Apple Homepod
FOR Weighty, assured sound; effective processing; stylish AGAINST Reliance on voice control; too Apple-focused
That Apple does things in its own sweet time is no new discovery – but, even by its own standards, the company has arrived late to the wireless speaker party. Still, as everyone knows, being late is perfectly acceptable if you’re the life and soul when you arrive – and that’s pretty much the story with the Homepod.
Despite some flaws and limitations, the Homepod is the best-sounding smart speaker available by quite a margin. When combined with Siri’s reinvention as your personal Dj/musical guru, it makes for an endlessly entertaining all-in-one system. Assuming you’re already deep in the Apple ecosystem, that is.
Classy understatement
It comes as no surprise that the Homepod is beautifully made and looks classy. It’s also smaller and heavier than you imagine, but is a subtly styled device, particularly in the Space Grey finish of our review sample. This is a speaker that, between its cylindrical shape and seamless mesh fabric cover, is designed to blend into, rather than dominate, its surroundings.
Not that it’s without neat touches. That glossy top panel, uniformly black when the speaker is resting, is where Siri appears as a shifting ball of colour. The way it floats within the blackness of the panel is undeniably cool. When playing music, plus and minus symbols appear, giving you touch points to raise or lower the volume. Tapping the centre of the surface will play/ pause, skip a track or go back to the previous track, while keeping your finger pressed will summon Siri.
But the really impressive stuff is hidden beneath that speaker covering mesh. Having started with an entirely clean slate and worked on concepts for years (Homepod has been in development since 2012), Apple eventually settled on having the tweeters at the bottom and the woofer at the top – the exact opposite of the arrangement found in traditional speakers.
The tweeters fire outwards and are angled slightly upwards, with the aim of not bouncing sound off the surface upon which the Homepod is placed. By avoiding those reflections, Apple can exact greater control over the treble’s behaviour.
There are seven tweeters in total, evenly spaced around the base of the unit. The woofer is close to the top and fires upwards, reflecting mid and bass frequencies off the bottom of that glossy panel so they are distributed equally around the device.
Embedded in the underside of the top panel, shielded from the bassy battering it receives from the woofer below, is Apple’s A8 chip. This is the same chip that first appeared inside the iphone 6 and 6 Plus back in 2014. That might make it sound rather old, but for a wireless speaker it’s quite the powerhouse.
Clever tech
So, what’s all that processing power used for? There’s Siri, of course, but also the ability to monitor the speaker’s surroundings and the music being played to ensure that you always hear the Homepod at its best.
The surroundings are analysed when you use the Homepod for the first time or move it to a new position (there are accelerometers to let it know) and, unlike the implementation of something like Sonos, involves no manual measuring on the part of the user. Instead, the Homepod uses the first song you play to listen to itself and adjust the sound accordingly.
Fine tuning
If it’s in free space, sound will be dispersed equally around the speaker, but if it’s close to a back wall the Homepod will actively split out some of the more ambient elements of your music and bounce them off the rear surface while projecting the vocals and more direct sounds straight into the room. It’s clever stuff.
Wherever you place the speaker, it is constantly analysing the music you play and dynamically tuning the sound, from bass to treble, to deliver the track as intended. Or at least as the Homepod thinks it’s intended.
But it seems that the Homepod has a good grasp of the intentions of a track. At no point in our test did we play a single track that sounded odd or unbalanced. It's not a perfect delivery, but the Homepod is great at honing in on and delivering the essence of everything you play through it, from Bach to Band of Horses, Bonobo to Bob Marley, The Notorious B.I.G. to Bullet for My Valentine.
It’s all well and good having a bass driver that can shift some serious air (which this one can), but keeping it controlled at the same time is a tricky business. The Homepod manages it expertly. Play Join the Dots by Roots Manuva and Chali 2na and you can revel in bass that’s superbly deep