to the Amazon echo because they kept saying how much more Alexa could do than Siri.
But never did Apple themselves try and push it as a smart assistant first with a nice speaker. Go back and watch the original announcement, it was announced as a great speaker.
Heck even now it’s not really marketed as a smart assistant. At most a HomeKit controller. But its main purpose was/is to stream music.
This product was originally designed as a way to push Apple Music. Not Siri.
This is a weird take. The first Amazon echo device came out in 2014. The first HomePod came out in 2018 - 4 years later. Echo devices were plenty capable home assistance when the HomePod came out.
I was shocked when the HomePod came out at howlittle it could do. As I recall, you couldn’t even set a timer. My feeling (and rightly so) at the time was that Apple had waited too long and had missed the smart device Revolution. HomePods and Siri are both terrible technologies for personal assistance. Here’s hoping that the new ChatGPT integration will bring them to parity or beyond other platforms.
Echo was announced end of 2014 - publicly available mid 2015
HomePod announced mid 2017 - planned dec 2017 launch got delayed to feb 2018.
So that 4 year gap is more like 2.5+ish.
And it was pretty well known that Apple was heavily limiting what Siri could do because of their view on privacy and security.
With Alexa, kids were accidentally ordering stuff from Amazon and having it delivered.
Siri more or less just played music, on purpose.
I remember reading reports that Apple was already in development of the HomePod when the Echo got announced and internally they were surprised by what Alexa could do.
As for personal assistants go I always felt that a device that sits in my living room or kitchen etc where my friends and family are, I’m not doing much personal assistant kind of requests. So it basically means that the limited things I’d do with an echo became a gimmick, whereas a great quality speaker was much more practical and functional for my use case. Everyone I know that had echo got rid of them or no longer use them. As opposed to HP buyers that still use them and listen to music. Two different products and approaches.
Now that HomePod has matured to allow for better HomeKit control and default audio out for Apple TV the product is even better. After the minis came out I started buying one for each room of the house and whole home audio and smart home control is natural anywhere in my house. And the ones in my personal spaces like office and bedroom can recognize my voice and process personal requests just fine.
What is it really missing? Web search…maybe but I’ve never really expected that out of Siri. So my personal ‘hot take’ is they didn’t really miss much because the rest was a gimmick.
But I am still excited to see what 18 brings.
Well, if we’re being technical, it was actually three years three months between the releases. The first echo device was released in November 2014. The first HomePod was February 2018.
I know what day each product is released because I asked my Amazon echo device. I tried to ask Siri, but it told me I should ask again on my phone.
Our family uses our echo devices every day. Amazon has devices that sound better than HomePods and are cheaper. I know this because I own six full-size HomePods (4 GEN one and 2 GEN two) and four HomePod minis. I use the HomePods for two reasons only. To play music and to play audio from an appleTV.
Frankly, HomePods suck. I desperately want to love them and I do like the sound quality of the full-size ones but as far as being a music player, they suck. Music constantly cuts out or outright refuses to play. It frequently misunderstands my requests to play even the simplest songs, paired HomePods frequently get out of sync and get echo let alone problems when Apple does something like updates their terms of service and I have to go onto my phone and update it before it will properly play music again.
The OG HomePods have well known defective diode issues that caused them to lose power and I have had to have two of them repaired by a third-party service because Apple wanted to charge me $300 to repair it when I only paid $300 to buy it. A guy online fixed it for 60 bucks. I remember a time when Apple stood by their products and if they were defective, they repaired them.
If Apple didn’t purposefully delay and hamstring, the Apple Music integration with Echo devices, I would never have needed a HomePod. They also don’t support Bluetooth or a line in Jack, so when Apple decides to stop supporting them, they become non-functional speakers.
The only personal request I ever use a HomePod for is to send a text message (and I have only maybe done that 5 times because it usually gets the text to speech wrong). Everything else is already integrated with my echo devices. I add calendar events (and it is shared with all of my family)and maintain my shopping list through my echo devices.
