the HomePod is much smaller than I remember. I had not seen it since a June, when the company announced the speaker back to the WWDC.
Last month, of course, Apple announced the speaker was pushed back from its scheduled December launch date because the company needed, "a little more time. "This time, it seems, has finally arrived, going to preorder this week and the expedition on the 9th of February.
I spent a little more time with the smart speaker this week in its final production form, and was surprised by how small the thing is at seven inches. Maybe it's all that time I spend with massive 12-pound Google Max Home Speaker.
As announced, the thing sounds good. There is little doubt that the HomePod is a first speaker, the second chip, unlike the trend of the first devices Echo and Google Home. Apple engineers were able to get a lot of rich and full of this small print. The speaker is particularly adept at isolating the voices and maintaining the often disordered sound aspects, as singers and public sounds in live recordings.
The company schematize the bowels a little when it was launched. There is a ring of seven tweeters around the bottom of the system, with a large subwoofer - which is able to move up to 22 millimeters, a sizeable travel considering the relatively small size of the HomePod. One of the great things the Max House design offers is specifically that the 360 degree design, which again, does a surprisingly good job providing consistent coverage at different places in a room.
When I met with Google before the Max launch, the company explained that it had opted for a single directional design given the fact that most people end up placing their speakers against a wall. The company uses this positioning to deliver what it says "Smart Sound" - essentially the loudspeaker's ability to match its sound quality to its proximity to the wall. After all, so much of what we hear from a speaker is what reflects on us.
Apple does not have a fancy alliterative name for its version of technology, but the HomePod seems to work on a similar principle. Here is how the company describes:
It automatically analyzes the acoustics, adjusts the sound according to the location of the speaker, and separates the music into direct and ambient sound. Direct sound is radiated in the middle of the room, while ambient sound is played in the left and right channels and directed to the wall. So your music sounds amazing, wherever you are in the room.
In essence, it seems to use them to sensitize based on the location of the sounds that are reflected onboard microphones back to it. From there, he paints a picture of the room around her and serves her accordingly. In the case of the Max House, the system gradually adjusts the sound to accommodate its surroundings, so there is not a sudden change in quality. I have not had time to futz about the function on the HomePod, but I think it performs similarly.
So it looks great - it's nice to watch, too, with a fabric cover that comes in white or dark gray. The upper part has two touch buttons volume. When the HomePod is listening and thinking, you get a colorful circle of light representing that ethereal sense of intangibility that is Siri - which, of course, brings us to the other part of the entire intelligent speaker experience .
This is, of course, Apple's answer to Echo and Home, and Siri is an integral part of this experience. The company seems unlikely to open its intelligent assistant for third-party hardware in the near future (lest it risk delivering something less than its usual hardware / software symbiosis), so HomePod is really the experience of the Siri smart home definitive for the foreseeable future.
Apple's approach also means that you need an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to set up with the speaker (it works in tandem with Apple TV, but the set-top box can not be used to get up and run). One of the positive aspects of this limited offer is an extremely simplified configuration experience. It is really similar to Apple's AirPod pairing, with a dialog box that appears on the mobile device. From there, you choose the room that you will put in, activate Siri and opt for personal requests.
This last bit is to use the speaker to offer things like notifications. At present, the HomePod does not differentiate users based on voice, so things can not be customized to this degree. The solution the company has developed to deal with what this feature allows when the device detects that the mobile device used to configure it is present.
As for privacy here, like Echo and Home, the six embedded microphones are listening to their wake words ("Hey Siri") and only send the information to the server once that is invoked. This information is encrypted and remain anonymous, so there is no central repository for your Siri requests. In addition, unlike Amazon and Google, there is no count running these requests in a central Siri application.
In fact, there is no dedicated application Siri at all involved. Instead, all mobile HomePod controls are tucked away in the Apple Home app. So, if you want, for example, put the microphones out of privacy, you go into the App house and turn them off. You can also ask Siri to stop listening by saying, of course, "Hey siri, stop listening. "
There is no visual cue for this, like the red ring that lights on the Echo devices. There is no physical button, either. When you want Siri to start listening again, either you can reactivate the function in the house or activate Siri by touching the top of the HomePod.
Siri does not seem to listen well enough when it's turned on - even when playing music. No word on whether there will be anything similar to near-field technology aboard Amazon when the company rolls on pairing multiple speakers as a free update this year. If I were the type of bet, I would say that you are waiting for news on this front around WWDC.
The functionality of the smart wizard on the device will be somewhat limited to launch - not surprising, since Amazon and Google have a pretty healthy head starting here. Apple has been focused on what he saw as the key things people actually use these devices for. Music is number one, of course. Also on board are climate, traffic, directions and news.
This last bit, as reported, is accomplished by access to podcasts. Here in the states, the default settings of the device to NPR, but you can change this setting for Fox News, among others, because where people get their news has become even more polarizing than the mobile operating system they use.
There are also call features on board. This one works differently than the echo, however. It really needs to be launched on an iPhone, then transferred to HomePod. This means that the phone must be present. The Smart Home feature is pretty sturdy here, with the permission of all of Apple's work was done on the HomeKit side of things. And all this is collected in the Home application. There is also no need for a separate smart home center here, which is nice.
from the company made a point of keeping much of the functionality in the Apple family here. It's actually the clearest side of things music. If you want a complete music playback feature, you'll need Apple Music (which Siri will happily offer as a free three-month trial on setup). The only way to use something like Spotify is through AirPlay on a connected smartphone (there is no AUX input on the back, either).
This will be a stumbling block for many users, of course. Hard to say if third-party music streaming will come on the road, but all of this seems to be part of Apple's focus on providing a unified end-to-end experience with the product. Among the advantages of such integration is a depth of functionality.
For example, you can ask Siri for contextual information about a song or artist while listening through Apple music using commands like "Hey Siri, when this song came out? Or "Hey Siri, tell me about Husker Du. This information is drawn from a variety of sources, including Apple's own metadata and places like Wikipedia.
I certainly did have some time with the speaker, so I will record the last thoughts for now. What is clear, however, is that the HomePod is a very Apple took the category. He is a handsome, high-end handset with his very good high at a price point of $ 349 (although, in particular, still $ 50 less than Google Max). Apple clearly offers a unique end to end the experience for its first product focused on Siri, avoiding some larger features because of a simplified, unified experience.
