I’ve been using homepod and echo devices for years now, and today I’ll tell you who should buy the
new homepod mini, and who will be happier with a echo, either the new round ones or the super steal
of a deal 3rd gen echo dot which you can get right now for just $18.99 using the link down below.
There are great benefits of each platform and device but for those of you who want a quick
answer I linked my personal suggested best device in the description as well. I have
to say after digging into this, there are some massive differences that you won’t find looking
at the product pages. You definitely don’t want to make a mistake buying the wrong one,
and if you watch this whole video I guarantee you’ll be able to make the right choice for you.
Before the comparison let's quickly go over the homepod mini announcement. I’m glad the mini isn’t
just a shrunken down homepod but its redesigned with a mostly round shape. Personally I think
it looks great and I’m glad we still have that LED touch surface with volume controls up top.
We have the same mesh which looks and feels really nice, but if you have kids around I’d
suggest getting the black since the white gets dirty easily and is really tough to
clean. It's hard to gauge the size when you see it on camera and they don’t explicitly
show it side by side on their typical website pages, almost like they’re trying to hide it.
Thankfully I manually typed in apple.com/homepod where it forces
you to choose one and shows them side by side. Here you can see how much smaller it truly is.
The mini is slightly less than half the height and about 50% smaller in diameter
so the size difference is significant. What's even more crazy is when you compare the weight with
the homepod being more than 7 times heavier, 5.5 pounds instead of 0.76 which means this
thing is light, and that $19 echo dot weight around the same while being half the height.
Apple said they focused on 4 things with the HomePod mini - Amazing sound,
intelligent assistance, smart home support and privacy and security.
Starting with the speakers, or should I say speaker since there's a single
driver that fires through little slots for 360 sound. Apple doesn’t say how big
the speaker is but based on their image I’d say about 2”. We also have two radiators on
the sides which will really improve the bass response which is great since this
speaker is small and apple doesn’t market it as high excursion like the regular homepod.
Even though the homepods bass wasn’t loud it did go really low for a smart
speaker so I hope the mini can get close with those radiators.
Unfortunately the mini doesn’t have any dedicated tweeters
which make for clean cripst high frequencies, where the original has 7 dedicated tweeters.
Apple made computational audio a big deal with tuning that happens in real time
180 times a second using the s5 chip which was the flagship Apple watch chip last year,
and is really powerful for a $99 device.
This will be a big deal when I get into the comparison to the echos in just a bit.
The other difference is you can’t use the mini’s with your apple tv,
which probably speaks to their maximum loudness, but enough with the homepod comparisons,
we’ll do a detailed dedicated video once its out so subscribe if you want to see that.
Let's move onto the convenience features, the first is auto stereo pairing if you have two
in one room thanks to the u1 chip which makes homepods easy setup even easier.
Thanks to that same chip, in the coming months if you have an iPhone 11 or newer
you can handoff music by bringing your phone near the homepod mini which is also really cool.
Thankfully Apple is finally adding Pandora and Amazon Music support to homepod,
but unfortunately there's no word about their biggest competitor, Spotify.
The coolest new feature has to be intercom,
and right away I thought it was just a copy of echo’s drop in, but it goes a lot further.
I use drop in all the time to talk to my kids who might be in the basement or in their room
and Amazon recently added the ability to drop in to all echos as well.
What it can’t do though is to intercom into airpods as well, which can be super
convenient if you’re kids are listening to music while you’re trying to call them.
The other part is the great integration with carplay, not only to easily and safely
intercom while on the road and have those audio messages show up on Apple devices,
but to intelligently have directions show up if you asked siri for info about a specific place.
This is where the homepod really stands out, the deep integration with other Apple devices
and this is honestly making it tempting to replace my echos with these new homepod mini’s.
Yes you can do some of these things on the echo’s but each person needs
to have Alexa apps installed and working properly on their devices
and manually setup profiles which is a much bigger pain with echos.
I’m a huge techy and I still have issues using the Alexa app and finding things I need,
where the ease of setup and simplicity of just using siri that's already on your phone is easy.
The other major difference is privacy. Both the echo’s and homepod can support multiple
users but the homepod is more seamless and most things are done on device instead of the cloud
and anything being sent up is encrypted.
