Apple HomePod 2 :
The just released second generation homepod is one of the most confusing new Apple products I’ve seen in a long time, just a quick recap of the story for context, so the original homepod was released in 2018.
It was a Siri-activated smart speaker for 350 dollars, with excellent sound an engineered rock-solid build quality, really impressive and a non-removable cable, it somehow failed and few people bought it Apple, then decided to lower the price a little from 350 to 300, which they almost never do.
So that’s a really good sign of the way things were apparently going, it peaked at about six percent of the market share, smart home speakers, which is honestly higher than I would have thought.
And finally they gave in and came out with a homepod mini, a much smaller version of basically the same thing, but now it’s 99 dollars this one started selling much better, for obvious reasons and finally the big homepod has just been removed from their site in 2021.
It was abandoned but now it’s back it’s new and improved it is but it’s like you haven’t tried it already.
It’s a better product in a few small ways, it’s a little hard to tell just by looking at it from the outside, but here’s what’s actually new basically, it’s the same layout in almost the same size, you can see slightly different proportions.
The new one is a bit beefier, I guess you could say and while we’re at it, it’s actually a new color called Midnight instead of the original space gray.
You may remember the name of the color of the Midnight iPhone, which is mainly black but with the smallest hint of blue, and which is also then at the top the touch surface, is about the same size.
But she’s a little embedded this time, and the screen covers the whole circle instead of a small part in the middle, so every time you talk to her, adjust the volume or talk to Siri a little, it’s just a little more vibrant up there, and then they also clearly listened to some comments, because the power cable is now completely removable, designed to be removed unlike the previous one so that you can power it, behind a desk or a table or something, when you install it.
But also do you remember that strange story, where the white plastic background of the original homepods stained the wooden tables, we confirmed it with ours.
It would only take one to two minutes sitting, on a wooden table doing nothing for it to leave a permanent white ring on this table naturally, we tried the same thing with the new one which has a bit of a redesigned base, to spread this surface and it takes longer, but it still stains with a slightly different pattern.
But it always stains wooden tables, it’s your PSA if you get the white pod for the house, don’t expect it not to stain your table, inside there are two new sensors, there is a temperature sensor and a humidity sensor which is nice to have.
It’s cool to have it integrated instead of needing a separate sensor, like I have with my Google Home setup, and there’s also a new sound recognition function, so if homepod with its microphones, here’s an alarm or a smoke detector or something, it will send a notification to your phone, which obviously makes no sense if you’re at home.
But if you’re away and a smoke alarm goes off, and you get a notification on your phone, now you’ll know to check your home’s cameras or something to see what’s going on good to know.
I should also mention that the 99 homepod mini, which I mentioned earlier already secretly had these sensors, and that they are activated by the latest update of the homepod software, with the sound recognition function, and the support for matter, this is the new homepod and mini, in fact have a thread radio.
Which means they can be used as a matter hub, but now there’s this matter support across the board, but the biggest change is actually what they removed.
So when I talked about the homepod, as a feat of audio engineering in this small compact case, if you took a cross section of the original homepod, you would see a woofer on the seven upper tweeters, all around the outside playing in all directions.
Then six far-field microphones in this new midnight homepod, you would actually have the same woofer, but now you have five tweeters around the outside, and four far-field microphones.
So they removed two tweeters, removed two microphones and took fifty dollars off the price, so on the one hand, I guess I should be impressed, that it still sounds just as good to me as the original, despite having less internal hardware.
Now typical disclaimer, I’m not an audio file, but I’ve listened to a lot of good speakers in my time, and after some quality time with the homepod, yeah it still sounds great it still has that super crisp, and balanced, and undistorted sound, in a variety of environments and a variety of volumes, which is really important, you still get that satisfying thud from the woofer, and the bass rumble, even at lower volumes.
Which is great and it uses computational audio to adjust the sound according to how close it is to a wall, so if you plug it into an outlet, you’re probably a little close to a wall, it determines its location with the shape of the room, and adjusts from there and you can put two of them together, for a stereo pair that emits a much bigger sound than it seems, it can even give you a complete Dolby Atmos configuration.
In fact, they keep showing these configurations as your TV speakers, and every time I see this, it looks silly because it’s like okay, you have them, you have six hundred dollars worth of speakers, for a 300 TV and I’m not sure, if this is a real configuration it exists anywhere.
But honestly, they sound good enough that in a smaller room you can really get away with it and no subwoofer sounds as good, so that’s impressive, it’s a feat of audio engineering as I said.
But on the other hand, it’s also the last one and it’s basically the same exact proposal that collapsed, on its face before it was still a high-end, expensive audio product with Siri that I got.
The problem with products like this is that it’s difficult to give it a digital rating, because it’s a very good product, and a very bad product at the same time, as both are true, as if you were just buying it to be a speaker, for your iPhone and Apple music.
It’s really good, it’s the best clearly, it has incredible sound quality, the versatility to go anywhere in the room and always sounds great the quick pairing function, and broadcast with your iPhone the far-field microphones can hear you pretty much, at any volume from across the room.
But it’s still a bad smart speaker as it still won’t set Spotify as its default music app, it still can’t pair with anything that’s not an iPhone, or something with AirPlay, and it can’t be used as a pure Bluetooth speaker.
There’s still no audio jack, it still doesn’t have a screen that can actually tell you anything, or show background stuff like running timers, and at the end of the day, it’s still a standard speaker, which means I mean, I made a whole video about Siri compared to Google Assistant, compared to the others.
But just to keep it simple, Siri is still very limited and quite bad, so it’s the same thing that it’s going to collapse again, like fixing the non-removable speaker, is going to be the reason why it doesn’t collapse no, is the better bigger screen on top, is going to be the reason why the homepod is suddenly a success no.
Will the price drop of 50 save it, it’s good but it’s not huge it’s still super expensive.
The thing we learned with the homepod, when it came out and we kind of already knew that, but since people for the most part don’t really like to pay a huge premium, just for the sound quality, and that’s why the mini came out and was functionally the same product.
But didn’t sound as good, and it sold a lot more because it was cheaper maybe Apple doesn’t care anymore.
They spent money to develop it, they might as well like that they ignore the gobbledygook cost error, and they’re like we have to try again maybe we’re too early.
Conclusion :
If you are such a fan of Apple products, and sound quality that you want to hear exactly how bad Siri is, and crystal clear high definition Dolby Atmos, even then, this is a smart speaker for you.
But for everyone else, there is always the homepod mini and for everyone else, there are other options from Google and Amazon, which are frankly much better smart speakers, not Samsung, although this smart speaker, Bixby was never released.
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