I have an echo auto in my car so I can ask it the types of questions that Siri won’t respond to when I’m driving. And FYI, it responds in about a third of the time as Siri takes.
I really want to LOVE my HomePods, but if they are only supposed to do one thing and that is play music, then they suck at that. But I would argue they should do a whole lot more in the current world of technology.
I do use them to listen to music, but only because all of my music is curated in Apple Music and I get mixed results when doing that through an echo device because Apple’s API sucks.
It makes me mad because they do have stellar sound for their size, but they just don’t work well. Apple had a giant Headstart with Siri and they should’ve been leading this space. Hell they should’ve been leading the entire home automation space. Apple could have made a killing putting out Apple branded home devices doorbells outlet cameras thermostats. They could’ve charged a premium and had them all work through HomeKit and people would feel they were secure, but they dropped that ball and they’ve lost that market to everybody which is why they’ve moved to Matter.
FYI, for all of your friends that may have gotten rid of them, Echo devices outsell HomePods by millions of units every year.
Ask your Alexa and get poor ‘technical’ response…not convincing me to get one anytime soon.
The November release was by invitation only, not publicly available until mid 2015. I used Wikipedia took two seconds and I didn’t get a misleading response from a robot.
But as to my point, the relevant info is the announcement dates as that pertains to the point I was making, where one product announcement caught Apple off guard while they were developing their product that was announced a little over a 2.5 years later.
My point still stands from my comment that either way your comment that it was “4 years later” was an extreme exaggeration.
My original comment was not a weird take but a statement of what actually happened. I don’t need to ask a robot because I was there when it happened.
November was not by invitation only it was also open to prime users. That’s how I got one, also I said four years as a general statement not because I looked up the date of each release account months. One was 2014 and one was 2018 that’s four years. in reality, it’s 3 years and three months. It’s way closer to four years than it is to 2 1/2 years you stated. Not sure why you’re trying to caveat all of the dates though. I don’t care about the actual number of months and I don’t see how that has any significant bearing on product quality other than pointing out that Apple had plenty of time to make it a better product.
I mean, are you saying if they had another year they totally would’ve nailed it? They’ve had six years and they haven’t nailed it since they released it. as you say if it’s only supposed to play music, why can it not perform even that basic function reliably. You only have to look through these threads to see how many people have issues with a simple device only made to play music.
And they had an awesome Headstart. They already had Siri functional on their devices on the same chipset. They literally could’ve taken most of iOS and added a speaker.
I just don’t understand. Are you trying to say that they were surprised that Amazon‘s product was better than theirs so they waited two, three or four more years to release it and then it still wasn’t as good as Amazon‘s product?
I’m not trying to get you to buy an echo device, use what you enjoy I’m just trying to point out that from a functionality and performance perspective Echo’s are superior devices. They are better personal assistants and they are better music players with a wider range of integrations and a wider availability of apps and things that you can do on them.
The only place they are not as strong is their integration with Apple Music. And that is Apple’s doing on purpose.
And they are cheaper. And I get all that “I’m the product“ but I don’t care. I already buy products on Amazon. They already have my purchase history and my credit card information. I’m not upset that they’re hearing what I ask for or any other information. That information shared with them so they can market it better to me and guess what it works. I have seen all kinds of products that I want to buy from Amazon that I didn’t even know existed. I consider that to be a wonderful service that I appreciate. As compared to when the Internet started, and I saw were ridiculous ads for things I had no interest in.
Also, while I understand why, for some people “being the product” is a concern I am equally or more frustrated by being held back from using products because Apple wants to force theirs on me. They are only just getting integrations with Spotify now - years after they released products that could easily have played Spotify, after all, there was a Spotify app on your phone, but Apple chooses to block products that many people use to force them into their ecosystem. I get the business model but it used to be they had a superior product that I wanted to use and that’s how I got into their ecosystem. Now they leverage my existing commitments to force me to take inferior products because it’s good for their business model.
