(upbeat whimsical music)
- So this is the HomePod.
The HomePod is Apple's answer to Google Home
and the Amazon Echo,
and every other smart speaker out there
with a voice assistant.
It's a $350 speaker that has Siri.
The basic idea is pretty simple.
It's covered in a weird, spongy fabric.
There's a touch display on top,
and it's surprisingly heavy.
But the HomePod is pretty limited.
Siri just can't do as much as other assistants,
and the only music service you can control with your voice
is Apple Music.
If you're a Spotify person,
the HomePod is probably not for you,
and I think Apple knows it's pretty limited,
because all of the company's focus
is on sound quality.
The truth is, most other smart speakers sound crappy
and the HomePod sounds incredible.
So, I'm a huge speaker nerd.
My house is full of speakers.
There's a vintage, all analog system in the living room,
a brand new Atmos home theater downstairs,
Sonos everywhere, and all kinds of smart speakers
tucked into every other corner.
So, there's a lot here to compare the HomePod to,
especially since Apple says
the HomePod is all about music first,
and smart assistant stuff second,
and the HomePod sounds incredible for its size and price.
We've been comparing it to the new Amazon Echo,
a bunch of Sonos speakers,
including the new Sonos one, and the Play5,
the Google Home and the Google Home Max,
and even Bluetooth speakers like the UE Megaboom,
and it's just obviously better than all of them.
♪ Buffallo by Sticky Blood feat. Terry Walker ♪
The home pod isn't just one speaker.
It's actually eight of them,
all controlled by an A8 processor
and tons of custom software.
There are seven tweeters that fire down and out
from the bottom and a single four inch woofer pointing out
of the top for low frequencies.
There's also a total of seven microphones.
Six around the middle for Siri
and a seventh inside that measures the location
of that woofer so Apple can precisely control the bass.
When you first plug in the Home Pod and start playing music,
it goes through a series of steps that tune the speakers
to the room it's in.
First, it uses the mikes to detect any walls nearby
so it knows how sound will bounce off of them.
Second, it uses those seven tweeters to form a virtual array
of sound beams that are assigned direct and ambient sounds
like vocals and applause.
The ambient channels are pointed at the walls to reflect
and the direct sounds are pointed out at the listener.
Some time during all of that, it detects the walls again
to refine the model of the room it's in.
Then, it analyzes the difference between
the left and right channels of the music you're playing
to figure out what sound should go into what beams,
ambient or direct.
And then, it measures the position of the subwoofer
and the reflections of the bass constantly
as you're playing music to make sure the bass
doesn't overwhelm the rest of the music.
And all of this happens at once, within like ten seconds.
If you move the Home Pod,
an accelerometer inside detects motion
and it does it all over again.
In terms of ideas I'm into,
a virtual array of sound beams that points guitar solos
at my face is super high on the list.
So, here's the thing.
The Home Pod sounds great, but I don't think
it sounds so much better than other speakers
that you should switch away from Spotify
or give up all of the features of Alexa or Google Assistant.
If you're a huge audio nerd,
you will definitely be able to hear it.
But if you're just a regular person,
you might get more from another speaker
that sounds almost as good.
Something like the Sonos One sounds almost as good,
and you get a huge array of Alexa skills,
Google Assistant support in the future,
and you can use almost any music service you want.
And when you get away from sound quality,
the Home Pod just isn't a very smart, smart speaker.
Siri just can't compete with Alexa's huge array of skills,
or Google Assistant's ability to answer questions.
There's this display on the top of the Home Pod,
but it doesn't show information.
Just blurry colors to let you know what it's doing.
The Amazon Echo Show and the Echo Spot
actually show information.
Google Assistant devices are coming out with screens too.
There's just something missing there.
You can control Smart Home devices
like locks and light switches
but you have to use HomeKit, which is way more fiddly
than what Amazon wants you to do with Alexa.
Siri can't even set more than one timer,
which is the main thing I use my Alexa devices for
in the kitchen. It's crazy.
And in the weirdest omission of all,
Siri on the Home Pod can't recognize multiple voices.
