Apple offers two smart speakers available: The second generation HomePod — a powerful, Siri-enabled smart speaker —that’s 6.6-inch tall with a high-excursion woofer,five horn-loaded tweeters, and support for Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos. There’s also the strong-selling HomePod mini.
Both Thread-enabled options offer a mesh fabric and backlit touch surface, support for stereo pair functionality and multiroom audio, and a temperature and humidity sensor.
So, which one is for you?
Apple’s follow-up to its 2020 HomePod is an exceptional speaker that’s not only loud (even for larger rooms) but well-balanced thanks to clear lows, mids, and highs.
Along with its Apple-designed high-excursion woofer for deep bass, there are five tweeters, angled slightly upward for optimized delivery, along with “beamforming” calibration tech that bounces audio around the room to sense surfaces (like walls) to deliver a more balanced experience.
That, and there is support for Apple Music tracks with lossless streaming and 360-degree Spatial Audio (with Dolby Atmos support), which also sound great when paired with an Apple TV 4K box for television shows and movies (especially in a stereo pair).
The HomePod Mini also delivers rich acoustics—surprisingly, really, as it’s out of a much smaller enclosure—but the full-range driver and dual passive radiators (a speaker diaphragm with no magnet) yield solid bass performance and crisp high frequencies.
Despite its small size, the HomePod Mini also impresses with decent volume levels for small- to medium-sized rooms… But pound for pound, in the performance department, HomePod (2nd gen) wins.
MacDailyNews Take: Saltzman also looks at price, smart home capabilities, features, and design and, in the end, picks – unsurprisingly – Apple’s flagship HomePod (2nd. gen) over the HomePod mini.
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