Excellent highs and lows from the sound. Design
Price. Mid-range sound not perfect. Confusing UI
The HomePod has arrived, Apple's music speaker with Siri built-in to take a slice of the rapidly growing smart speaker market currently dominated by Google and Amazon.
Apple has once again played its waiting game, letting rivals come out early with a view to trumping the competition with a later model with better specs, better user experience and a better form factor. However, the flip side is this has also let other companies get skin in the game, such as Sonos with its Alexa-powered One.
In short, the HomePod has to be superb to cut through in what is already a crowded market. Let's see if it is.
Taking the HomePod out of its packaging, we get our first indication where some of the money has been spent on this £319 speaker - Apple's trademark attention to detail. This time its the power cord. It's a lovely power cord. No, really - it is. Fabric covered, tactile and unloops to become a straight, unkinked connection (unlike a Sonos power cable which when unravelled looks like its been stuck crushed up in the bottom of a suitcase for a few weeks).
The cylindrical unit itself is just under 18cm tall and a weighty 2.5kg. The mesh fabric covering Apple created specifically for the HomePod sets the tactile aesthetic (Apple claims it is practically acoustically transparent), while the only visible point for physical interaction is via the circular control touch panel and screen on the top.
This screen is where Siri appears as a dancing rainbow of colour when woken, but when playing music, "+" and "-" symbols appear, letting you manually adjust volume rather than via spoken command or a phone. A tap on the centre of the panel pauses playback, double-tap for skip, triple to go back, and so on.
Setting up HomePod is almost as quick as pairing some Beats X headphones. Power on HomePod, hold your iOS device close to it, and in a few taps you’re ready. You are promoted to select a room where the speaker will be placed, turn on personal requests (for sending messages or setting reminders using the speaker), then transfer the settings from your iPhone so your iCloud, iTunes and Apple Music settings are automatically ported to the HomePod. That's it.
Once set up, HomePod shows up in the Home app where all the settings can be tweaked. As for placement, you can put the HomePod freestanding in the middle of a room or in a corner or against a wall. The speaker itself can tell where it is located in a room, and automatically adjusts the audio accordingly.
Cleverly, it also knows when it's been moved thanks to the on-board accelerometer, and if it has been moved, or turned off at the plug, it automatically runs this location programme again to make sure the sound is correct for wherever it is.
You cannot fault Apple for not working very hard to try and squeeze as much into this unit as possible. An array of seven horn-loaded tweeters, each with its own custom amplifier, joins an internal low-frequency calibration microphone for automatic bass correction supplied by the subwoofer also with its own custom amplifier.
Apple is claiming a frequency response of 40Hz to 20,000Hz, which is none too shabby. The on-board A8 chip powers the real-time modeling of the woofer mechanics, the DSP, the beamforming (so the microphones can hear your voice over loud music) and the echo cancellation.
Speaking of the DSP, the HomePod constantly analyses the music playing to dynamically tune the sound based on how Apple thinks the track was meant to be heard. That's key. How Apple thinks the music should be heard. You may think differently.
The sound produced by the HomePod is better than I thought it sounded in Wired's short hands-on demo where we got treated to 30-second clips of different tracks. The bass is thunderous. It's perhaps the speaker's best selling point, and it's clear that bass driver is moving some serious air and is mightily impressive for something that comes in such a small package.
Meanwhile, the high end is also executed with aplomb. Clear, ringing tones are reproduced with seeming ease, sounding bright but not harsh.
But following on from our initial impressions, there is still something naggingly amiss with the mid-ranges. It's minimal, but considering how excellently the HomePod copes with high and low frequencies, not to mention the speaker's high price tag, you desperately want it to be as impressively accomplished here, too. If it was, the HomePod would be phenomenal. It's not, but it is very good.
Where the HomePod does nail it is reproducing great sounds at lower volumes. The DSP trickery works its wonders and you get an engaging soundscape without having to go anywhere near the upper ends of what the speaker is capable of.
If you do go near those highest volumes the HomePod manages to maintain control of the sound and not lose that clarity and composure.
However, this comes with the caveat that Wired would have liked the HomePod to be more powerful. At full volume, yes the HomePod will fill your living room with music, but you can actually just about talk over the noise produced at this level. I was a little surprised it didn't have a bit more oomph. Looking to have a impromptu party? The HomePod on it's own will be nowhere near enough.
Finally, the 360-degree sound works surprisingly well. Wherever you are in the room the HomePod is playing, and no matter how much you move around that space the sound generated is remarkably uniform. This is no small feat as many other systems claim to offer something similar, a uniform sound with no "sweet spot", yet few deliver to this extent.
So the design is great and the sound is good but not perfect - but what is the HomePod like to interact with? Apple usually nails user experiences after taking its own sweet time to bring product to market.
Apple clearly intends for you to interact with the HomePod primarily by voice. Why? Because accessing the speaker via an iPhone is uncharacteristically cumbersome for the brand.
Initially you'll be searching around for direct control on the phone, and you may well accidentally start playing music on the handset when you intend to fire up your HomePod. It's all a bit messy.
Control by voice is a lot simpler. The six built-in microphones located around the centre of the speaker mean that Siri can supposedly hear your commands from across the room even while music is playing.
We found that Siri responded in a small room immediately even when the HomePod was playing at full volume, but in an open office it had more difficulty discerning if you were speaking to it or not.
This is something else you have to consider when buying a HomePod - Siri. Now, there's no getting away from it, Siri is not the best digital assistant on the market. It's not even the second best.
Yes, Siri can do everything on the HomePod the digital assistant can do on any other iDevice. It can operate scenes on HomeKit, or just dim individual smart lights. It can act as a speakerphone if you want to make a call or send messages linked to the single Apple ID partnered with the speaker (something to consider if the whole family will be using the HomePod for this).
The trouble is Siri regularly misunderstands what you say to it, or gets hold of the wrong end of the stick altogether. The voice interface is not as polished as Alexa or Google Assistant either, with answers coming back in the unnerving rhythm and cadence of a slightly broken machine rather than a trusted and almost sentient helper.
There's nothing terribly wrong with the HomePod, so why am I slightly disappointed with it? Perhaps it is that Apple is guilty here of over-promising and under-delivering?
When the HomePod was revealed we were told it was going to blow everything else away on the market. It doesn't. It is the best sounding single smart speaker you can buy right now, but at that price so it should be.
It may just beat the Alexa-powered Sonos One in sound stakes, but you can buy two Ones for the price of a single HomePod. Right now, I'd get the two Sonos speakers. Stereo pairing means much better sound separation, which means much better sound.
Yes, the HomePod can do stereo pairing, but not yet. Nor can it do multi-room yet, not until AirPlay 2 is released.
And, finally, the smart aspects of the speaker are just not as good as the competition. Siri needs to up its game against Google and Amazon's offerings.
All of course can be fixed: Apple may eventually drop the price of the HomePod, stereo pairing is coming, as is AirPlay 2, and Siri will in time improve. Once all this happens, then Apple's HomePod really will be as good as the company thinks it is.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