With those multiple profiles, if the person isn’t in the home other won’t be able to use their
profile. Privacy can be a concern with any device, but I definitely trust Apple way more than Amazon.
And that's sadly where the benefits end
and here's a ton of reasons why I switched to echo’s from home pods.
First off Alexa is way more capable. Not only does it support over 60,000 devices but
there are over 100,000 skills which are kinda like apps for your echo, from third parties.
Because of this echo’s can do way more and smart device companies can easily add voice features.
If you’re someone that want to easily shop with your voice, you’ll want to use the echo.
I couldn’t find a figure for homekit devices, but from my research I’d say it's less than 10%
of the echo compatible ones. If you are looking to create a smart home
almost every smart device out there works with the echo.
Along with much wider device support third party soft integration is
way better. One of the biggest differences for me is spotify support, both replacing
Amazon music using my voice and using spotify connect which is super handy.
Oh and by the way, Apple music also works perfectly on Echos like it does on Homepod.
I can control music from the spotify app on my phone, watch, TV or any web browser
even over LTE no matter where I’m and play music to groups of echo’s or my whole house
and it won’t disrupt whatever else I’m listening to or watching.
With the homepod you can do similar things if you’re on the same wifi and
you’re using Apple Music, but if you want to use spotify you have to use
airplay which will directly cast your audio from your phone to the homepod.
It's basically bluetooth but better since its uses your wifi,
but that also means you need wifi for it to work.
If you want to listen to something else, or your connection cuts out
airplay will stop, and in general its way less reliable than using spotify connect
which streams the audio from the cloud like homepod’s do with Apple Music
so if you use Spotify the experience is drastically better on echo devices.
And since I mentioned bluetooth,
home pods don’t allow you to use it. If you want to stream to it your apps
better support airplay and if your friend comes over with an android device he’s out of luck.
Not only can echos work as a bluetooth speaker so anyone can directly connect to them
and they still work if your wifi network is down,
but they can also connect to other bluetooth devies and directly stream to them.
I have a massive Fluance speaker that is insanely loud which supports bluetooth
so with just my voice I can connect to it and use alexa to stream and get incredible sound,
and if you have speakers that don’t support bluetooth all echos have 3.5mm audio output
so you can turn your dumb speakers into smart ones.
None of this is possible with the homepod. It works best with Apple apps from Apple devices
and with music that can only play on it and only if your wifi is working. The homepod might be
Apples most locked down device and anything that connects to it has to be approved and
controlled by Apple which means there will always be less and most will cost more.
Lets circle around and finish up with audio quality when listening to music,
which is what I do most with my echos.
I’m certain that the Mini will sound better than the echo dots which share the same 1.6” speaker
but that's to be expected at $50 for the new one and a crazy $19 right now for the third gen.
These don’t sound fantastic but still very usable at medium volumes and if you buy it
for that price, links in the description by the way, I don’t think anyone will complain.
My question is how it will compare to the new standard echo that comes in at the same
$99. This thing is slightly larger but features
three speakers. A 3” woofer and two tweeters 20mm tweeters.
This thing is close to 3 times the weight and I’m sure a lot of that is from the much bigger woofer.
Amazon is so confident in its audio quality they even included a line in
option to connect music player to the speaker. If you want to see
how they compare click that subscribe button above but If I had to guess I would have to give
it to the echo because of the dedicated drivers and I’m almost certain it will play louder too.
If you’re someone that wants the features of Alexa but want great sound you can get the Echo studio
for $50 more than the mini, and this one has 5 speakers with dedicated drivers for the highs,
mids, and bass. The studio launched at $260 and many
websites say it get louder and sounds better than the Homepod which costs twice as much.
Overall, I’m really tempted by the few standout features of the homepod mini.
I love how they look and how easy they are to use, and the new integrations with other
Apple devices are great but they lack so many features both software and hardware that unless
you have a very limited use case and you are all in on Apple its really hard to recommend.
I left my recommended devices and best sales on echos down in the video description below. Thanks
for watching, click that circle above to subscribe since we will be doing some real
world comparison when the mini comes out. This has been Max and I’ll see you in the next one.