Apple HomePod $349 smart speaker - big focus on music and sound quality

HomePod – the new sound of home. Check out some photos below for a first look (if you have not seen). HomePod will be available in White and Space Gray for $349 in December.

The big reveal in June 2017 at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose was the unveiling of the company’s much anticipated standalone Siri speaker device officially called “HomePod”. As expected, Apple unveiled an Amazon Echo and Google Home-competitor of sorts with the new HomePod, bringing Siri into the living room for voice commands at home without having to reach for an iOS device or Mac.

© Article’s author: Jordan Kahn.
© Source: 9to5Mac

In December 2017, at its Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple officially took the wraps off of its oft-rumored speaker in the form of HomePod. The device acts as a standalone way for users to interact with Siri, play music, and more. Tim Cook touts this as Apple’s effort to “reinvent home music” just as it did with products like the iPod.

Prior to announcing Apple’s product, Phil Schiller explained that Apple has worked to take what companies like Sonos and Amazon have done and create a “breakthrough home speaker.” Schiller explained that a successful speaker must “rock the house,” have “spatial awareness,” and “be a musicologist.”

Here’s how Apple describes HomePod:

Unlike most of the competitors, however, the HomePod has a big focus on music and sound quality with the $349 speaker packing in a 7 tweeter array with precision acoustic horns and directional control. You’ll also find an Apple-designed 4-inch woofer, 6 microphone array, and Apple’s A8 chip to power it all. Apple also noted that multiple speakers can be paired meaning it’s expecting some people to buy more than one to use as a multi-speaker setup or around the house.

To accommodate for the included woofer and speaker setup the HomePod comes in slightly bigger package than the competitors too, measuring in at 6.8 inches tall by 5.6 inches wide, and weighing 5.5 pounds.

In person, the speaker doesn’t exactly do anything to set itself aside from the competition design-wise – it’s a pretty basic speaker design with mesh fabric that looks similar to other Bluetooth speakers. But from Apple’s presentation of the device, it sounds like it’s hoping audio quality will be HomePod’s big differentiator.

Apple didn’t let us actually get hands-on with the HomePod during WWDC, and they didn’t have any functioning units for showing off features of the product in the demo area. One thing unique to the HomePod, however, are lights on top of the device that indicate when Siri has been activated, which can be done with the usual “Hey Siri” command that works on iOS devices.

Bloomberg’s opinion: “HomePod project cancelled & revived several times. Was originally three-feet tall. ‘Blindsided’ by Amazon.” Bloomberg says that it started as a hobby project by a group of engineers who originally envisaged it as a proper HiFi speaker.

One prototype was said to be around three feet high, putting it in the company of conventional HiFi speakers.

It was two years before the project got as far as an official codename – said to be B238 – and was adopted by Apple’s accessories division, the engineers being relocated to an office close to the company’s Cupertino campus. By that time, it was conceived as a smart speaker, and the team was said to have been blindsided by Amazon beating them to market with the Echo.

Apple’s far more limited ambitions were said to be a source of frustration to some of those working on the project.

Unlike Echo, which is a standalone device, HomePod can only access apps on an iPhone – and only a handful of those.

The concern is that HomePod will look like an inferior version of Echo – despite what is expected to be vastly superior audio quality.

Apple does at least appear to be on safe ground among its hardcore devotees. In a poll currently running on popular website, 60% of users are waiting for the HomePod, compared to 12% planning to buy a Sonos and less than 10% an Amazon or Google speaker.