One feature I wish Apple would build into this would be a 3.5mm jack or optical audio out. I have a lot of very nice speakers already in my house, but no multi-room audio, or voice assistant. I know the echos can do this, but I don’t want them spying on me.
HomePod Mini
281–290 of 446 posts
Re: HomePod Mini
#282I'm a big apple fan, got a homepod last christmas, and it's the worst apple product that I've ever owned. Truly disappointing. Siri fails to recognize commands that work great on alexa or google, the features it does have often fail (if I transfer a podcast from playing on my phone to play on the homepod, my phone often fails to sync with the location of my homepod). There's no way I will buy one of these until I hea…
Really?? I love mine. I use it every day for Hue bulb activations, playing music, timers, etc. and it does the job perfectly. It doesn’t answer all the same answers as the Google Assistant but I feel like that’s worth the privacy trade off.
A $30 echo will do that. I have a few of those, why spend $200 for a HomePod if that’s all it is.
Re: HomePod Mini
#283HomePod mini works with your iPhone for requests like hearing your messages or notes, so they are completed on device without revealing that information to Apple. This is the big differentiating feature, along with the seamless integration within the rest of Apple's product line. EDIT: HomePod does this too but it was not at a price point nor size that competed with other assistants.
I don't think Apple understands what 'world class' assistant means.
I've tried their intercom feature on an iPhone using Hey Siri. The message doesn't get recorded if you don't speak english. It works fine if you press and hold side button tho (my preferred way to use Siri anyway).
I would probably consider Homepod or Homepod mini if they've got batteries and bluetooth. Heck they could've even used MagSafe chargers for them. Now I've got two Soundcore Motion+ that got amazing hifi sound.
Re: HomePod Mini
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't even really use any other Apple products, and have never really been particularly comfortable with smart assistants, but I have to say that the steps that they've taken here with E2E, non-AppleID-tied identifiers, on-device computation, and of course the really good price point have got me seriously considering a purchase from them for the first time in a long time. For my family members that already have App…
re: on-device computation, you'll note from the presentation that they said that no data is sent to Apple _until you say "Hey Siri"_. They're still doing transcription in the cloud which requires sending your voice for Apple to process and store. I have no issues personally with using cloud services like this but they very much used weasley language in the presentation and website to obscure the fact that Apple's clo…
Pretty sure they do transcribe locally and only send text to cloud to interpret it. So still not private, but no audio is sent (unless for special cases).
Re: HomePod Mini
#285Curious how much market share this homepod line has. My gut feel is that Amazon has the lion's share, followed by Google and everyone else has crumbs at the bottom.
I also think the market is pretty saturated if not about to taper. Amazon and Google have been all over this market for years and there's just no big value prop. 99% of the use is just as a smart speaker. I'd bet very few do home automation. Some are doing a bit of voice commerce if they're bought into the Amazon ecosystem. Apple doesn't offer much beyond cool product design. If someone was going to bust open this space it would be Spotify.
Re: HomePod Mini
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
It feels slower than my old Amazon Echo which is certainly using a crappier chip than the A8.
Doesn't seem slow to me. Mine responds quite quickly.
Maybe depends on country. iCloud is silly slow abroad. Takes 3 minutes to download 30 second video on a gig connection.
Re: HomePod Mini
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so sure on PoE (great for technically inclined folks, not the general public, and if you're really set on PoE you could use a reverse injector to take power off the ethernet and break power/data out at the device) but it would be smashing if HomePods had WiFi mesh support (802.11k/v/r) and Apple used them to challenge Google Next Wifi and Amazon's Eero offerings (because the UX on Nest Wifi and Eero is so good, b…
802.11s is the mesh technology you would want. The others are, I think, for roaming devices (literally mobile radios). A bunch of access points already have this, though most all implement mesh in their own, proprietary standard.
You're right, thanks for the correction. The standards I listed are on the mobile devices for seamless roaming between access points, 802.11s is the mesh standard proper [1]. OpenWRT supports 802.11s [2], so I assume this protocol is trivial to support in wifi silicon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11s
[2] https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/mesh/80211s
Re: HomePod Mini
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
The footnote on that item is a bit disappointing: "Not compatible with non-HomeKit Thread devices."
Lol. Adopt an open protocol built by Nest and then make it exclusive to Apple devices. Very revolutionary indeed
Honestly it is very much Nest's decision to not support Homekit.
Re: HomePod Mini
#289One feature I wish Apple would build into this would be a 3.5mm jack or optical audio out. I have a lot of very nice speakers already in my house, but no multi-room audio, or voice assistant. I know the echos can do this, but I don’t want them spying on me.
Every single amazon echo device has a 3.5mm jack. And chromecast audios are going for $90 on eBay. I just want a simple solution to stream to my old speakers that isn't bluetooth or Amazon. I would've 100% bought a homepod mini if it had an audio out.
Re: HomePod Mini
#290I have the iPhone now and have always used MacBooks, but so far I have refused to buy other products from them because they insist in keeping the ecosystem so closed. No Spotify support is why I’m not buying this. I’ve had Spotify for years and I’m not looking to switch. And Siri, unfortunately for me it’s now a selling point. It struggles so much on my phone that I can’t bring myself to use it often enough to care about it.