This isn't sound like a big deal
but if you just power through the set up
without thinking about it,
literally anyone can ask the Home Pod
to read your text messages
if you're on the same wifi network.
So, if I'm in the basement and the Home Pod's up here,
someone can just roll up to it and start sending iMessages
or asking it to read my most recent message
and I'll never know.
- [Woman] Hey Siri, can you read me my last message?
- [Siri] I found your most recent message from Phil.
"Hey Nilay. I don't know what kind of lonely audio nerds
Apple designed the Home Pod for,
but I think you should turn off
all the personal request features of the Home Pod
until the company adds voice detection to this thing."
Would you like to reply?
- Yes.
- [Siri] What do you want to say?
- "Hey, it's Nilay. I'm leaving. Becca runs The Verge now."
- [Siri] Your reply to Phill says,
"Hey, it's Nilay, I'm leaving. Becca runs The Verge now."
Ready to send it?
- Yes.
- [Siri] I'll send your message.
- That's a huge glaring weakness in the Home Pod.
If you have roommates, you have kids,
you live with any other people at all,
you should turn off personal requests
on the Home Pod settings
until Apple adds detection for multiple voices.
And I still just don't know why it's not there.
Amazon can detect multiple voices.
Google can detect multiple voices.
Apple can detect multiple voices.
If you say, "hey Siri", only your phone responds.
The Home Pod is running an A8 chip, same as the iPhone 6.
It should be able to do it. It's just not there.
The Home Pod is limited in other ways too.
A lot of people on Twitter asked me
if you can use it as a tv speaker.
And the answer is, basically, no.
You can set the Apple TV to AirPlay to a Home Pod,
but the second you ask it to play music,
it loses the connection
and then you have to set the Apple TV to AirPlay again
when you wanna watch something.
So, you can do it, it's just super inconvenient.
You also can't tell Siri on the Home Pod
to play something on the Apple TV the way that you can
with Alexa and a Fire TV
or Google Assistant and a Chromecast.
Until AirPlay 2 comes out some time this year,
you can only use one speaker at a time.
You can't have multiple speakers going at once.
You can't use it as a bluetooth speaker at all.
And you can't even set it up if you have an Android phone.
You have to have an iOS device.
And then there's Spotify and other music services.
I've mentioned this couple times already,
but Spotify has way more subscribers than Apple Music,
and the Home Pod doesn't really know Spotify exists.
You can play Spotify on the Home Pod
over AirPlay if you want,
but you won't really be able to control it with your voice.
And Spotify is everywhere.
You can get a ton of devices that support it directly.
Apple Music is pretty much just limited to Apple's ecosystem
so you lost a ton of flexibility
about where your music is available
if you switch to Apple Music.
It's a huge and frustrating limitation.
Look, Amazon makes the Echo and they own Amazon Music,
but they still let you set Spotify or Google Play Music
as the default.
Google makes Google Home Devices.
They own Google Play Music and YouTube.
They still let you set Spotify as the default.
Apple just wants to lock you into that ecosystem
and it's incredibly restrictive.
I'm an Apple Music subscriber.
It's my primary music service,
and I still think this is frustrating.
As a speaker, the Home Pod is a huge accomplishment.
It sounds incredible.
Apple's audio engineering team should be so proud of itself.
I actually went to Cupertino a couple of days ago
and toured Apple's audio engineering lab
and got to see all the rooms they test it in.
They've put so much work into this thing,
and it totally paid off.
But, Apple's audio engineering team
should be pretty frustrated with the executives at Apple
who decided that this thing needed to be restricted
entirely to Apple's walled garden.
If the Home Pod would just open up a little bit,
and let you use the music service you wanted,
let Siri be a little bit more extensible,
it would just be a little bit more capable,
it would be the only speaker to buy. Absolutely.
Look, if you're a huge audio nerd,
you use entirely Apple products
and you subscribe to Apple Music, you should get a Home Pod.
It sounds really, really good.
But if you use Spotify, you should get something else.
There are other speakers out there
that sound almost as good and fit your life better.
And, ultimately, Apple needs to compete with that.
Man, I really put a lot of words in this video.
(laughs)