(calming music)
- Here we are.
- Well, well, well, look who we have here.
Mr. Shiny and New.
- Hey, what's up?
Why do you sound sarcastic?
- No, no, no, we're just joking.
- He looks just like Craig.
- Welcome back, we are wondering if we'd see you again.
- What do you mean again?
I'm brand new.
I just came out, look at this.
- What is he talking about?
I think it was that software update.
- Craig, we know it's you.
- No, I said I'm brand new.
My name is Tim.
What are you talking about?
- Oh God, you got me there Craig.
Very funny, very good.
- Steve still loves me, Steve still loves me,
Steve still loves me.
Steve still loves me, Steve still loves me!
- New HomePod, old HomePod.
New HomePod, got it.
So this new HomePod,
the second generation HomePod that's just come out
is one of the most confusing new Apple products
I've seen in a long time.
We just reviewed the 10th generation iPad,
which was already pretty weird, but this one is incredible.
So just a little history recap for context.
So the original HomePod came out in 2018.
It was a $350 Siri enabled smart speaker
with excellent sound, really impressive engineering,
rock solid build quality, and a non-removable cable.
It kind of flopped and not a lot of people bought it.
Apple then decided to lower the price a bit
from 350 to 300, which they almost never do
so that's a pretty good sign of how well things were doing.
Apparently it peaked at around 6%
of home smart speaker market share,
which honestly is higher than I would've thought
and eventually they caved and came out with a HomePod Mini,
a much smaller version of basically the same exact thing,
but now it's 99 bucks.
This one started selling much better for obvious reasons
and eventually the big HomePod was just deleted
from their site in 2021, it was discontinued,
but now it's back.
It's new and improved,
but it's like didn't you try this already?
I mean, I should say, this is, to be fair,
it is a better product in a couple small ways.
It's kind of hard to tell just by looking at it
from the outside, but here's what's actually new.
Fundamentally, it's the same layout in almost the same size.
You can see slightly different proportions here.
The new one is a little bit more stout
I guess you could say.
And while we're at it,
this is actually a new color, which is called midnight
instead of the original space gray.
You might remember the name
from the midnight iPhone color, which is mostly black
but with the tiniest hint of blue and that is here too.
Then up top, the touch surface is roughly the same size,
but it's inset a little bit this time
and the display covers the whole circle
instead of just a small portion in the middle.
So anytime you're talking to it
or adjusting the volume or talking to Siri a little,
it's just a little more vibrant up there.
And then they've also clearly listened
to some of the feedback
because the power cable is now fully removable
designed to be removed, unlike the last one
so you can feed it up behind a desk
or a table or something when you're setting it up.
But also, do you remember that weird story
where the original HomePod's
white plastic bottom was staining wooden tables?
We confirmed it with our own.
It would only take like one to two minutes
of sitting on a wooden table doing absolutely nothing
for it to leave a permanent white ring on that table.
Naturally we tried the same thing with the new one
which does have a bit of a redesigned base
to spread out that surface area and it takes longer,
but it actually still does stain
with a slightly different pattern,
but it does in fact still stain wooden tables.
This is your PSA, if you get the white HomePod,
do not expect it to not stain your table.
What else, oh, inside, there are two new sensors.
There's a temperature sensor and a humidity sensor
which is nice to have.
Hey Siri, what's the temperature?
- [Siri] It's currently 49 degrees.
- That's outside, hey Siri, what's the temperature in here?
- [Siri] It's 71 degrees Fahrenheit in the office.
- And so you can sort of like calibrate that to sync up
with other smart home actions.
Let's say the humidity gets below a certain number,
you turn on your smart humidifier
or your temperature gets over 75 degrees,
you turn on your fan, your AC, stuff like that.
It's cool to have it built in
instead of needing a separate sensor
like I have with my Google Home setup.
And there's also a new sound recognition feature.
So if HomePod with its microphones hears an alarm
or a smoke detector or something like that,
it'll send a notification to your phone,
which obviously doesn't make sense if you're home,
but if you're away and a smoke detector goes off
and you get a notification on your phone,
you will now know to check the cameras
in your home or something like that to see what's going on.
Good to know.
I should also mention though that the $99 HomePod Mini
that I mentioned earlier also already secretly
had those sensors and they're being activated
by the latest HomePod software update
along with the sound recognition feature and matter support.
