Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 302 posts

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#291

Post by _phred »

jrowley wrote: post #127
AlanYx wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you still want them repaired, there's a guy online (Nic's Fix) who runs a mail-in $60 repair business for dead first gen HomePods.

He even live streams fixing them. Here is a video, more on his channel https://youtu.be/FfGiuh_QH3M And I think it works out to about $80 once you include shipping. Ive got a dead one right now - trying to decide if I want to source air gun to fix it myself or just send it to him. Less than $100 to have it fixed is kind of a steal.

Very helpful y’all, thanks! Gonna see if I feel up to tackling the repair (good excuse to buy a reflow setup) and or get in touch with this gentleman. Cheers!

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#292

Post by veqq »

holistio wrote: post #54

I have a pair of original HomePods. Love them dearly. Just read through the page and couldn't figure out what's new. I was expecting much more from a new version.

Your Chinese thread's too old to reply to, sadly. But as another learner of many languages: check out "Colloquial Chinese: by Ping-cheng T’ung and David E. Pollard. (Not newer versions by other authors!)

It covers the language only in Pinyin, covering the core grammar etc. very quickly, and giving you big dialogs with a lot of vocabulary. If you work hard with it, (ignoring introductory time figuring out the sound system) a month with 2-3 hours a day will give you about 3000 words of vocabulary and a good handle on the language.

While the structure of Chinese is very simple, besides getting used to the phonetics, the writing system constitutes the majority difficulty of the language (but very helpful to understand a lot of complex vocabulary, due to its composition) so ignoring it first will help a lot. The normal Chinese textbooks will cover as much material as this small book in 4-5 volumes, intended for multiple years of university classes.

To then learn how to read:

The books "The Most Common Radicals" and then "Rapid Literacy in Chinese" are amazing. ("Intensive Spoken Chinese" is meant to be done first, but the Colloquial book is better in my opinion.) I covered these two books in about 40 hours.

Then use various readers like "A new China. Intermediate reader of modern Chinese" by Chou Chih-ping, Chiang J., Eagar J or read forums, checking what each character/group of them is in the dictionary to build vocabulary.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#293

Post by deanc »

plusminusplus wrote: post #110
deanc wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're stuck with handoff or airplay.

You can't link Spotify to it? What does the voice assistant on a speaker do if not "Siri play Shooting Star by Bag Raiders"? Surely you can link Apple Music?

You cannot. It will try to play it with Apple Music, which you have to have a subscription for.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#294

Post by holistio »

veqq wrote: post #292
holistio wrote: post #54

I have a pair of original HomePods. Love them dearly. Just read through the page and couldn't figure out what's new. I was expecting much more from a new version.

Your Chinese thread's too old to reply to, sadly. But as another learner of many languages: check out "Colloquial Chinese: by Ping-cheng T’ung and David E. Pollard. (Not newer versions by other authors!) It covers the language only in Pinyin, covering the core grammar etc. very quickly, and giving you big dialogs with a lot of vocabulary. If you work hard with it, (ignoring introductory time figuring out the sound sy…

wow, I didn't realise people check out profiles here

thanks for the comment, I'll make sure to check these out asap

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#295

Post by odysseus »

novok wrote: post #284
abirch wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're a google household but I'm interested in switching. Do you know if it's possible to use YouTube Music or do I need to do a line change and replace all of my Google Hubs?

If it's not apple music, it's a pain in the ass.

And even if it's iTunes Match and not Apple Music, it's still a pain. Half the time it tells me it's playing the song I wanted and in reality it's playing something completely different. The other half the time it can't find the song.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#296

Post by odysseus »

Reason077 wrote: post #185
novok wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siri is really bad on many basic things that they could hard code. Like 'turn off lights' become 'turning on the the lights'. There are many weird ass bitflips for basics like that in Siri that is incredibly frustrating that alexa and google are significantly better in understanding reliably. Whats even worse is Siri could hard code these basics and not use ML which tends to work %90 of the time, but bitflips %10 of…

I find Siri is very good at recognising my words accurately. Better than Google, in my experience, but that could be due to differences in mic quality in the various devices. Where Siri sucks is at actually comprehending instructions beyond some fairly basic commands. "Here's something I looked up on the web" is it's default response to most of my outside-of-the-box queries. It seems weird that we still have such a d…

"I can tell you that if you ask again from your iPhone."

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#297

Post by odysseus »

1123581321 wrote: post #248
Hippocrates wrote: post #137

I 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 keep Siri disabled on them because of small children, and I felt I got full value just from the audio quality and being a nice Airplay target. But, I recognize that other people have little need for its audio quality, but really wanted a non-Alexa smart voice device, and it was dismaying for them to pay $350 for a household Siri device that was unreliable. Like you said, since the OG HomePod came out, a lot more pe…

How old were your children when they figured out they could control Siri? One of my kids tried it once but Siri couldn't recognize the voice and refused to respond.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#298

Post by odysseus »

yowzadave wrote: post #130

HomePod is the most annoying piece of technology that I still frequently use. I was an early buyer of the first version, but this update doesn't address any of the complaints that I have about it: 1. No audio line-in! It's a $300 speaker, it sounds great...sometimes I'd like to be able to just plug something into it. If you have a record player, you have to have a separate set of speakers for it, because this thing w…

I also had #3 happen many times, but my wife just laughs at Siri being dumb and is usually just thankful /somebody/ stopped that timer or turned down that music.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#299

Post by odysseus »

Why does Apple:

* Allow you to set white noise / background sounds for sleeping

* But -doesn't- allow you to turn off the glowing light on the top of the HomePod while playing those background sounds (in a pitch dark room while you're trying to sleep)

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#300

Post by 1123581321 »

odysseus wrote: post #297
1123581321 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep Siri disabled on them because of small children, and I felt I got full value just from the audio quality and being a nice Airplay target. But, I recognize that other people have little need for its audio quality, but really wanted a non-Alexa smart voice device, and it was dismaying for them to pay $350 for a household Siri device that was unreliable. Like you said, since the OG HomePod came out, a lot more pe…

How old were your children when they figured out they could control Siri? One of my kids tried it once but Siri couldn't recognize the voice and refused to respond.

Early elementary for the older kids and pre-k for the younger who benefited from their sibling trying. They weren't initially good at it, but I learned they would try a lot until they figured it out once they could say "Hey Siri" correctly enough to get any response.
Post reply on HN