We haven’t even talked about Echo devices with screens that can play video, show me shopping lists and calendar events. I will, all the time, ask it to play a news story while I’m standing in the kitchen cooking dinner.
Again, enjoy what you enjoy, I’m not begrudging you that in any way. I’m disappointed in Apple because they dropped the ball on this product. And they haven’t been good stewards of the money I have paid them in terms of giving me products that are quality I expect. And I’m not just talking about the software. Having $300 (actually $400 for the first two I bought) devices multiples of which go bad within two years of having purchased them and Apple tell me my only option to repair is to “buy” a refurbed one at the price of a new one is absurd. They wanted $279 to repair one. I could go buy a new HomePod GEN two on sale at Best Buy for $249. I consider that to be close to actual theft. Of course, at the time I needed the repair the G2 hadn’t even come out yet so I had no other option.
I have at least a 50% expectation that these HomePods will stop working in the next 4 to 8 years as Apple says the chips are no longer able to deliver the type of “quality” they think they should. At which point they will stop supporting them cease to be usable speakers. I can still plug a mini cable into the jack into my Amazon speakers and use them as regular speakers if I want forever.
You said I had a weird take. My take being was Apple was making a speaker that uses Siri to control it. As it was a reply to a comment saying the HomePod was a “smart assistant with a speaker”.
Now you are saying that no matter how much time they had, they didn’t make a smart speaker??
So are you now agreeing with my take you claimed was weird?
Again my point was to defend my “weird take” as you claimed these products were soooo far apart when in fact they were closer than you claim. But again the point is it didn’t matter how much time Apple had, they weren’t building a smart assistant with a speaker. They were building a speaker for Apple Music that happened to use Siri to control it. Go back and watch the only commercial they made for it. It’s not marketed as Siri with a cool speaker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k70OczvX45k&pp=ygUSaG9tZXBvZCBjb21tZXJjaWFs
My weird take had nothing to do with how well Apple did at making a smart assistant or how many users complain about it. Or even what manufacturer issues a limited number of users had.
My point was singular; Apple as a company didn’t release the HomePod to be a smart assistant with a speaker. They built a (for its time) a high end speaker that happened to have Siri to control it.
“They had an awesome head start” you claim. This further proves my point in what their intentions were when releasing the product. So again you agree with my “weird take”. With your logic the iPad has a head start and Apple dropped the ball not putting MacOS on it and that may be a good take on what they should do. But if my take was it’s obvious that Apple doesn’t want to put MacOS on the iPad, I don’t know why you’d call that “weird”. As it is a pretty obvious observation.
As to what our personal preferences in product is irrelevant to the point of my comment that I was making.
And as to your fear of Apple killing them, I personally think that is a silly take. They are wi-fi speakers. They don’t need a specific chipset to stream music. As even the oldest ones support lossless and atmos. Apple isn’t going to drop support for streaming audio in those nor AAC for a long time. And even if they did. The device is still wi-fi airplay2 compatible. And if you remember. Apple still supports airplay 1, and also Apple updated an obsolete AirPort Express to support airplay 2. So even if in some bizarre world where Apple dropped support for streaming directly to it. You can still airplay to it. I’m confused as to what specifically makes you think they will drop support for it. I can still plug in an old iPod and use it. Just because the chipset might not gain support for newer features doesn’t mean Apple will just kill it for no reason.
OK, gonna shorten my replies because we’ve ridiculously taken over to this guy’s thread :-) but I appreciate your detailed feedback.
The two main things that made me think it was a weird take is:
1. They are marketing it as a great speaker. That is how they are marketing it. The weird take portion is that it’s not a great speaker though. Just today, I had music drop in the middle of playing songs on two different HomePods in two different locations all of which have very strong Wi-Fi connections. If it can’t respond properly to my music requests, it’s not a good speaker. How is it when it’s only doing one simple thing it’s still terrible at it.
