If I'm following Apple's audio strategy correctly, I'm supposed to buy AirPods because I don't care about sound quality but the convenience is worth it, and I'm supposed to buy a HomePod because I really care about sound quality even though the ecosystem is inconvenient.
Apple HomePod 2nd Generation
151–160 of 302 posts
Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation
#152I F'in LOVE the OG HomePods. The sound quality absolutely slaps for the money/size/convenience. I've got one for music in the kitchen and it fills the room like a setup 3x as large. The bass response even at low volumes is remarkable, and clarity through the whole volume range is near perfection. Many of my guests have sourced their own OGs after hearing it. I've got another hooked up to my Apple TV (mono) that repla…
I might try it with the stereo setup for the home cinema tv setup. I agree on everything about Siri.
Though in the kitchen I bought those 100 bucks Ikea Sonos made speakers that sound amazing too. Much cheaper...
One issue though is that I can not pass thru audio over the Apple TV, so the cinema setup would only work when using the Apple TV.
Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation
#153Is it time to complain about Siri again? Sure is! I am an old-school Apple fanboy. I learned HyperCard on a Macintosh SE/30—I am that old. I still appreciate the Apple ecosystem, and I do like certain aspects of my HomePod mini…but Siri. C’mon. Get it together. It just fails at the absolute basics. https://imgur.com/q0H788Y The basics being: please add stuff to my shopping list when I yell it into the aether while in…
"Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes." "I'm sorry, I'm having trouble connecting to the internet. Please try again later."
"Isn't the pasta done by now? Hey Siri, what's the timer?"
"There are no timers set."
"$@*%#$&"
Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation
#154I would love to hear the inside story about why the old one was discontinued and it took so long for the v2. The HomePod mini is the "first device" we have given to our children. No screen, I am comfortable with apple privacy, access to music and podcasts, etc. The mini has shockingly good sound for $100 and what it is.
I was going to get one for my kid but don't want her to be able to ask arbitrary questions and basically access web search just yet. When I looked into it, the only way to accomplish this was to turn off Siri entirely, and just make it into a speaker for source iOS devices. Any chance they have more fine-grained controls for this yet?
Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation
#155Speaking of smart speakers, I'm moving to a new flat and I'm looking for some good old dumb speaker setup. The smartest that I'd let it get would be a Bleutooth dongle. As a recovering Audiophile, I'm gonna stay away from r/audiophile lest they temp me to sell my kidney to afford that extra 5% in "acoustic fidelity." Seriously, I'm happy with the 95%. Now, how do I go about putting together that sound system? Or in A…
Probably something active like the Q Acoustics M20, Triangle AIO Twin, JBL 305P, or Kali Audio In-5 (though the last two are monitors so you’d need a dac/preamp of some sort).
Just got a pair of Kali LP-6 last month for my desk setup and they're incredible for the price
Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation
#156The last HomePods sounded great, but it’s hard for me to imagine them taking off without fixing Siri. Siri is still remarkably dumb compared to Alexa and certainly when compared to GPT3.5 tools. If you ask Siri “What is 220°C in F” it will correctly hear the words you’re saying, then convert 220F to C. Because of this, I never use Siri outside of contexts I’m sure Apple has tested thoroughly (e.g. read my last text).
I thought that the main reason between the last generation of HomePod flopping was because they're so locked down. And apparently they still don't support Bluetooth streaming even though it has built-in Bluetooth?
Only a handful of techies cared that it was locked down. The problem with the original was the $350 price point.
Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it was U1? There are too many apple chips that it is easy to confuse now. I can't find anything on the page saying exactly which chip it is. Regardless it was a chip that was missing from the original but is in the Mini that made this feature work. That would be awesome, I would love some feature that it could actually be room aware and knowing where devices are in that space instead of just relative to your ph…
You would just name your homepods and ask siri where your phone is and it would reply "10ft away from you kitchen homepod".
What if your HomePod is against a wall and shares a wall with another room?
I could see that confusing in my place where I have 2 HomePods in my office against a wall that is shared with my living room.
Not discounting the idea, but without mapping I just see there being extra confusion.
Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation
#158I F'in LOVE the OG HomePods. The sound quality absolutely slaps for the money/size/convenience. I've got one for music in the kitchen and it fills the room like a setup 3x as large. The bass response even at low volumes is remarkable, and clarity through the whole volume range is near perfection. Many of my guests have sourced their own OGs after hearing it. I've got another hooked up to my Apple TV (mono) that repla…
I cannot get siri to text my Mom. I say “text Mom” and it would respond “what do you want to say to Dad?”. Both my parents are explicitly set to be Mom and Dad in my contacts, but Siri has its own logic for determining who I mean as “mom” or something. Siri is the worst part of the Apple ecosystem by far.
Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation
#159Seems like Apple executed the way Google should have with their Google Home Max. They've added stereo pairing, so you can have two of them sync up together and then connect them to an Apple TV 4k and you basically get a pretty nice wireless sound bar with Dolby Atmos enabled. Still, at $300 per pod, I really need Siri to do better than the "dumber than a bag of rocks" vibe she currently gives off for this to be at al…
> Instead, everyone I know that's an Apple fan uses Google Assistant, because it just works most of the time.
Really? I know lots of Apple fans and I've never seen any of them use Google Assistant on their iPhone or anything else. How do your friends do this? Via a Siri shortcut that passes requests through? Or by opening up a Google app every time they want to use the voice assistant?
Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation
#160Is it time to complain about Siri again? Sure is! I am an old-school Apple fanboy. I learned HyperCard on a Macintosh SE/30—I am that old. I still appreciate the Apple ecosystem, and I do like certain aspects of my HomePod mini…but Siri. C’mon. Get it together. It just fails at the absolute basics. https://imgur.com/q0H788Y The basics being: please add stuff to my shopping list when I yell it into the aether while in…
So Siri is mediocre at best, we also probably agree. Lots of things to complain about… how Siri works inconsistently across devices, punts most queries to a web search, etc. I appreciate that they aren’t overbuilding Siri though. Alexa (which recent experienced an unfortunate gutting vis layoffs) was amazons attempt to build a consumer ecosystem, which meant a lot of crappy features no one uses (notifications?). Siri…
> I still don’t know why anyone would buy a $300 HomePod. As the owner of two original HomePods, they’re fine.
Why did you get yours?