Apple’s HomePod, AI-assisted headphones, a fine stylus, a greatvalue action cam, and lots more…
Fantastic audio, cool looks, but there are limitations
£319 from Apple, apple.com/uk Features Space grey or white colour options, voice control using Siri, touch-sensitive top surface
Standing just 17.2cm tall, HomePod is not at all overbearing. Its black or white mesh is nondescript, and it doesn’t offer the design flourish of the fabric or wood veneer coating of the likes of the second-gen Amazon Echo. It shows that you don’t really need those extras to fit in well in a home, though – of all the smart speakers, HomePod probably looks the least like a tech item. In fact, it has more in common with the Sonos One, but with more sensuous curves.
Setup is easy; plug it in, then put your iOS device nearby and HomePod pulls everything from it, from your Wi-Fi password to your iCloud details. Seconds later, Siri suggests that you tell it to play some music.
A hazy dot of light on the top surface swirls in multiple colours to indicate Siri is active, like HAL took the weekend off for Mardi Gras. When music is playing, plus and minus buttons are available for manual volume adjustment. You can tap the centre to pause or play, hold to invoke Siri, and triple-tap to skip a track. It’s less overtly futuristic than Amazon Echo’s circling light and rotating top, but we like both approaches.
Awesome audio
That HomePod starts you off with music is smart, because sound quality is absolutely its standout feature. Its musical showpiece is its knack for detail. With vocals, acoustic guitar, cymbals and similar elements that have a lot of fidelity to lose or gain depending on your speaker’s quality, HomePod is very nearly untouchable compared to similar gear.
This may well be down to Apple’s ‘roomsensing’ tech. Sound reflections can create a kind of crosstalk when listening to music, muddying the finest detail in a recording. Good compensation should bring that back out, and HomePod’s room analysis is very good indeed.
It’s not all about those higher-end acoustic acrobatics, though. HomePod is solid through the midrange for its size, and impresses with its bass. Its small size puts a certain limit on the amount of the latter, but the upward-firing woofer isn’t afraid to let you know it’s there. You won’t feel vibrations in your chair as you might from a bigger speaker, but that it puts out such a full sound is kind of astonishing.
HomePod comfortably bests the other smart speakers of its size for sound quality, but then it does cost a lot more than many of them. We pitted it against the Libratone Zipp, which is close in price and size, and comes close to it for a vibrant top end, but the Zipp totally fails to match HomePod’s midrange and bass. We tried it against a Naim Mu-so Qb next, one of the best Wi-Fi speakers available. This is bigger, and takes HomePod to school when it comes to impact, poise and fullness across the bass and midrange, but HomePod still beats it for clarity and offers a sweeter high end. Which you prefer will likely come down to the kind of music you like, so we’d call it a draw between them.
But the Naim costs around double – that’s how good Apple’s little speaker is.
Having two HomePods working in stereo would be even better, but this, along with multiroom support from iOS, isn’t coming until later this year – we’ll take another look at HomePod when it does. Despite its current mono status, HomePod’s ability to diffuse sound evenly in a room is impressive.
You can only send music to HomePod if you’re in Apple’s ecosystem. There are two ways to get your tunes on it. First, you can ask Siri, which works if you have an Apple Music or iTunes Match subscription to get your music into iCloud, or if you’ve bought music from the iTunes Store. The second way is AirPlay. You can play nearly anything from iOS to HomePod this way, making the speaker more flexible than a lot of its Wi-Fi rivals. If your family is all-Apple, great. If you have an iPhone but your other half uses another brand, that’s a bit more awkward.
Apple would like you to subscribe to Apple Music, of course, and control it using Siri. If you use other services like Spotify or Amazon Music, you’re not able to use your voice to request tracks from those services’ libraries, though you can control playback once it’s started from iOS’s touchscreen. But, if you’re all Appled up, HomePod is as slick to use as you’d hope. AirPlay is quick to respond and more reliable than in a lot of third-party speakers, and even if you start playback from Siri, it can be remotely controlled from the ‘Now Playing’ widget in iOS’s Control Centre.
That widget’s volume control is handy, because while you can tweak the volume on the speaker, asking Siri remotely to set the volume to a certain percentage is a bit of a gamble if you don’t know what it’s already set to. The slider offers context. Or you can just ask Siri to turn it up or down.
Siri: a mixed bag
The technical portion of Siri is really solid – its ability to pick out your voice against music or other ambient noise is top-notch. It did well at understanding our commands, too – we’ve experienced no major idiocy in its responses so far. But then, that might be because it’s quite limited, and so we’ve only been asking limited things of it.
Siri’s main function is as a ‘musicologist’, theoretically able to respond not just to your
simple requests for an album, but to broader commands like “Play me some 90s pop” (it responded with the New Radicals for us – nice work) – and even questions like “Who played the bass in this track?”
Greatest misses
In practice, you may find some of these abilities a bit hit and miss. When we asked Siri for a station tuned to our tastes, it gave us New Order and The Cure, who we had literally never listened to on Apple Music – nor any of their obvious contemporaries. We have no idea where that came from.
We asked Siri to play some Nirvana, and it led with School, which is not exactly the instant, recognisable hit one might expect. When asked for “popular Nirvana songs”, Siri played Love Buzz. Truly, the popular Nirvana hit we were all expecting. So we just went simple and asked for Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged album, which is
on Apple Music. Siri gave us Now That’s What I Call Music! 98. OK, most other things we asked for, whether individual songs or albums, Siri delivered, but clearly it’s not flawless at present. Apple Music also has a huge library of podcasts available to it, but if you don’t use Apple’s Podcasts app, the lack of syncing with what you’ve heard before can be a bit of a pain. If you’re up-to-date, being able to just ask for the latest episode of something is nice, though. Siri has other problems. It can read out your unread text messages, send messages you’ve dictated, set timers and alarms, and create reminders… but these all have one flaw or another. The messages feature is bizarrely privacy-compromised for a company that prides itself on being a leader in this area. If you’re home with your phone, anyone can ask to hear the messages, or dictate a new one. And remember, Siri is very good at picking up voices, so don’t expect walls to protect you if they’re thin. You can, of course, just take the nuclear option and turn off this feature, but that also turns off reminders and notes.
Maybe that’s not a big loss, though, as these suffer from the fact that HomePod only recognises one iCloud account. It desperately needs multi-user support, or at least voice recognition to limit someone who’s not you messing with your stuff. It won’t let anyone use these features if your iPhone isn’t at home, but it’s a free-for-all when it is.
Skills to pay the bills
The problems don’t end there, as the timer function has its own issue: you can only have a single timer running. That’s often fine, but HomePod should be able to handle multiple timers, ideally that you can name, as Amazon Echo does. Siri can also do measurement conversions. If Apple sorts out timers and adds recipe support in the future, HomePod could become a handy kitchen companion.
You can also ask for weather and sports info – standard stuff for Siri on iPhone, and of course, it controls HomeKit accessories, and works as a hub for remote control and automation – this works really well, although the choice of accessories is a bit sparse so far compared to Amazon Echo.
One thing you can’t ask Siri to do is to call someone, oddly. It works as a hands-free speaker only if you choose that during a call. As good as its voice recognition is, Siri is a long way from the flexibility that Alexa offers through Skills. Clunky as they can be to trigger, Skills mean Echo can do almost anything. Siri feels limited by comparison.