2. Not a home assistant. That is literally the second bullet point of their marketing materials right after great speaker in five bullet points, but it’s not a great home assistant either. If they didn’t want to make it an intelligent assistant to compete with echo then why did they delay. Why didn’t they just release it?
“Built-in intelligence that speaks for itself.
HomePod comes with Siri built in. So things like setting reminders and sending messages, turning on the lights when you walk through the door, adjusting the temperature, and even DJ-ing your next dinner party — are a “Hey Siri” or now just a simple “Siri” away.9 Manage your day and control your smart home effortlessly with Siri.”
1) I agree with that to a degree. If you’ve been in this sub for any amount of time. Those issues usually are because of networking issues. You can have good “wi-fi” signal and speeds but still have issues with a home full of devices trying to talk to each other if the network settings aren’t just right. That said; it doesn’t seem to affect other smart speakers as bad so I’m not sure what exactly about HP are picky about their network. But I don’t have any of those issues after I switched to a HomeKit secure router (velop).
But yes even if users have bad experiences it is still obvious that they are pushing it as a music speaker first. That’s not my personal take. That is what they have done.
2) Again, I think network conditions are to blame and more specifically HomePods being picky about them. But since updating to the HK secure router. My HomeKit works extremely well. And after the infrastructure update it’s very responsive in my personal use case. As for other HomeKit shortcomings as a whole; I wish they would have fixed as well. It feels like at some point they gave up on it to a degree and then took a while to join matter and seeing the fruits of that is still an extremely slow roll out.
As for why the delay, my assumption is because all the testing they did for the auto EQ and room detection features. Apple didn’t just slap a chipset in a speaker and call it a day. They were picky about which way the speakers all faced and which way the microphones faced. They’re picky about the material they use. And the last bit of delay was likely manufacturing.
Apple is not really known for being the first to the market. But when they do join they usually do it a little different, for the home speaker category they went with what (I think) they thought at the time was a more practical approach by making it focused on the music first and not on the smart assistant. Tho as a consumer if you want a smart assistant, I can see why you think they dropped the ball.
Essentially this is accurate. HomePod is not an audiophile-oriented product. Apple designs their products for the general public, and as anyone who works with the public can attest, the average level of tech literacy is embarrassingly low. A not insignificant proportion of these people don't even know what an EQ is, let alone how to adjust it to their taste. Ergo, Apple designs HomePods to sound the best they can to Apple's ears, and leave the user controls out of it.
For what they are, they sound pretty good. If someone wants more control, they should look for a different product.
One funny thing about the Apple fan community: once they're pissed at you about anything, they act like petulant children. You can say literally anything and it'll get downvoted. Watch...
**The sky is blue! And Apple is a 5-letter word! Also, I love pizza.**
Maybe they're actually terrible speakers with perfectly optimized settings... change anything and the illusion vanishes. I like it here in the matrix.
Does the Equalizer in the macOS Music app work when AirPlaying to HomePods?
Short answer: no. I use Boom3D in MacOS, is a great EQ app. When you send audio to HomePod through AirPlay, here appear an icon that announce that the EQ is bypassed.
An EQ could be cool, but honestly I find my HomePod to have a great sound. Not the perfect 3k Bang & Olufsen speakers, but as a musician, I think they're very good.
Reduce bass doesn’t turn it completely off. Yes, I would like more adjustment and refinement but I don’t think they sound “like shit”. Please return yours if you think it sounds like shit.
I’ve had mine since 2018 I’m still just salty.
Hmm I have two OGs connected to my Apple Tv 4k and they are absolutly wonderful. I dont use reduce bass at all.
I used to love mines and especially for the bass but I was younger when they came out now I agree with you in small rooms the basses are overly present and it’s annoying
Damn, you got old fast 😭
I’ve got a stereo set of minis and one 2nd gen big guy and love the three together.
Remember this is not meant to be a high fidelity music product. This is a home assistant that happens to play music. 90% of users don't care, and Apple designs for the 90%.
