Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “HomePod Mini Review: Big Sound, Tiny Box!”.
All right, what’s up mkbhd here, so homepod mini this little guy right here, it’s out a surprising amount of you guys have been asking about it. I say surprising, because the original homepod was not exactly a smash hit. It was a 350 dollar siri enabled smart speaker that sounded amazing, but didn’t really do a whole lot. So yeah in my review, i literally called it the dumbest smart speaker because it was, but now this homepod mini kind of flips the script as far as what you would expect and priorities for someone looking for a little smart speaker like this, i’m actually going to Talk about sound quality last because i think it’s like one of the last things you’re actually looking for and expecting when you’re buying a smaller smart speaker like this. So let’s talk about my week with the homepod mini. So, first of all, the design of the homepod mini, i think, is pretty nice honestly.
This is about as good as a compact, smart speaker can look without a real functional display. It’S only about three inches tall. It’S got this mesh fabric all the way around the animations that play while you’re, using that little circular top display are pretty neat. They go all the way to the edges of the circular display and the thing still feels premium when you touch it. If you ever do, but there are some things that feel less elegant about this one in particular, so one i have the black one, it has a black plastic top and if you touch this black plastic to change the volume or change, songs or anything like that, You instantly leave fingerprints, so if you plan on doing that, maybe get the white one. So it doesn’t look like cheap fingerprinty plastic quite as fast and then two it still has a permanently attached. Braided power, cable that comes out the back.
But now it terminates in a usbc port and then it actually does come with in the box. The apple standard, 20 watt usbc power, brick, this white one, it’s crazy. We actually have to specify that it comes with a power brick now, but yes, thankfully it does.
But i also think it looks kind of odd with the black cable and then the white brick. But really my complaint is we all know this thing is going to plug in behind a dresser or a nightstand or in a corner somewhere. I think it would have been nice if it were, like a 90 degree plug or something smaller, like we’ve seen in some other smart speakers, but it’s not so that part feels kind of inelegant too.
But overall, i’m just going to say i think homepod mini is still a great design for something without a screen. I still prefer smart speakers with screens, but this one doesn’t look weird in a kitchen or in a bedroom or anywhere else in a house. It’S small. It’S unobtrusive: this is how a mini speaker should be so then the reason people are buying these cheaper, smaller smart speakers is just as the entry point to turning your home into a smart home, basically a lot of people’s first time. Doing that and in theory a siri enabled speaker should be the ideal place to start so. My take is this for homepod mini the more apple things that you use the deeper you are in apple world, the better.
This thing is so: okay, if you don’t use that many apple services, but you just have an iphone. Let’S say you set this thing up and you can talk to siri and we’ve all seen the gradual improvements on siri over time. She knows more facts now.
You know she knows how tall some more buildings are. You can ask her to do more things. You can listen to the news or get the weather or all the classic stuff.
Like that, hey siri, tell me a joke. I saw a movie about how ships are put together. It was riveting, hey siri, tell me a good joke. What does it cost to hire a spy? I could tell you, but then i’d have to bill. You siri can do timers and, yes, she can do more than one timer at once, despite not having a functional screen to keep track of them all. And, of course, when your iphone is on the same wi-fi network, you can send and receive texts or start phone calls and it glows green.
While it’s doing that. So that’s already pretty convenient. But if you just add, also apple music to the things from apple that you use suddenly homepod becomes a lot more useful. So now you can ask siri for songs or playlists or ask what song is playing and she’ll.
Tell you what it is, but the best feature, the most impressive actually from the u1 chip and the new iphones is this beam feature? All you have to do is touch your iphone to the homepod in just the right spot on the front or the back, and it pretty much instantly beams, whatever music you’re playing to the speaker and when the speaker’s playing music, you can touch them and it like. Snatches, the music back to playing from the phone it’s pretty sweet it takes a few, tries to maybe get it just right to press it in the right spot. But once you find it, it’s a sweet demo and the fact that it works so well, and so quickly is the most impressive part to me. It’S pretty quick but also side.
Note. This only works with other devices that are in your family or on your network. Already so, if you in theory had a friend come over, i think it would be cool if they could put their phone up against the speaker and it would like give them a link to or just tell you what song is playing. That’S like a free feature. Suggestion apple feel free to use that that would be cool, but still even on top of that, if you use apple music, the multi-room listening experience is so easy on the drop down of the iphone i’m insanely jealous of how quickly and easily you can create a Stereo pair or just light up, every speaker, you have at once with the same music. So if you use apple music and you have two home pods, it’s really easy to just play the same song on both.
