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I have a Sonos setup for my home and I absolutely love it. The sound quality is great, and the Play:1 speakers are less than half the price of the HomePod.
I'm not saying I will never buy a HomePod but for me: control > sound quality. And when price IS an issue you can't beat the Amazon ecosystem.
PS: Also writing skills and the like for Alexa is pretty easy from my experience
I feel exited about home assistants in the same way I am excited about home automation: the premise seems useful in a general way, but I struggle to think of use cases that have a meaningful effect on my lifestyle. Also - I can't shake the privacy concerns.
Putting aside the privacy concerns, the home automation + home assistant combo is actually pretty useful. It definitely beats fumbling through apps to do smart home stuff. Since getting an Echo, I notice my wife constantly changing the temperature on the Nest because, well, it's so easy to bark out a command when you don't want to get up or don't have your phone handy. Prior to getting an echo, I only used my Wemo sw…
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> Apple's only real advantage now is privacy Apple's main real advantage is lots of the high-disposable-income market is heavily invested in their ecosystem. The big ecosystems are real competitors, but the individual offerings within them are rarely direct competitors because the utility of the individual offerings depends on degree of pre-existing investment in the ecosystem.
In effect Jobs (or maybe the unnamed middle manager to managed to convince him it was a good idea) managed to make the fruit logo a status symbol, in large part thanks to allowing the iPod and iTunes to work on Windows...
For this reason, Apple will probably be one of the few western 'tech' companies who will most likely always have a foothold in places like China.
1) Full voice coverage (I shouldn't have to redirect my voice or scream for it to hear me in any room).
2) Enough devices that talk to it so that it is habit-forming to use it for lights/tv/etc
I can see the HomePod doing 2 as that's more about what you have aside from the HomePod but I'm worried about #1 due to the price tag.
If I have a 3 bedroom house and a large enough Kitchen/Living Room we are talking about 5 devices. For HomePod that is $1,750. For ALL Echo's it's $500. If you were smart and did a mix of say 2 Echo's and the rest Dot's: $320 (At the $40/dot price point, I picked mine up at $30/ea). That is a HUGE price difference. The Dot's were so cheap that I stuck a few in bathrooms as well for even better coverage and it's awesome.
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Putting aside the privacy concerns, the home automation + home assistant combo is actually pretty useful. It definitely beats fumbling through apps to do smart home stuff. Since getting an Echo, I notice my wife constantly changing the temperature on the Nest because, well, it's so easy to bark out a command when you don't want to get up or don't have your phone handy. Prior to getting an echo, I only used my Wemo sw…
I get the temperature from my Apple Watch 90% of the time but I have been using Alexa more and more now that I have Echo/Dot's everywhere because I don't put my watch on until the end of my morning routine. I'm growing quite fond of saying "Alexa, Good Morning" and my lights coming on, it giving me the temperature, and it playing the 2-3 "news brief"'s I've picked. I'm VERY close to removing a few daily short podcast…
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Get a Sonos?
I wound up buying a cheap AmazonBasics Bluetooth device to transmit music to my receiver. It works well enough. I suppose I could get on with Sonos, but I don't want to replace my current working system with all-new hardware.
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I wound up buying a cheap AmazonBasics Bluetooth device to transmit music to my receiver. It works well enough. I suppose I could get on with Sonos, but I don't want to replace my current working system with all-new hardware.
Does Chromecast Audio do what you need?
I'd have to move my music off of my iPhone or maintain two music libraries. Neither are more acceptable than the status quo.
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I agree with everything you said about Apple’s MO. But this thing is expensive. Siri almost seems grafted on (they wouldn’t even let people try it at the announcement) to a speaker that was already in development. I wonder if this will be the iPod HiFi 2.0. Sounds great, too expensive, no one cares. I’m curious about it but have no real interest in it as a speaker or assistant. Reviews should prove interesting.
>> But this thing is expensive. I don't necessarily agree. I was shopping around for multi-room audio solutions, namely Sonos. I don't think the Homepod price is that out of whack compared to Sonos or Google Home Max. And this is coming from someone who generally finds Apple products way overpriced.
1) How big is that market?
and
2) It doesn’t do multi-room at launch
This all just feels odd to me. Like it slipped through a hole in Apple’s process.
HomePod costs $349. I know Apple products are pricy but 3.5x is insane. I have a (Google) Home mini and its fun - it isn't really that useful but ok for $30-50. While history has proof that Apple is able to extract higher prices, I feel this product will fail at this price point.
You really can't compare a HomePod and a Google Home Mini. As an owner of the latter I know that the sound quality is absolute crap - I never play music through it. Meanwhile, that's the whole reason to get a HomePod. It's better compared to expensive Sonos speaker setups.