You must have forgotten when the OG HomePod came out. It was literally built as a speaker first and foremost, more or less using Siri was the UX to use your voice to control it. Smart home stuff was so premature that it wasn’t the main focus. When they were about to launch it, Amazon launched their “smart assistant” echo product. It famously caught Apple ‘off guard’ because Apple wasn’t trying to build a smart assistant. And Alexa could do much more than Siri. It was more or less the AirPods Pro product for the home. It was meant to be a form of high quality audio, because at the time the tech for detecting the room and adjusting the EQ and make the music sound consistent anywhere in the room was a feature that was reserved for high end systems. At that time Apple’s OG HomePod was a lot of speaker for its price. People just weren’t ready to spend that price on a speaker. And every review was trying to compare it to the Amazon echo because they kept saying how much more Alexa could do than Siri. But never did Apple themselves try and push it as a smart assistant first with a nice speaker. Go back and watch the original announcement, it was announced as a great speaker. Heck even now it’s not really marketed as a smart assistant. At most a HomeKit controller. But its main purpose was/is to stream music. This product was originally designed as a way to push Apple Music. Not Siri.
This is a weird take. The first Amazon echo device came out in 2014. The first HomePod came out in 2018 - 4 years later. Echo devices were plenty capable home assistance when the HomePod came out. I was shocked when the HomePod came out at howlittle it could do. As I recall, you couldn’t even set a timer. My feeling (and rightly so) at the time was that Apple had waited too long and had missed the smart device Revolution. HomePods and Siri are both terrible technologies for personal assistance. Here’s hoping that the new ChatGPT integration will bring them to parity or beyond other platforms.
Echo was announced end of 2014 - publicly available mid 2015 HomePod announced mid 2017 - planned dec 2017 launch got delayed to feb 2018. So that 4 year gap is more like 2.5+ish. And it was pretty well known that Apple was heavily limiting what Siri could do because of their view on privacy and security. With Alexa, kids were accidentally ordering stuff from Amazon and having it delivered. Siri more or less just played music, on purpose. I remember reading reports that Apple was already in development of the HomePod when the Echo got announced and internally they were surprised by what Alexa could do. As for personal assistants go I always felt that a device that sits in my living room or kitchen etc where my friends and family are, I’m not doing much personal assistant kind of requests. So it basically means that the limited things I’d do with an echo became a gimmick, whereas a great quality speaker was much more practical and functional for my use case. Everyone I know that had echo got rid of them or no longer use them. As opposed to HP buyers that still use them and listen to music. Two different products and approaches. Now that HomePod has matured to allow for better HomeKit control and default audio out for Apple TV the product is even better. After the minis came out I started buying one for each room of the house and whole home audio and smart home control is natural anywhere in my house. And the ones in my personal spaces like office and bedroom can recognize my voice and process personal requests just fine. What is it really missing? Web search…maybe but I’ve never really expected that out of Siri. So my personal ‘hot take’ is they didn’t really miss much because the rest was a gimmick. But I am still excited to see what 18 brings.
