Apple (AAPL)
has never been ashamed to be late to the party. The iPod wasn’t the
first pocket music player; the iPhone wasn’t the first cellphone; the
Apple Watch wasn’t the first smartwatch. But in each case, Apple won the
category by making its product better.
On
Friday, you’ll be able to buy the HomePod, Apple’s answer to the smart
speakers from companies like Amazon, Google, and Sonos. It is indeed way
late to the party, even by Apple’s definition — last June, Apple said that it would ship the HomePod in time for the holidays.
But the HomePod is better only in the “speaker” sense.
Despite all of those delays, despite the chance Apple has had to study
its rivals, despite the fact that Apple says it’s been working on the
HomePod for six years, the “smart” part of this speaker is way behind.
Which
is so weird. Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, was born before Alexa, “OK
Google,” and Cortana. It had a huge head start. It has no excuse now for
being the dumbest smart assistant on the market.
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The Apple HomePod is here at last: get a black or white pod in your home.
Music first
You hear people shrieking about the HomePod’s price, which is $350. “I could get an Amazon Echo Dot for $40!”
Well, yeah. And instead of buying a Tesla, you could buy a bike off of Craigslist. It’s just not the same thing.
This thing is built. It’s
a heavy, squat cylinder (6.8 inches by 5.6 inches), available in black
or white. Rubber on the bottom, cloth mesh around the sides,
touch-sensitive screen on the top. Even the power cord is dressed up.
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The HomePod’s cord is wrapped in fabric, too.
The
touchscreen on the top never displays words or recognizable pictures;
it exists solely to offer a cool, colorful swirling LED light whenever
HomePod is speaking or listening. Then it goes black.
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Apple says that your music habits are encrypted and anonymized before anything’s transmitted to its servers.
Setting up the HomePod is incredibly easy: You just bring your iPhone near it and tap Set Up.
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Things get off to a very easy start.
After
a few setup screens (including, inevitably, an Apple Music ad), your
Apple account password and home Wi-Fi password get transmitted
automatically, and then you’re good to listen.
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The iPhone walks you through the HomePod setup. No iPhone? No HomePod for you!
Assuming
you’re among the 40 million subscribers of the Apple Music service ($10
a month), you’re in for a glorious ride. You can ask it to start
playing music by genre, band, song name, album name, whatever. “Hey Siri
— play Coldplay.” “Hey Siri — play me some 80’s dance tunes.” “Hey Siri
— play ‘The Wall.’” “Hey Siri, next track.” “Hey Siri, volume up.” “Hey
Siri, stop.”
You
tap the top to pause playback, or tap + and – to adjust the volume. You
can also double-tap for “next track,” or triple-tap for “previous
track.”
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You can tap these buttons for volume adjustment—or just speak your volume requests.
The audio quality will floor you. Let’s just get one thing straight: The HomePod sounds better than the Google Home Max ($400), the Sonos One ($200), or the Amazon Echo Plus ($150),
let alone all the smaller Echos and Google Homes. This isn’t a matter
of opinion; it’s a universal reaction, based on blind side-by-side blind
listening tests I’ve conducted with listeners from all walks of
demographics. (I’ll post the video here on Friday.) The HomePod has the
most balanced midrange, the most detailed highs, and a crisp, muscular,
musical bass the other little guys can’t touch.
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From left: The Amazon Echo Plus ($150), Google Home Max ($400), Apple HomePod ($350), Sonos One ($200). The HomePod sounds best.
Maybe
that’s because the HomePod contains seven tweeters, arrayed in a
circle, and a gigantic, 4-inch woofer, capable of moving 0.8 inches,
pointing out the top. Or, as Apple describes it, “array of seven
beam-forming tweeters, each with its own amplifier and transducer. And
each custom designed with a precision acoustic horn that focuses sound
for tremendous directional control.” But you knew that.
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Here’s what the HomePod looks like naked.
At top volume, the HomePod is powerful enough to fill your entire downstairs, or your entire yard. It gets really loud — so loud that Siri asks if you’re sure
you want to crank it that loud before doing so. And guess what? It
doesn’t distort at 100 percent, like the Google Home Max does.
The
HomePod also contains six microphones. They’re designed to pick up your
voice commands even when you’re across the room, even when it’s
blasting music. (My 13-year-old is fond of subjecting his parents to the
following prank. He tells our Amazon Echo: “Alexa, play ‘Who Let the
Dogs Out’ at 100% volume.” The Echo complies — but at that point, it’s
impossible for it to hear any further commands! There’s no way to stop
it except to get off the couch, march over, and tap it. The HomePod, on
the other hand, can always hear you. You can say: “Hey Siri — tell me
about this album.” “Hey Siri — who’s this singer?” “Hey Siri — play more
like this.” And so on.)