So the new HomePod and Mini actually have a thread radio,
which means they can be used as a matter hub,
but there is now that matter support across the board.
Really the biggest change though is actually
what they've removed.
So we talked about the HomePod being a feat
of audio engineering.
In this little compact package,
if you took a cross section of the original HomePod,
you'd see a woofer on top, seven tweeters all the way
around the outside pointing in every direction
and then six far field microphones.
In this new HomePod, this midnight HomePod here,
you'd actually have the same woofer,
but you now have five tweeters
around the outside and four far field microphones.
So they removed two tweeters, removed two microphones,
and removed $50 from the price tag.
So on one hand, I guess I should be impressed
that it still sounds every bit as good to me
as the original despite lesser internal hardware.
Now, typical disclaimer, I'm no audiophile,
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 really good.
It still has this super crisp and balanced
and not distorted sound in a variety of environments
and a variety of volumes, which is really important.
You still get that satisfying thump from the woofer
and the low sub-base rumble even at lower volumes,
which is awesome
and it uses computational audio to adjust the sound
based on how close it is to a wall.
So if you're plugging it into an outlet,
you're probably kind of close to a wall.
It figures out its location, what the shape of the room is
and adjusts from there
and you can put two together for a stereo pair
that puts out sound much bigger
than it looks like it's supposed to.
It can even actually give you full Dolby Atmos setup here.
Actually, they keep showing these setups
of it being your TV speakers and every time I see this,
it looks silly because it's like, okay,
you got $600 of speakers here for a $300 TV and I'm not sure
if this is a real setup that exists anywhere,
but honestly they sound good enough
that in a smaller room
you really could get away with this and no subwoofer.
They sound that good.
So it's impressive.
It's a feat of audio engineering, like I said.
But on the other hand, so is the last one,
and this is basically the same exact proposition
that flopped on its face before.
It's still an expensive premium audio product with Siri.
Like we were just talking
about ratings on the Waveform podcast recently.
I'll link that episode
below the like button if you wanna watch it,
but basically the thing about products like this
is it's hard to give it like a number rating
because it is a really good product
and a really bad product at the same time,
like both are true.
Like if you're just buying it to be a speaker
for your iPhone and Apple Music, it's really good.
It's the best one clearly,
it's got incredible sound quality,
the versatility of going anywhere in the room
and still sounding good,
the quick pairing and beaming feature with your iPhone.
The far field mics can hear you pretty much
at any volume from across the room,
but this is still a bad smart speaker.
Like it still won't set Spotify as its default music app.
It still cannot pair to anything
that's not an iPhone or something with AirPlay
and it cannot 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 display background things
like running timers and at the end of the day,
it's still a Siri speaker, which means...
I mean I did a whole video on Siri versus Google Assistant
versus the others, but just to keep it simple,
Siri is still very limited and pretty bad.
So it's the same as the...
It's gonna flop again, right?
Like is fixing the non-renewable speaker
going to be the reason why this doesn't flop, no.
Is the larger better display on the top
gonna be the reason the HomePod is suddenly a success, no.
Is the $50 price drop gonna save it?
It's good, but it's not massive.
It's still super expensive.
The thing that we learned
with the HomePod when it came out
and we kind of knew this already,
but it's people don't really, for the most part,
like paying a huge premium just for sound quality.
And that's why the Mini came out
and was functionally the same product,
but didn't sound as good
and that sold way more cause it was cheaper.
Maybe Apple just doesn't care anymore.
They spent the money developing it, they might as well,
like they're ignoring the sunken cost fallacy
and they're just like, we gotta just try again.
Maybe we were too early.
We'll just ship the thing now and see if people
want it this time.
I don't know, tough to say.
Here's a conclusion.
If you are such a fan of Apple products
and sound quality that you want to hear exactly
how bad Siri is in crystal clear high definition,
Dolby Atmos even, then this is a smart speaker for you,
but for everyone else,
there's still the HomePod Mini and for everyone else,
there are other options from Google and Amazon
that are frankly much better smart speakers.
Not Samsung though, that big speed smart speaker
straight up never came out.
Don't think I forgot about that, Samsung.
So, we know Siri sucks
but at least Siri sucks seamlessly on a smart speaker
that sounds pretty sweet.
Thanks for watching, catch you in the next one, peace.
(upbeat music)