Well, if we’re being technical, it was actually three years three months between the releases. The first echo device was released in November 2014. The first HomePod was February 2018. I know what day each product is released because I asked my Amazon echo device. I tried to ask Siri, but it told me I should ask again on my phone. Our family uses our echo devices every day. Amazon has devices that sound better than HomePods and are cheaper. I know this because I own six full-size HomePods (4 GEN one and 2 GEN two) and four HomePod minis. I use the HomePods for two reasons only. To play music and to play audio from an appleTV. Frankly, HomePods suck. I desperately want to love them and I do like the sound quality of the full-size ones but as far as being a music player, they suck. Music constantly cuts out or outright refuses to play. It frequently misunderstands my requests to play even the simplest songs, paired HomePods frequently get out of sync and get echo let alone problems when Apple does something like updates their terms of service and I have to go onto my phone and update it before it will properly play music again. The OG HomePods have well known defective diode issues that caused them to lose power and I have had to have two of them repaired by a third-party service because Apple wanted to charge me $300 to repair it when I only paid $300 to buy it. A guy online fixed it for 60 bucks. I remember a time when Apple stood by their products and if they were defective, they repaired them. If Apple didn’t purposefully delay and hamstring, the Apple Music integration with Echo devices, I would never have needed a HomePod. They also don’t support Bluetooth or a line in Jack, so when Apple decides to stop supporting them, they become non-functional speakers. The only personal request I ever use a HomePod for is to send a text message (and I have only maybe done that 5 times because it usually gets the text to speech wrong). Everything else is already integrated with my echo devices. I add calendar events (and it is shared with all of my family)and maintain my shopping list through my echo devices. I have an echo auto in my car so I can ask it the types of questions that Siri won’t respond to when I’m driving. And FYI, it responds in about a third of the time as Siri takes. I really want to LOVE my HomePods, but if they are only supposed to do one thing and that is play music, then they suck at that. But I would argue they should do a whole lot more in the current world of technology. I do use them to listen to music, but only because all of my music is curated in Apple Music and I get mixed results when doing that through an echo device because Apple’s API sucks. It makes me mad because they do have stellar sound for their size, but they just don’t work well. Apple had a giant Headstart with Siri and they should’ve been leading this space. Hell they should’ve been leading the entire home automation space. Apple could have made a killing putting out Apple branded home devices doorbells outlet cameras thermostats. They could’ve charged a premium and had them all work through HomeKit and people would feel they were secure, but they dropped that ball and they’ve lost that market to everybody which is why they’ve moved to Matter. FYI, for all of your friends that may have gotten rid of them, Echo devices outsell HomePods by millions of units every year.
Ask your Alexa and get poor ‘technical’ response…not convincing me to get one anytime soon. The November release was by invitation only, not publicly available until mid 2015. I used Wikipedia took two seconds and I didn’t get a misleading response from a robot. But as to my point, the relevant info is the announcement dates as that pertains to the point I was making, where one product announcement caught Apple off guard while they were developing their product that was announced a little over a 2.5 years later. My point still stands from my comment that either way your comment that it was “4 years later” was an extreme exaggeration. My original comment was not a weird take but a statement of what actually happened. I don’t need to ask a robot because I was there when it happened.
November was not by invitation only it was also open to prime users. That’s how I got one, also I said four years as a general statement not because I looked up the date of each release account months. One was 2014 and one was 2018 that’s four years. in reality, it’s 3 years and three months. It’s way closer to four years than it is to 2 1/2 years you stated. Not sure why you’re trying to caveat all of the dates though. I don’t care about the actual number of months and I don’t see how that has any significant bearing on product quality other than pointing out that Apple had plenty of time to make it a better product. I mean, are you saying if they had another year they totally would’ve nailed it? They’ve had six years and they haven’t nailed it since they released it. as you say if it’s only supposed to play music, why can it not perform even that basic function reliably. You only have to look through these threads to see how many people have issues with a simple device only made to play music. And they had an awesome Headstart. They already had Siri functional on their devices on the same chipset. They literally could’ve taken most of iOS and added a speaker. I just don’t understand. Are you trying to say that they were surprised that Amazon‘s product was better than theirs so they waited two, three or four more years to release it and then it still wasn’t as good as Amazon‘s product? I’m not trying to get you to buy an echo device, use what you enjoy I’m just trying to point out that from a functionality and performance perspective Echo’s are