“People in Australia, the UK and USA are starting to receive their pre-ordered HomePods and getting to experience its sound quality in person for the first time,” Guilherme Rambo reports for 9to5Mac.
“HomePods are arriving to customers with iOS 11.2.5, build 15D59 installed,” Rambo reports. “The interesting thing about it is that this is technically a beta.”
“This particular build was released the same day as iOS 11.2.5 beta 7, part of the ‘living on beta’ program that Apple was running with employees,” Rambo reports. “We should probably see the first public HomePod update soon, with a new build of iOS 11.2.5 or when iOS 11.3 ships. ”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “Living on beta” is something with which longtime Apple TV owners are very familiar.
Eight months to ship a beta product sad
if this is beta i cant wait for the real thing so far its been flawless… setup took less then 2 minutes, sound great, the most responsive and accurate siri i have used on any apple device. Bass is deep sound is clear.
Six years of development to create a single speaker that (apparently) fills a room — any room — with great sound.
Totally NOT sad.
HomePod just set up. Wow sound is great!
When the product is ready, Ship It !! When the OS is ready, ship that too. It’s nice when those happen on the same day.
I don’t care, I’m off to pick up my HomePod in a few minutes. Maybe by the time I get home, 11.3 will ship 😉
😉
…or maybe not.
Yup because Apple uses its customers for testing rather than bothering to do itself! Apple – It kinda works.
I’m not getting paid to be a Apple beta tester. Thats Apple’s job not mine. PERIOD……
Oh great. More news that’ll be blown out of proportion. Would people have rather waiting until all Homepods were given the upgrade that really only put up the “full release” flag? How do we know the HomePod even needs that? After all, it really ins’t the same full OS that is used on iPhones, so how do we know that it completely follows the iPhone’s beta and release naming conventions? Ugh, people. Devin Prater Assistive Technology Instructor
, Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Word, and Powerpoint instructor certified by World Services for the Blind
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Well, mine arrived this morning.
First a couple of personal comments:
I am a professional sound engineer (among other things; my latest sound system was a 60,000-watt system capable of easily handling outdoor rock concerts with up to 3,000 people in FOH).
That said, I am also relatively deaf (two go hand-in-hand, eh?) with diminished hearing above 3K. I do, however, have hearing aids that restore my hear to 10K to reasonable levels (I am 62 years old, so don’t give me too hard of a time about this).
The home pod was easy to set up, other than I had to turn on two-factor authentication, which I generally don’t use because it’s a PITA.
My office is an acoustic nightmare with gear hanging all over the place.
Let’s just say that based on all the hype I’ve been hearing for the past couple of months, I was expected something super great. It was not. Mind you, the HomePod sounds *good*, but the sound is not as fantastic as I would have expected based on all the reviews I’ve been reading.
As I walk across the the sound field, there is a *small* amount of HF phasing (multiple tweeters, this is *going* to happen, that’s simple physics; unless you have a single point-source, you will get phase distortion).
I do agree with the one review that claimed the mid-range is a bit lacking. HF is good. Bass is reasonable for a 4″ driver size.
One thing that I’m a bit disappointed with is the “room-filling volume level.” Yes, some highly-compressed and over-engineered tracks do sound “loud”, but tracks with a high dynamic range do leave a bit to be desired.
All said, the HomePod is a *reasonable* piece of $400 audio gear. Nothing spectacular for the price, but not terrible, either. Comparing the HomePod against Echos, etc., is no different from comparing some other $400 piece of audio gear against a $100 piece of audio gear.
That said, Siri works well for me (and I’m not even an Apple Music subscriber, I’ve got 40 GB of purchased tracks that I’m perfectly happy with) and I like the wireless operation. It works great with my iMac Pro (just select it from the audio output menu).
All said, if you don’t mind spending $400 on a single speaker and you own OS X and iOS gear, you can’t go wrong with a HomePod. If you’re a true audiophile, you’d probably be better off with something better if sound quality is what you’re after; Siri is a big plus if she works for you.
I think I have to lower my opinion of the HomePod.
I decided to watch a video and send the audio from from iMac Pro to the HomePod. There is a 1 second or so latency that completely destroys your ability to watch video (lip-sync is way off). Until Apple fixes this latency problem, the HomePod is only useful for listening to recorded music; it’s inability to sync properly with the video greatly diminishes its utility.
Beta leaders gets ya beta products
HP, sounds ok except for too much bass, reading the posts it seems I am the only one who doesn’t like the bass, is there a way to adjust the bass, or is it the position in my room or what it is placed on affecting it.,,
I like bass on my Bose speaker and Zeppelin but must say I am not liking so much the Homepod?
Try placing it in a more central location within the space, if you can, as opposed to next to a wall.