If you follow Apple, you probably know the company rarely jumps into any product market first.
Apple was not the first company to offer the personal computer, MP3 player, smartphone or smartwatch, but with each product, it waited for the right time to swoop in with its own version that came to dominate the market.
The connected-speaker market began with the Amazon Echo in 2014, and Google followed with Google Home in 2016. I’m also including the Alexa-enabled Sonos One, which debuted in 2017.
Apple has taken the familiar route of not entering a market until it feels its product could dominate.
The Apple HomePod ($349.99, apple.com) is certainly a great-looking speaker, but is there enough on the inside to pull customers from the more established competition?
• Enter HomePod: When Apple executive Phil Schiller introduced the HomePod at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June, the first thing I noticed was the price.
Apple has never been one to enter a market at the low end on price.
At $349, the HomePod is not the most expensive connected speaker — that honor belongs to the $399 Google Home Max — but it’s still pretty expensive. For $349, I can buy two Sonos One speakers with Amazon Alexa built in.
• Features: HomePod is absolutely full of components, including a high-excursion woofer and a custom seven-tweeter array.
The speakers are designed to work with an Apple A8 processor and advanced software to “analyze the music, dynamically and continuously tuning the low frequencies and automatically adapting the acoustics for the best sound experience.”
The woofer faces upward, while the seven beamforming tweeters are placed in a ring facing outward around the HomePod.
An array of six microphones is positioned around the body of the HomePod to pick up your voice when you speak to Siri.
The HomePod is covered in a seamless fabric mesh (space gray or white), and there is a touch surface on top to allow for manual control of volume, music playback and Siri.
• Setup: You’ll need an iOS device (iPhone or iPad) to set up HomePod.
You plug it in and bring your iPhone over, and the setup wizard will appear on your phone’s screen. You’ll want to have your iOS device already connected to your home’s Wi-Fi network.
You’ll be asked to give the HomePod a name (probably the name of the room it will live in) and whether you’d like to enable Personal Requests, which enables features such as setting reminders, sending texts with your voice or having Siri read incoming texts. Personal Requests require your phone to be on the same Wi-Fi network as the HomePod.
You’ll then be asked for your permission to transfer some settings to the HomePod, including your Apple ID and Siri voice and location preferences, as well as your Wi-Fi network login credentials. You’ll also be asked for your Apple Music login. You can set up a free trial from the setup screen if you are not an Apple Music subscriber.
• Playing music: The HomePod is designed to play music via Siri voice control from Apple Music, uploaded iTunes Match songs, your iCloud Music Library or your iTunes purchases.
To play those sources, the HomePod pulls the music straight from the internet.
If you’d like to play from other sources, like Pandora or Spotify or even music stored on your phone or computer, you’ll have to use AirPlay, which means the phone or computer needs to be on the same Wi-Fi network as the HomePod.
Apple has announced that HomePod will work with AirPlay 2, which will allow different songs to play to each room. This functionality is coming later this year.
Controlling music with your voice is great.
You can give voice commands even if the HomePod is playing at full volume. In fact, you don’t even need to raise your voice.
Simply say, “Hey Siri” in a normal voice, even from across the room or the next room, and the music volume lowers so you can speak the command.
I was amazed at how low I could speak to HomePod and have it recognize the command. Apple is far ahead of Amazon when it comes to giving commands when music is playing.
• Sound quality: I have several Sonos Play:1 speakers at home, which is what we use to play music throughout our house. I have several Amazon Echo Dots around the house that can control the Sonos playback via voice.
So naturally I wanted to test the HomePod against the Sonos.
I set up a test with the HomePod and a single Play:1 side by side on my kitchen counter. I queued up a few songs from Apple Music and played the same songs through each speaker, alternating between them. At first I was more pleased with the Sonos, but I realized that was because the Sonos app allows the user to tweak treble and bass.
When I set those controls to neutral, the Play:1 and HomePod sounded similar.
The HomePod had more on the low end, but with my treble dialed back up on the Sonos, I liked Sonos a tad better.
Then I brought the HomePod into my living room, where I have two Sonos Play:1 speakers in a stereo pair. In a not-very-fair comparison, I liked the Sonos pair better than the single HomePod.
When Apple enables stereo pairing on the HomePod, I’ll be happy to retest.