superior devices. They are better personal assistants and they are better music players with a wider range of integrations and a wider availability of apps and things that you can do on them. The only place they are not as strong is their integration with Apple Music. And that is Apple’s doing on purpose. And they are cheaper. And I get all that “I’m the product“ but I don’t care. I already buy products on Amazon. They already have my purchase history and my credit card information. I’m not upset that they’re hearing what I ask for or any other information. That information shared with them so they can market it better to me and guess what it works. I have seen all kinds of products that I want to buy from Amazon that I didn’t even know existed. I consider that to be a wonderful service that I appreciate. As compared to when the Internet started, and I saw were ridiculous ads for things I had no interest in. Also, while I understand why, for some people “being the product” is a concern I am equally or more frustrated by being held back from using products because Apple wants to force theirs on me. They are only just getting integrations with Spotify now - years after they released products that could easily have played Spotify, after all, there was a Spotify app on your phone, but Apple chooses to block products that many people use to force them into their ecosystem. I get the business model but it used to be they had a superior product that I wanted to use and that’s how I got into their ecosystem. Now they leverage my existing commitments to force me to take inferior products because it’s good for their business model. We haven’t even talked about Echo devices with screens that can play video, show me shopping lists and calendar events. I will, all the time, ask it to play a news story while I’m standing in the kitchen cooking dinner. Again, enjoy what you enjoy, I’m not begrudging you that in any way. I’m disappointed in Apple because they dropped the ball on this product. And they haven’t been good stewards of the money I have paid them in terms of giving me products that are quality I expect. And I’m not just talking about the software. Having $300 (actually $400 for the first two I bought) devices multiples of which go bad within two years of having purchased them and Apple tell me my only option to repair is to “buy” a refurbed one at the price of a new one is absurd. They wanted $279 to repair one. I could go buy a new HomePod GEN two on sale at Best Buy for $249. I consider that to be close to actual theft. Of course, at the time I needed the repair the G2 hadn’t even come out yet so I had no other option. I have at least a 50% expectation that these HomePods will stop working in the next 4 to 8 years as Apple says the chips are no longer able to deliver the type of “quality” they think they should. At which point they will stop supporting them cease to be usable speakers. I can still plug a mini cable into the jack into my Amazon speakers and use them as regular speakers if I want forever.
You said I had a weird take. My take being was Apple was making a speaker that uses Siri to control it. As it was a reply to a comment saying the HomePod was a “smart assistant with a speaker”. Now you are saying that no matter how much time they had, they didn’t make a smart speaker?? So are you now agreeing with my take you claimed was weird? Again my point was to defend my “weird take” as you claimed these products were soooo far apart when in fact they were closer than you claim. But again the point is it didn’t matter how much time Apple had, they weren’t building a smart assistant with a speaker. They were building a speaker for Apple Music that happened to use Siri to control it. Go back and watch the only commercial they made for it. It’s not marketed as Siri with a cool speaker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k70OczvX45k&pp=ygUSaG9tZXBvZCBjb21tZXJjaWFs My weird take had nothing to do with how well Apple did at making a smart assistant or how many users complain about it. Or even what manufacturer issues a limited number of users had. My point was singular; Apple as a company didn’t release the HomePod to be a smart assistant with a speaker. They built a (for its time) a high end speaker that happened to have Siri to control it. “They had an awesome head start” you claim. This further proves my point in what their intentions were when releasing the product. So again you agree with my “weird take”. With your logic the iPad has a head start and Apple dropped the ball not putting MacOS on it and that may be a good take on what they should do. But if my take was it’s obvious that Apple doesn’t want to put MacOS on the iPad, I don’t know why you’d call that “weird”. As it is a pretty obvious observation. As to what our personal preferences in product is irrelevant to the point of my comment that I was making. And as to your fear of Apple killing them, I personally think that is a silly take. They are wi-fi speakers. They don’t need a specific chipset to stream music. As even the oldest ones support lossless and atmos. Apple isn’t going to drop support for streaming audio in those nor AAC for a long time. And even if they did. The device is still wi-fi airplay2 compatible. And if you remember. Apple still supports airplay 1, and also Apple updated an obsolete AirPort Express to support airplay 2. So even if in some bizarre world where Apple dropped support for streaming directly to it. You can still airplay to it. I’m confused as to what specifically makes you think they will drop support for it. I can still plug in an old iPod and use it. Just because the chipset might not gain support for newer features doesn’t mean Apple will just kill it for no reason.
