Apple HomePod
Is any speaker worth £319?
SCORE PRICE £266 (£319 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk
What’s the definition of “smart” when talking about smart speakers? This isn’t a rhetorical question, because in some ways the Apple HomePod is the smartest of them all; and in some ways it’s the dumbest.
In the context of Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home, smart means responding to voice commands to play music or radio. It means controlling your home’s smart lights and thermostats, making voice and video calls, and asking about the weather. It means setting up timers and alarms and telling jokes on request. And, according to this definition of “smart”, the Apple HomePod falls a long way short.
But that’s not the only meaning of the word and, in other ways, Apple’s answer to the Echo and Home is streets ahead.
Sound design
Apple’s biggest weapon in the smart speaker wars is its ingenious audio engineering. Beneath that attractive yet unassuming exterior – a softly curved, 7in cylinder, all clad in spongy mesh fabric – is an incredibly complex arrangement of tweeters, woofers and microphones.
At the top of the speaker’s housing is an upwards-firing 4in woofer, which Apple tells me has a peak-topeak cone “excursion” of 20mm. That’s no traditional speaker driver specification. Normally, one would talk about parameters such as QTS, XMAX and VD when discussing the physical characteristics of a speaker driver before excursion distances. However, it’s still a lot for such a small driver and it goes some way towards explaining how the HomePod can reproduce such prodigious bass.
The trouble is that with more excursion can come a lack of control and definition. If you push the driver to the edge of its performance, there’s also a greater risk of “bottoming out”, or distortion. More expensive speaker drivers combat this by using huge magnets, which allow for more exacting control. The weight of the HomePod (2.4kg) tells you there’s almost certainly a beefy one here, but Apple complements this with its own clever technology. Using a microphone, it continually monitors the position of the woofer and its
“A speaker this size simply has no right to sound this good, with crisp sweetness that most small speakers struggle to reproduce”
output to prevent over-extension and thus distortion, while at the same time maximising performance.
That’s not all, though. The HomePod is also aware of its environment. Pick it up and accelerometers inside tell the speaker to start a scan as soon as you put it down again. Sonos’ TruePlay does a similar thing but it’s a slow and manual process where you wave your iPhone around the room to scan your surroundings and optimise the sound. The HomePod carries out this process automatically, while the music is playing, and the amazing thing is you can actually hear it working. While playing Beck’s latest single,
Colors, I moved the HomePod from the kitchen table onto an enclosed shelf; with most speakers, a recipe for muddy sound and overbearing bass. That’s what I got at first. Almost miraculously, though, after ten seconds the HomePod sorted itself out, rebalanced the treble, mids and bass and sounded great once again. I moved the speaker back onto the table and initially the music sounded thin and lacking in body; but before long the bass was back, injecting the track with much-needed energy.
With seven tweeters surrounding the bottom of the speaker in a ring, the HomePod is also capable of directional sound. With each one working together with the speaker’s roomscanning tech, the HomePod can spread the sound so that music has both a sense of space and coherence.
Sound quality
The question is, how does this speaker sound in real-world use? The answer: preposterously good.
It’s better the £200 Sonos Play One, which sounds flat and boring in comparison, and in a different league to Google Home and the second generation Amazon Echo. It produces a fuller, deeper, more threedimensional and broader sound than Amazon’s best-sounding speaker, the Echo Show, with much more bass.
A speaker this size simply has no right to sound this good. In the mids and highs there’s a crisp sweetness to audio reproduction that most small speakers struggle to reproduce. And at the bottom end a surprising amount of low-down thump and richness.
Still, it isn’t perfect. It’s not as warm in the mids as I’d like it to be, and can take on a harsh edge with tracks when you crank the volume all the way up. But most of the time I’ve spent with the HomePod has seen me gleefully exploring the full range of its sonic capabilities, and I can report that it has very few weaknesses.
The only negative is that there’s no way to take the output of the HomePod and send it to another audio system or speaker via a 3.5mm output (it doesn’t have one) or Bluetooth transmission.
But with sound quality this good, who would want to?
Sounds smart
This isn’t only a speaker for listening to music, though. It’s intended to take on the best Amazon has to offer in the smart speaker business, and this is where things start to unravel for the HomePod.
That said, it starts off strongly. Just as with the Amazon Echo range, the speaker’s microphones are capable of picking up the wake phrase - “Hey Siri” - from across the room.
