HomePod mini
The little speaker with a big, big sound
Features S5 chip, AirPlay 2, Full–range drive with dual passive radiators, 360° sound, 4x microphones for far–field Siri, stereo pair capable, 802.11n Wi–Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, Thread, Ultra–wideband chip, 3.9x3.3in, 0.76lb
If a week is a long time in politics, then three years is a lifetime in tech, something that’s particularly true for Apple’s HomePod. The $299 smart speaker was announced in 2017, arrived in 2018 to a flurry of positive reviews about its incredible sound quality, then more or less sank without a trace, overwhelmed by a tsunami of cheaper, inferior–sounding speakers featuring Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant.
While the HomePod sounded better than most of its rivals, its weak spots were its price and its Siri/Apple Music integration. Siri (still) has a lot of catching up to do before it can rival Alexa and Google Assistant, while the wall Apple erected around the HomePod meant music services that weren’t Apple Music rather got left out, limiting the speaker’s appeal.
Now Apple is having a second go around, this time with the HomePod mini. Smaller, semi–spherical and costing just $99, it promises to address some of the original HomePod’s shortcomings, while also being much more keenly priced.
The first surprise is how tiny the HomePod mini is, measuring just 3.9x3.3in. It’s not much bigger than a coffee mug, with acoustically transparent mesh cloth in Space Grey or White around the outside and a flat glass disc on the top, which is used for touch playback controls and lights up when Siri responds to your voice commands. Slightly disappointingly, there are no other ports on the rear or underside of the HomePod mini and its power cable is fixed in place, with the same 20W USB–C–style charger plug found on the iPad Air included in the box.
Setup is surprisingly simple: plug the HomePod mini into the mains then bring your iPhone or iPad within touching distance (with Wi–Fi and Bluetooth active) and the HomePod mini will set itself up in no time. You can then choose its location, whether or not you want to receive personalized Siri results, and more. And if you want to use two HomePod minis as a stereo pair, you can do that easily too — the speakers can recognize when they’re placed in the same room and you can designate which speaker handles left or right channel duties.
After that, using and tweaking the HomePod mini is done via a combination of the Home app (the HomePod mini can also act as a home hub); the Music app on iPhone, iPad, or Mac; and through certain third–party apps. You can even use it with your Apple TV to playback sounds from your favorite movies and TV shows, although as it lacks the HomePod’s spatial awareness it can’t be used for surround sound.
Given that the HomePod mini is so small, it’s no surprise that you’ll find a lot less tech inside it. Rather than the complex speaker array
inside its bigger brother, HomePod mini makes do with a single downwards–firing full–range driver, plus two sideways–firing passive radiators to project a 360° sound. And there’s three far–field microphones for picking up any Siri voice commands you direct its way — the fourth is used for echo cancellation. At the heart of the HomePod mini is an S5 chip, the same one used in the Apple Watch Series 5. This helps it overcome its limited size by using computational audio to adjust the sound quality up to 180 times per second, so your music sounds its best no matter where the speaker is placed in the room. That’s the theory. Does it work? Oh yes.
Despite its tiny size, the HomePod mini is capable of delivering sound with incredible fidelity, no matter what your jam is. Fire up Apple fave Billie Eilish and you’ll hear crisp, clean highs, warm, realistic–sounding vocals and more bass than you might expect from a speaker of its size. In truth, the mini is better at filling bigger rooms when used as a stereo pair, but for smaller rooms it sounds just great; the sound stays clear and presentable at almost any volume and there’s no distortion even when the speaker is pushed really hard.
However, there are a couple of caveats to be aware of. The first is that you can’t really use the HomePod mini as a stereo pair for your Mac. AirPlay in macOS only really lets you send sounds to one speaker at a time without a fiddly workaround. You can’t just plug the speakers into a spare pair of USB–C ports on your Mac either. Do so and its top will flash an orange warning light and the speakers will simply refuse to work, making it a wall power– only deal for now. But for everything else the HomePod mini works just great, whether you’re using a pair of them like a traditional stereo array or you’re dotting them around home multi–room style.
The HomePod mini’s other big drawback, of course, is Siri. Despite the huge leaps and bounds Apple’s voice assistant has made in the last couple of years, there will be still be quite a few occasions when it either won’t do as you ask or gets confused in some way. Incredibly, it does respond to your voice most of the time despite the same speaker cranking out music at high volumes, but its occasional unreliability can be frustrating. You can also use the HomePod mini’s Intercom feature to send messages from the speaker to other devices.
THE BOTTOM LINE. The HomePod mini is compact, neat and delivers incredible sound for its size and price. Its weakest link remains Siri. ROB MEAD–GREEN