“I did eventually hear one [of Apple’s new HomePod units] next to a Sonos PLAY:3 and an original Amazon Echo,” Chris Velazco writes for Engadget. “Musically, it blew them both out of the water.”
“But first, it’s worth discussing the HomePod’s design,” Velazco writes. “It looks like a speaker. The Echo, meanwhile, looks like a tube, and Google Home could be mistaken for an air freshener.”
“The existing crop of intelligent home assistants sort of suck at audio,” Velazco writes. “The HomePod however, sounded crisp and bright no matter the musical genre fed through it — it rendered The Eagles as well it did Kendrick Lamar. As a reminder, there’s a huge woofer and seven tweeters inside, all meant to make audio sound as vivid as possible no matter where you are in a room. It works.”
Apple’s HomePod offers room-filling sound:
“If listening to the HomePod was like listening to a CD,” Velazco writes, “then audio through the Echo sounded like AM radio.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Cupertino, we have winner!
We just wish, like nearly everything that comes out of Tim Cook’s Apple, that it shipped at least 12 months earlier. (That goes especially double for Multi-Touch Drag and Drop and the Files app (read: Finder) for iPad Pro!)
So, HomePod is obviously late, but it’s not nearly too late (this is a nascent market, after all) and it will quickly own the profitable premium end of the smart speaker market shortly after it begins to ship. Also, there are two other important things it has that no competitor has: The Apple brand and “Pod” in the name. The power that those two wield should never be discounted.
SEE ALSO:
Apple HomePod takes on Amazon Echo – June 6, 2017
Apple reveals HomePod smart home music speaker – June 5, 2017