So check this out…
I got this on Facebook Marketplace for $15 (with an iPod)!
What is this…?
In February of 2006, Steve Jobs held a press conference at Apple’s Town Hall theater
to announce a new dual-core Mac mini but more importantly—perhaps less importantly—this:
the iPod Hi-Fi
Look, by 2006, to say that the iPod was absolutely dominating the portable MP3 player industry
would be an understatement—at the beginning of 2006, Apple had over 78% marketshare.
And with the overwhelmingly popular iPod, came the billion dollar accessory market.
Apple didn’t mind this industry existing as
they charged a 10% tax for MFi or Made for
iPod certification which was required for accessory makers to advertise iPod compatibility
in retail locations.
An increasingly popular accessory was the iHome and its derivates—a dock for your
iPod to charge it and playback music through a built-in speaker.
These never really sounded very good, but they were
affordable and often integrated secondary
features like alarm clock functions.
Jobs called these products out on stage saying that they served the purpose of playing music
in the home but they fell short of in his words, “home stereo quality.”
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Steve Jobs: “You know, what… what is home stereo quality you could ask?
Well, if you’re an audiophile what you’d say is four things: (1) if you close your
eyes, there’s a “soundstage” around the speakers.
You don- the speakers disappear acoustically and there’s like a stage around the speakers
where you can hear the performers performing that’s much larger than the speakers, right?
So, a large soundstage.
The second thing, maybe the most important in some ways is precise imaging and separation.
Each instrument can be placed in space individually.
Right?
Each instrument you can imagine where it is in that sound stage.
They’re not all muddled together, right?
They’re separate, they’re clear, and you can almost ima- you can almost see where they
are if you close your eyes in that soundstage.
The third things is a wide frequency range.
You know, you want to be able to have great bass but you also want to be able to hear
you know, the highest frequencies as well.
And lastly, you do want room-filling sound, but without distortion.
The product they believed worthy of home stereo audio quality was this—the iPod Hi-Fi.
Up top, it has a 30 pin dock connector to fit your iPod and while mine are missing (I
bought this used, afterall),
it came with 10 snap-in cradles to fit your specific Pod model and then there’s two
touch-sensitive volume up and down buttons.
Now, around back was a detachable power cable that is 10 feet long,
a 3.5mm auxiliary input that accepted both
analog and digital Toslink cables, and then there was a door wherein you could put 6 D-cell
batteries to power the iPod Hi-Fi on the go—boombox style.
Okay, here we go…
Gosh! lol
The batteries would last 5-15 hours of playtime but would continually drain in standby since
there was no power switch—sound familiar?
Oh!
What are these doing here….?
I want to talk about this in detail but not before I clean it up because it’s disgusting.
Powering the system are two 80mm mid-range drivers and a 130mm dual voice coil woofer
with a bunch of bass porting.
This thing has no screw holes in sight—they’re hidden under this aluminum front plate that’s
glued into place and while you might say “ah, ha, ha, classic Apple,” airtight design
in speaker cabinets is pretty important.
Steve Jobs: And again to make great sound, you’ve gotta have a sealed enclosure that
doesn’t vibrate.
This is a sealed resin enclosure and it’s really, really good.
This “sealed resin chamber is a double-hulled
polycarbonate ABS with a honeycomb interior
to defeat resonance and the mid-range drivers are in their own sealed acoustic chambers
as well.
There are a lot of Apple-istic attention to details.
And the front grille doesn’t buzz either since the pins are spring-loaded which is
ridiculously clever.
I’ve seen loudspeakers many times the price of these things where at certain frequencies
you’ll get a slight vibration (from the grill).
Doesn’t.
Happen.
Here.
Clever.
I don’t want to fanboy about it too much but this thing is gorgeous…
There’s no sign of drafting—there’s no seams, the built in handles are actually
perfect with a radius just wide enough still look good without them feeling
uncomfortable, and a single green LED radiates through the fabric grille.
The battery cover is insanely thick—probably so that it wouldn’t warp—but it feels
stupidly over-engineered.
So, I guess the big question is, uh, how does it sound?
Let’s find out.
Okay, so… hm… this thing *can* sound good; however, it's very picky.
The whole idea with Apple's more modern hi-fi venture, the HomePod, is that it was omnidirectional—sound
emitted from everywhere.
The iPod Hi-Fi is *not* that and like a more traditional audiophile loudspeaker, it has
a sweet spot and the iPod Hi-Fi’s is quite stingy.
In my experience, it's from about 10-12 feet away with the speaker facing you head on at
eye level.
If you're too close, the mids and trebles completely wash out and it
sounds like your body is inside a subwoofer.
If you're too far away, the speaker sounds too thin.
You gotta be right... here.
When you're in this sweet spot, it still sounds too bassy for my liking but it's pretty tight
and the ports move an insane amount of air.
Mids are very suppressed and trebles sound okay when not washed out by the low-end.
It’s basically a pair of Beats by Dre but in a speaker.
Jobs said audiophiles looked for 4 things—remember?
A wide sound stage, precise imaging, a wide frequency range, and room-filling power without
distortion.
The HomePod really only fulfills the last one.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad speaker—there are a number of tracks like Kanye West's Heartless
and The Internet's Stay the Night that were standouts.
In fact think in *most* (but not all) tracks, it sounds better than the HomePod.
Despite all of the cool computational audio happening in HomePod, a lot of what makes
something sound good comes down to displacement and the iPod Hi-Fi has the definite advantage.
A fun aside, when you plug the iPod in, a “Speakers” tab in the main menu pops up
that lets you change the EQ and backlight settings.
This the fat Nano that came out in September 2007 after the iPod Hi-Fi was discontinued
(spoilers) and weirdly didn’t ship with a feature demoed at the press event which
I thought was kinda cool: the iPod would display the album art full-screen.
Anyways, it failed—as did the HomePod.
Why, is the question…
The obvious answer is that they were too expensive, but I think the opposite: they were too cheap.
Apple has evolved into a luxury brand and a lot of consumers will spend insane amount
of money on their products—if there’s hype.
If they’re good.
AirPods Max?
These headphones are $550—that’s insane when compared to the competition.
But, they’re good.
Great, even.
The HomePod and the iPod Hi-Fi were not great.
They were fine.
And unfortunately, fine wasn’t going to get the audiophiles raving about how amazing
they were.
iPod HiFi had near universal negative reception amongst the audiophile crowd and the HomePod
wasn’t much better—see my old review if you haven’t already.
Apple made the exact same $349 mistake twice.
I think we can tell with the HomePod mini outselling the HomePod’s lifetime sales
after mere weeks that most people just want a cheap iHome-esque speaker—it doesn’t
need to sound good.
However, I think there *is* a market for a really high-end speaker system and it doesn't
need to cost thousands of dollars, but the've demonstrated they can't do it for $349.
Here begins my hope for a HomePod Studio—a vengeful successor to Apple's failed speakers
of yore.