But
Apple says that the six microphones also serve to sample the proximity
of the walls and ceilings around it. It instantly reconfigures what’s
coming out of those seven tweeters so that the important stuff, like the
band and the singers, come out toward the room, and the ones on the
sides handle reverb, applause, and the like.
I
don’t know about all that — there’s really no way to tell if all that’s
happening. But never mind. The HomePod sounds really, really great.
Siri second
If
you’re among the 39 million Americans who own an Amazon Echo or Google
Home, you already have certain expectations of the things it can do for
you. You can ask about sports, weather, news, measurements, facts,
timers, reminders, and so on.
And
you can voice-control your home, to the extent that you’ve bought Apple
HomeKit-compatible thermostats, lights, and so on. Unfortunately,
Google and, especially, Amazon are way, way ahead on smart-home
compatibility. Siri can’t even control anything from Nest, which is
probably the most popular brand.
But
the sad, stunning fact is that the HomePod can’t do a lot of the things
that the other speakers can— or even things Siri on your iPhone can. It
can’t call you an Uber. It can’t tell you what’s on your calendar. It
can’t set up more than one timer at a time (sorry, kitchen chefs). It
can’t check your email.
It
also can’t make free speakerphone calls to any number without needing a
phone, the way the Amazon Echo and Google Home can. You can
use the HomePod for dictating texts and reading incoming ones, if your
iPhone is within range; and the HomePod can be a speakerphone for the
iPhone.
But
the HomePod can’t tell apart different voices in your family, the way
the Google and Amazon speakers can. So if the texting feature is on,
there’s nothing to stop other people from sending texts “from you” while
you’re in the shower, or listening to your incoming texts when you’re
upstairs. For a company that touts its dedication to personal privacy,
Apple dropped the ball on this one.
Oh,
and while we’re categorizing our disappointments: You can’t set up two
HomePods as a stereo pair, as you can with Google or Sonos smart
speakers. Nor is the HomePod multi-room; you can’t say “Play Barry White
in the bedroom,” as you can with its rivals. Apple says that both of
those features will come later in the year. (What exactly were you doing during those six years, Apple?)
Velvet handcuffs
The most astonishing limitation of the HomePod is that you must own an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch to set it up, and you must
be an Apple Music subscriber to voice-control music. (It can also play
what’s in your iTunes or iTunes Match libraries.) Unless you’re all-in
on Apple, you can’t even use this thing.
That’s
right. Apple’s $350 smart speaker has never heard of Spotify, the music
service that’s twice as popular as Apple Music (70 million
subscribers). No Spotify, no Pandora, no Google Play, no iHeart Radio.
Now,
you can start up these services on their various iPhone apps and send
the playback through the HomePod. But you can’t command them by voice,
which is the whole point.
“Totally
understandable,” you might say. “Apple runs a music service — they want
to drive customers to that.” Well, sure, but so do Google and Amazon.
Yet their speakers let you control Spotify and other services by voice. And they don’t require one phone brand or another.
For most people looking for a smart speaker, I’d recommend the Sonos One (here’s my review).
Its audio quality is just shy of the HomePod’s (you’d notice a
difference only in a direct A/B comparison test). It contains Amazon
Alexa and “OK Google.” It’s multi-room, it’s stereo-pairable, and —
here’s the kicker — you can buy two for the price of a single HomePod.
Bringing HomePod
Being
late to the party is an Apple hallmark — but so is starting out with a
lame 1.0 version. The first iPod worked only with Macs, not Windows. The
first MacBook Air was painfully slow. The first Apple Music app was a
hot, confusing mess. And how about the Apple Watch 1.0? Yeah — nobody
touched it.
Maybe that’s the master plan for the HomePod, too.
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It’s a 1.0 product, for sure.
We
already know that Apple is working on letting you use two in a stereo
pair, and developing multi-room features (“Hey Siri, play Taylor Swift
in the playroom”). So maybe Apple’s also assembling a team of voice
engineers to bring Siri out of its 2011 rut. Maybe a software update
will bring speaker-independent voice recognition, so each family member
can ask about their own calendars, texts, and playlists. And maybe
Apple’s lawyers are furiously hammering out the deals with Spotify and
Pandora even as we speak.
Until
then, the HomePod sounds amazing only in the literal sense. Otherwise,
it’s best suited only to a core audience of true-blue Appleheads: people
who use the iPhone, signed up for Apple Music, and, preferably, live
alone.
In other words, maybe the HomePod isn’t late to the party. Maybe it’s just really, really early.