I lined up the HomePod next to an Amazon Echo Show and found that, across the room and up close, the Apple device’s microphones were more effective at picking up my voice when speaking at normal volume. To be fair, this isn’t the Show’s strongest suit; the Echo Plus is much more effective and matches the HomePod stride for stride in recognising voice commands spoken quietly against a background of moderately loud music. Still, it goes to show that Apple has this essential part of smart speaker design nailed. I found the microphone array could pick up voice commands from a few metres away no matter what was playing: even with the music turned up to room-filling volume, you don’t have to shout. The things it can tell you about the music on offer are impressive, too, particularly the way you can ask about what’s playing right now. You can ask Siri who the drummer is on a track, for instance, or request more information about the album or even the producer. You can ask the HomePod to play more tracks like the one you’re listening to, for different versions of it – or for something completely different. These are capabilities missing from Amazon’s Echo speakers which won’t even let you “play it again” unless you’re using Amazon Music. Having said that, the HomePod isn’t perfect. Often, it didn’t know who was playing on a particular track, instead opting to inform me who has played the drums/guitars/bongos for the band in the past. And it has a problem with distinguishing between singers and bands. When asked, “who’s singing?” while LCD Soundsystem’s Oh baby was playing, “LCD Soundsystem” came the rather obviously incorrect answer. Thanks, Siri. Only if you ask – very slowly and very clearly – “tell me more about the singer” will you get that information.
Sounds stupid
This is symptomatic of the smart speaker experience on the Apple HomePod. Indeed, Siri on the HomePod is very much like Siri on the iPhone: occasionally useful, prescriptive about the phrases you must use, and not nearly as accomplished as
either Alexa or Google Assistant in interpreting the naturally spoken word.
Nor is that the end of the HomePod’s quirks. Next on my personal hit list is its inability to set up more than one timer simultaneously. You can set up plenty of alarms, but it offers to cancel your existing timer if you try to set up a second. If you’re juggling dishes in the kitchen, that’s very frustrating.
Of greater importance to nonchefs, there’s no voice-controlled way of listening to radio stations, other than Beats 1 (which is Siri’s “favourite radio station on Earth”) or other streaming services. You can pick up your phone and stream radio from BBC iPlayer Radio, Spotify, Tidal and so on via Apple AirPlay, but without an Apple Music subscription you’ll be missing out on whole point of HomePod. True, the Echo is similarly biased towards Amazon Music Unlimited (as shown by my earlier example about playing a track again), but it does at least let you pick and choose songs with your voice.
You can’t also yet associate the HomePod with different Apple Music accounts. With Apple Music constantly monitoring what you listen to so it can build its famed personalised playlists, this could be a problem if the little people in your house insist on listening to Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing on Rainbows when you’re not at home. Fortunately, you can prevent this from influencing your music recommendations via Apple Music by flicking a switch in the settings.
Another thing you might want to disable is the HomePod’s ability to send and read out text messages. Since Apple’s smart speaker doesn’t distinguish between voices, anyone can use the speaker to send texts via your phone and read them out, even if you or your phone aren’t in the room.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s barely worth having the HomePod’s smart facilities, though, as some critics have.
After all, the HomePod can do some of the things just as well as its rivals. It can read out the news and, helpfully, you can switch sources on the fly – between Sky News, BBC Radio 5 Live and LBC.
It can advise on traffic conditions on your daily commute and carry out various actions with a single trigger phrase using HomeKit’s Scenes capability. “Hey Siri, good morning” can trigger an action that turns on the kitchen lights and starts the kettle boiling, for instance.
HomeKit’s location awareness is another neat feature that plays nicely with HomePod. Set the target device’s location so it’s the same as the speaker, and you can carry out certain actions without having to spell them out. “Hey Siri, turn on the lights”, for instance, will switch on all the smart lights in the room the speaker is in; you don’t have to tell it where.
This all works well, but your smart home gear has to be HomeKit capable to work with HomePod, and it’s another area in which Apple cedes the advantage to Amazon. Not only can Amazon’s Echo Plus speaker support devices natively via its embedded Zigbee wireless chip, but all of Amazon’s smart speakers currently support a much broader range of smart devices than HomeKit does via Alexa’s third-party “Skills”.
Sound advice
The Apple HomePod arrives late to the smart speaker party and it’s considerably more expensive than its rivals, so it needs to offer something extra over and above the competition.
In some ways it does just that. It’s a phenomenal speaker, packed with exciting engineering and innovative technology. It blows every other smart speaker out of the water when it comes to audio quality – and it will do so wherever you happen to put it.
It isn’t as “smart” as Amazon’s Echo or Google Home, bafflingly omitting radio playback, Spotify support and basic things such as multiple timers. Unless you’ve already invested in HomeKit equipment, support for home automation is limited. And although she can hear you clearly across a room, Siri isn’t as good at interpreting what you say.
If all you’ve been waiting for is a great-sounding speaker that you can control with your voice, and money is no object, then you’ll grow to adore the Apple HomePod. But this isn’t the transformative, market-leading product that Apple probably hoped it would be.
SPECIFICATIONS
High-excursion woofer with custom amplifier seven horn-loaded tweeters six-microphone array internal lowfrequency calibration microphone for automatic bass correction direct and ambient audio beamforming 802.11ac Wi-Fi
Bluetooth 5 142 x 142 x 172mm (WDH) 2.5kg 1yr RTB warranty
“Since Apple’s smart speaker doesn’t distinguish between voices, anyone can use the speaker to send texts and read them out”