You can also just say: hey assistant, play this everywhere and it’ll just light up everything it’s fast and then there is also pandora support for all these features as well. So if you use pandora for your music or podcasts, you can do all this beaming and all this stuff as well. But there seems to be a little bit more of a delay like a second and a half delay if you’re using pandora, but it works. So natural question, because we didn’t see it at launch what about spotify? Of course i use spotify for all my music and the answer is apparently it’s potentially coming soon and it’s up to spotify. So we saw spotify support come to the apple watch. I believe they could be working on it. I hope to see it soon.
Fingers crossed because again just beaming it around easy, multi-speaker support all that stuff is sweet. So then, if you keep adding apple stuff, if you use apple podcasts, you can ask siri or homepod to start playing your podcast or picking up where you left off. If you use an apple tv later this year, you’ll be able to use one or a pair of homepod minis in stereo for dolby atmos quality sound.
You can use siri to ask for directions somewhere. It’Ll automatically drop the results in apple maps on your iphone. You can ask it to take notes: it’ll drop it in the notes app in your iphone, and it can read from your calendar if you use apple’s calendar stuff too, and then there’s like this final boss mode galaxy brain super plugged into the ecosystem, feature where, if You have an entire family of people who all use apple devices.
At the same time, then, you can talk to them all at once through the intercom feature, so you can speak a message to siri and it’ll just light up everyone’s apple watches and iphones and every other homepod in the whole house. So you can say: hey siri intercom, what’s good everybody, what’s good everybody, there’s a there’s a homepod over there so play the message worked pretty fast, so the moral of the story is the more plugged in you are to apple stuff and the more apple services and Devices you use the better homepod is for you and then, if you want to get started with a smart home, you have to get home kit enabled accessories, and then you slowly start to build it up from there. But i think that’s where it’s smart to start. Peeking over the walls of that garden, a little bit and looking at the competition and compatibility, because if that’s really, your only goal is to get into the smart home game. Amazon’S alexa products have a zillion, more choices and all sorts of different sizes and form factors.
Some with screens and, most importantly, by far the most compatibility with smart home stuff and there’s something like a hundred thousand alexa skills and then in second place is google home and all that smart home ecosystem and then so in, like a distant third place. Just as far as overall compatibility, you have apple stuff with home kit, but what i will say is this guy definitely sounds massively better than any of the other speakers. I just talked about like that’s how homepod kind of started with the original homepod focused on sound quality, this one, it’s obviously much smaller, so you’re not expecting nearly as much sound, and it also has less drivers, but it’s still for something three inches tall gives you A lot of audio and there’s a pretty good amount of bass too, and clarity at all volume levels where others like google, home mini and alexa dot, which are similar in size anyway, definitely sound much worse at those higher volumes. So this homepod is getting louder and sounding better, and the sound is also roughly even from all directions. So, no matter where you are in a room, it’s going to sound pretty much the same, unlike some of the more directional setups like from google and from amazon, and on top of that they’ve got the s5 chip in here, which they say is analyzing the music You’Re playing 180 times per second and applying complex tuning algorithms to make sure your music sounds its best now i don’t know how much of a difference that makes you can’t turn it on or off it’s just kind of the way it sounds, and it sounds fine Sounds really good, but if that’s something you’re focused on, if that’s something you care about, is still sound quality and something really small. This is great for that. Putting a pair of them in stereo is kind of like this room-filling sound.
It’S really good. So, at the end of the day, the 99 question is homepod mini actually good. Is it actually worth it? So here’s how i’d answer that, if it’s a good deal you’re after well, you could get three google home minis for the same price and put them in three different rooms to get you started.
So it’s not the best deal if it’s the best compatibility you’re. After for starting off your smart home, well, amazon’s alexa dot is around the same price. If not less, you can get a more expensive one, but that’s going to be dramatically more compatible with way more smart home stuff to start so it’s not the most compatible and if it’s just the best assistant you’re after well, you could look to either google or Amazon, to give you a better assistant than siri, i still think that’s true, but if it’s that seamless experience with the apple ecosystem and sound quality that you’re after well, that’s when you get the homepod. So that’s been it thanks for watching and i’ll catch. You guys very soon in the next one peace .