Hi everyone Aaron here for Zollotech and this is the homepod mini and i
was able to get my hands on one today they came out today
but only the white variant was available there's white and space gray and it's 99 so
let's go ahead and unbox it so it's got a little wrapper over it let me get my unboxing knife
and as you can see here it says 99 dollars see if we can take the wrapper off here
and let's take the top off the box and this reminds me a lot of an ipod box but it's smaller
so here we go
and this is a lot smaller than i thought now supposedly it's going to have fairly decent
sound we'll talk more about that in a moment and here is the homepod mini itself it's very small
let me set that aside and see what's in the box so we've got a piece of cardboard to separate it from
the bottom from the plug that's in the bottom so we've got some literature or paperwork here
and it just says homepod mini shows you how to set it up with your phone and that's it no apple
stickers you've got a little warranty card oh it looks like you do have an apple sticker but it's
stuck right here so it was stuck inside there we go we get a singular apple sticker which is nice
and then we've got an adapter and this is apple's 20 watt adapter so this will go nicely if you
you have a 20 watt adapter you could use it but this would also fast charge your
iphone if you needed it now let's take the wrapper off the charger
and we'll set the box aside and let's take a look at the homepod mini itself
so we've got the cable take the plastic piece off the bottom or the wrapper and there's a little
apple logo on the bottom so it's something you'll never see but that's apple's attention to detail
now supposedly unlike the original homepod this won't mar up a surface or leave residue so it
should be a different type of rubber that doesn't leave any dust or anything behind
and then we have a braided cable and maybe this is the braided cable that people were seeing as
far as the lightning to usbc let's go ahead and take the cover off of this there we go
and we'll set the box aside with everything else in it now this is only 3.3 inches high
or 84.3 millimeters and it's 3.9 inches wide or 97.9 millimeters it weighs 0.76 pounds or
345 grams so it's very small for a quick size comparison here is an iphone 12 pro next to it
here's the height so you get the idea and here's the width so it's a little bit wider
but it's not very big maybe if you stacked two homepod minis you'd be the height of an iphone 12
pro so let me set that aside let's go ahead and plug it in and let's see if it'll run off a mac
or if you actually need to plug it into the wall itself so let's see what we can do here i'll plug
it into my mac pro let's see if it turns on it just flashed it's plugged into my mac pro and it
looks like a mac will actually power it so i'll wait for it here it's flashing in orange light
let me zoom in a little now while we wait before i set it up the outside of this is the same sort of
fabric material that we had on the original home pod the top is plastic it's not glass at least
that i'm aware of but it looks pretty nice you have a volume up and volume down in this in the
plus and minus signs and that's really it you just have your cable on the back and you can't remove
the cable so it's not a removable cable let's see if we can get this set up now we had the orange
flashing light because it wasn't enough power so now i've plugged it into the wall socket with
the 20 watt adapter we'll wait for it to boot up and let's see what it does here give it a moment
and so now it's on let me bring my iphone nearby
unlock it and you'll see it says homepod mini so let's go ahead and hit setup
and are we at home or office you can pick wherever you're at we'll hit continue
and let's bring the brightness down there a little bit and it says what room is your homepod in let's
see what we've got here and technically it's an office but i'll go ahead and just put living
room for now we'll hit continue and it says do you want it to recognize my voice i'll go ahead
and allow it to recognize my voice and that will allow me to say read my messages or let me know
about my reminders or calls that have called in or appointments so i'll use personal requests and
then it says siri for everyone you can set this up for multiple users i'll go ahead and hit continue
then you have to agree to the terms and conditions and it says accountant settings so use your icloud
account wi-fi and home settings on this iphone or in settings on this iphone to configure your
homepod you can change them later we'll transfer settings and it says center the
homepod in the frame so just like when you set up an iphone it recognizes it it makes a tone
we'll wait for it here hi i'm siri welcome to homepod you can't tell but i'm waving
to get my attention say hey siri say hey siri what can you do three what can you do
i can do lots of things like turn on the lights give you a news update
and tell you about the weather now you try say hey siri play some music
hey siri play some music so music started playing and it works like you would expect
now let me stop that we can tap on it to stop and we have different commands now this is using a
chipset from inside an apple watch it also has 802.11n wi-fi bluetooth 5.0 an ultra wide band
so you can tap your phone and transfer music from your phone to the homepod mini so that's pretty
interesting now i'm playing a song on my iphone 12 pro and this one's actually signed into apple
music and this is just a song i created i have it turned down but if i move the iphone 12 pro
over to the homepod mini it immediately transfers the song from the iphone to the homepod mini and
you'll see it transferred back when i brought the phone back down if i bring it back it transfers
again bring it back again and it transfers back to the phone so it works pretty seamlessly and you
just bring the phone nearby and it starts playing whatever songs on your iphone so that's really
nice it does support a couple different things it has touch controls such as tap to start and stop
tap and hold to activate siri and then your normal controls of double tap to go to the next
the next track triple tap to go back and of course you have your volume and up and down
buttons so there's not a whole lot more that you can do with this other than pair it with another
one so if you have another homepod mini nearby you can pair it with a stereo pair i plan to do
this and maybe try and use it with my my mac i'm not sure it depends if there's lag or not
but you can bring them nearby and have them pair but this is a really small it sounds pretty good
and in general i think most people will really like it it is a little expensive compared to
other assistants from say amazon or google but it is secure and none of the information
is stored on apple's servers and everything is done with your consent it will recognize your
different voices and everything else so this is really interesting that they're doing this and it
should be nice to have these around your house if you want to pair them or just play them throughout
your house it's really simple to just switch from here to another device like that so again
switch back and forth that's super convenient and i'm glad they have that now it doesn't work with
spotify currently but it works with radio stations from tunein iheartradio and radio.com and then it
will airplay with any airplay compatible device and it supports pretty much every ios 14 device
so all the way back to the iphone se first gen or iphone 6s all the way to the new ones now
it won't necessarily allow you to tap to transfer your music except with newer devices but you will
be able to use siri on these as well now initial impressions is the speaker sounds really good for
its size it has decent bass for something of this size it's not quite as prominent as what you get
with the normal homepod but it's definitely surprising to me i think it sounds great and
then of course you have interesting new features like intercom for example theory use the intercom
how's it going today
okay intercom to everyone in office so it will send an intercom alert to anyone in the office
with me and let them hear what i just said to it and then they can come for dinner or whatever or
just respond to whatever you're saying so you have that intercom feature if you have a bunch of these
throughout your house that part's really nice so it's kind of interesting i'm really surprised by
the sound i think it's better than what i've heard other people say although i haven't
heard the equivalent 99 amazon versions or google home versions but you get security with this one
and i really like it so far of course i'll have to use it for a while and if there's anything
more you want to know about it let me know in the comments below now if you'd like to get your hands
on the wallpaper i have in this video i'll link it in the description like i normally do and if you
haven't subscribed already please subscribe and if you enjoyed the video please give it a like
as always thanks for watching this is Aaron i'll see you next time