Apple last month announced the return of the HomePod (2nd generation), a powerful smart speaker that delivers next-level acoustics in a gorgeous, iconic design. Packed with Apple innovations and Siri intelligence, HomePod offers advanced computational audio for a groundbreaking listening experience, including support for immersive Spatial Audio tracks.
With convenient new ways to manage everyday tasks and control the smart home, users can now create smart home automations using Siri, get notified when a smoke or carbon monoxide alarm is detected in their home, and check temperature and humidity in a room — all hands-free.
In hindsight, it’s not entirely surprising the HomePod was discontinued in 2021, but it still felt strange that the company was removing what had previously been the cornerstone of its smart home strategy.
Earlier this month, the company announced an about-face. HomePod was returning. The speaker looked nearly identical to the product announced in 2018, but Apple promised even better sound, coupled with improved smart home functionality. While the company won’t disclose how long it’s been working on this iteration of the product, a spokesperson confirmed with TechCrunch that the revival is due to customer demand, noting, “We really did hear from our customers this growing interest for more powerful and richer acoustics of a larger speaker.” In other words, this wasn’t part of some secret plan to bring the product back all along.
“We deeply studied the learnings from the first HomePod and HomePod mini,” Matthew Costello, Apple’s vice president, Hardware Engineering and Operations, told TechCrunch, “and we introduced the new HomePod when it was able to achieve our broad range of experience goals.”
The timing of the new HomePod’s arrival as Matter is beginning to ramp up is presumably not a coincidence. An Apple spokesperson tells TechCrunch it’s “really excited” about the new standard. “The new Matter smart home connectivity standard gives users more choice and interoperability to connect a wide variety of smart home accessories across different ecosystems,” says Costello. “With support for Thread, the new HomePod can serve as a border router and securely enable communications to Thread-based accessories located throughout the home.”
MacDailyNews Take: With the mini on the market, it never made any sense to remove the HomePod. Even if it wasn’t a huge moneymaker. We’re glad it’s back!
Having one product called “HomePod mini” is stupid. It directly leads a potential customer to ask, “Well, where’s the real HomePod?” “Or the HomePod Max?” You know, for every “mini” Apple product there’s at least one big brother (Mac mini, iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 13 mini).
“So, where’s the real HomePod?”
“Oh, that? “It failed.”
That’s not a huge confidence boost for “HomePod mini.” A prospective buyer might rightly wonder, “Hmm, for how long is Apple going to remain committed to this ‘mini’ product if its parent is already canceled?” – MacDailyNews, November 1, 2021
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It all comes down to Siri, which, as far as I can tell, hasn’t improved in years and might be regressing. “I can’t do that” or offering to send Safari results to my iPhone are the most common replies to my questions. The original Homepod sounds great still but what is the new Matter standard going to do to make Siri smarter? It won’t.
I agree Nick and it seems that with Carplay, now you have to wait for a few seconds before you speak after every response or she doesn’t hear you. This is new in the last update, very frustrating.
I’ve noticed it asking follow-up questions recently as if to clarify something but then mostly just treats the reply as a new query and gets confused. I basically only use it for very specific tasks like asking the weather or reminders, even then it’s a 90% success rate at best. sometimes i’ll get a reply on both my iPhone and iPad (insted of my homepod) and they’ll be slightly out of sync so the voices are just talking over one another so I can’t understand either.
Voice recognition interfaces have been offered by Apple since August 1993. Casper was great for its day. Apple let it languish for well over a decade. (Yes, your 2000 era Mac had a voice interface though it was limited and virtually no one used it.)
Now Siri seems to be languishing too. There have been no major improvements to Siri in quite some time. With the new M2 chips with their neural engines, Siri should run extremely fast and do many tasks without reaching back to Apple for answers. True, there will always be the cases and types of questions where Siri must “phone home” to get the answer, but as a high profile service across most devices Apple ships, Siri’s evolution should be progressing by leaps and bound. Unfortunately, it’s not.
Yeah, being told by Siri that the internet connection is not strong enough to PAUSE THE CURRENTLY PLAYING MUSIC does not inspire confidence.
What the new HomePod needed was a way to also sync with the HomePod Mini so you could create a wireless surround sound experience.