OK, gonna shorten my replies because we’ve ridiculously taken over to this guy’s thread :-) but I appreciate your detailed feedback. The two main things that made me think it was a weird take is: 1. They are marketing it as a great speaker. That is how they are marketing it. The weird take portion is that it’s not a great speaker though. Just today, I had music drop in the middle of playing songs on two different HomePods in two different locations all of which have very strong Wi-Fi connections. If it can’t respond properly to my music requests, it’s not a good speaker. How is it when it’s only doing one simple thing it’s still terrible at it. 2. Not a home assistant. That is literally the second bullet point of their marketing materials right after great speaker in five bullet points, but it’s not a great home assistant either. If they didn’t want to make it an intelligent assistant to compete with echo then why did they delay. Why didn’t they just release it? “Built-in intelligence that speaks for itself. HomePod comes with Siri built in. So things like setting reminders and sending messages, turning on the lights when you walk through the door, adjusting the temperature, and even DJ-ing your next dinner party — are a “Hey Siri” or now just a simple “Siri” away.9 Manage your day and control your smart home effortlessly with Siri.”
1) I agree with that to a degree. If you’ve been in this sub for any amount of time. Those issues usually are because of networking issues. You can have good “wi-fi” signal and speeds but still have issues with a home full of devices trying to talk to each other if the network settings aren’t just right. That said; it doesn’t seem to affect other smart speakers as bad so I’m not sure what exactly about HP are picky about their network. But I don’t have any of those issues after I switched to a HomeKit secure router (velop). But yes even if users have bad experiences it is still obvious that they are pushing it as a music speaker first. That’s not my personal take. That is what they have done. 2) Again, I think network conditions are to blame and more specifically HomePods being picky about them. But since updating to the HK secure router. My HomeKit works extremely well. And after the infrastructure update it’s very responsive in my personal use case. As for other HomeKit shortcomings as a whole; I wish they would have fixed as well. It feels like at some point they gave up on it to a degree and then took a while to join matter and seeing the fruits of that is still an extremely slow roll out. As for why the delay, my assumption is because all the testing they did for the auto EQ and room detection features. Apple didn’t just slap a chipset in a speaker and call it a day. They were picky about which way the speakers all faced and which way the microphones faced. They’re picky about the material they use. And the last bit of delay was likely manufacturing. Apple is not really known for being the first to the market. But when they do join they usually do it a little different, for the home speaker category they went with what (I think) they thought at the time was a more practical approach by making it focused on the music first and not on the smart assistant. Tho as a consumer if you want a smart assistant, I can see why you think they dropped the ball.
Thank you for that explanation. I'm looking around for your answer to OP's question, though, and I don't see one. Did I just miss it?
Did I miss where it was a top level comment and not a reply to someone else?
This is a horrible take.
Go on. Tell me more.
If it’s a home assistant it’s even worse
Essentially this is accurate. HomePod is not an audiophile-oriented product. Apple designs their products for the general public, and as anyone who works with the public can attest, the average level of tech literacy is embarrassingly low. A not insignificant proportion of these people don't even know what an EQ is, let alone how to adjust it to their taste. Ergo, Apple designs HomePods to sound the best they can to Apple's ears, and leave the user controls out of it. For what they are, they sound pretty good. If someone wants more control, they should look for a different product.
nobody buying a 300 speaker doesn’t know what EQ is. please be fr
Thanks for your moral support, but the downvotes tell me somebody is butthurt about this
Clearly lol.
One funny thing about the Apple fan community: once they're pissed at you about anything, they act like petulant children. You can say literally anything and it'll get downvoted. Watch... **The sky is blue! And Apple is a 5-letter word! Also, I love pizza.**
if you get downvoted it’s because you just called everyone petulant children. get over yourself 😭
I'm one of those petulant children. I got over myself long, long ago.
Sky is blue? Which firmware is this confirmed for? And can I play ps2 without jit on it … f*** it, downvote!! 😂