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HomePod Mini

apple.com

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Re: HomePod Mini

#301

Post by lilyball »

reikonomusha wrote: post #279
jshen wrote: post #174

I'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…

Mine bricked itself on an update. No way to hard reset it. Apple would repair it only for $1 less than the full cost of the device.

I’ve never even heard of a HomePod bricking itself, nor does it sound plausible that Apple would charge to fix a device they bricked themselves, especially at $1 less than the price of a new device. I feel like you’re omitting something here.

Re: HomePod Mini

#302

Post by xionon »

whalesalad wrote: post #297
kart23 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AppleTV does this. I believe you can use it as a headless sound machine. Mine has optical out.

Unfortunately, the newest models do not have optical audio out, only HDMI.

Re: HomePod Mini

#303

Post by fomine3 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #284
dweekly wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I'm not pretty sure. Now Siri sends voice to cloud after triggered by wake up word.

Re: HomePod Mini

#304

Post by lilyball »

ibdf wrote: post #290

I 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 a…

They already announced earlier this year that they had a new program to integrate third-party music services. And in today’s event they specifically called out “services like Pandora and Amazon [Music]” as being available “in the coming months”. I don’t know whether Spotify is included, but I would hope so.

Re: HomePod Mini

#305

Post by lilyball »

varenc wrote: post #233

The U1 ultra-wideband chip means the HomePod can be used a fixed reference point for general purpose indoor location finding! Would be great for AirTags, if those ever become a reality. At the moment, the U1 is only be used for the nifty hold-your-iphone-close move, but I have no doubt Apple has other applications in mind. Ultra-wideband is amazing for its indoor high-resolution position finding. Down to the inch is…

I’d really like to see a future where HomePod Minis with the U1 enable my phone to precisely track its own location as I move throughout the house, with automations as I go from room to room, or with songs following me between rooms, or letting me ask Siri for a precise location of my phone.

Re: HomePod Mini

#306

Post by fomine3 »

jagger27 wrote: post #23

The coolest part to me is that they're using the S5 watch SoC to power it. Pretty cool that Apple's various hardware teams can just grab a part off the shelf to use in a completely different class of device. I'd love to see them reintroduce AirPort routers powered by an A-series chip.

Watch SoC on speaker looks cool and the use existed chip makes sense, but is it practically differ than just buying Broadcom or MediaTek chips?

Re: HomePod Mini

#307

Post by OkGoDoIt »

fearoffish wrote: post #262
tensor wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's true of Google too. It only hits their servers when you "hey Google."

I think the difference stated above, was that for messaging, calls and other phone related activities it’s not sent. I’m not sure you can say the same for Google.

My interpretation of that was your voice query is still sent to Apple and interpreted as whatever text/command, but the contents of the text message are not pulled from iCloud, instead they are pulled from within your local network directly from your iPhone. So all of your requests still do get processed in the cloud on Apple servers, but they don’t wind up with copies of the content of your messages (unless of course you enable iCloud back ups or iMessage cloud sync). This is definitely an improvement versus how things work on the Google side, but it’s a far cry from nothing at all getting sent to Apple.

Re: HomePod Mini

#308

Post by steve_adams_86 »

jshen wrote: post #282
austinkhale wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t own one personally, but I use one at the office daily. They sound incredible. I have some google smart speakers and they’re pretty underwhelming in terms of sound. The voice assistant is excellent, though.

I’d much prefer the sound of the HomePod but it’s hard to justify the expense when I have something that works fine. If I could do it over, I’d absolutely spend way more for the better audio experience. While I use the assistant for things apart from music, music is still more than 99% of what comes out of that thing.

Re: HomePod Mini

#309

Post by steve_adams_86 »

turtlebits wrote: post #195
myrandomcomment wrote: post #146

So here is the thing I struggle with. I have a NAS. On it is my media (music, videos, photos) collection. I do not have a subscription to Apple Music, or the reset of the streaming services and I not want one. So how do I play my own music collection with this? Right now to do this I have an AppleTV on every TV. I have an app on the AppleTV called MrMC which is basically a paid for port of Kodi for the AppleTV. The M…

The HomePod can act as audio out for any Mac/iOS device. The music app on Mac can also stream directly to HomePod. (Or you can send system audio to it as well)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe audio out for Mac still doesn’t support stereo pairing?

Re: HomePod Mini

#310

Post by schrodinger »

haswell wrote: post #229
qchris wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

I'm pretty deep into the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, Watch, iPad, MBP), but when it comes to smart speakers, I've always used a combination of Echo and Alexa-compatible Sonos devices. The Alexa devices have always bothered me. Not just because of the baseline privacy concerns, but because it seems so damn easy to activate the trigger word on accident. The absolute worst part being a false positive activation of my Sonos…

Can Homepod Mini control Sonos?
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