Apple’s New Speaker Compared to Sonos and Echo
The Apple HomePod is the company’s latest new gadget to pack a smart assistant, smart home hub and multi-room audio speaker in an overpriced, rounded body.
At $ 349, the HomePod is definitely hitting the smart home speaker market for prices. Amazon Echo costs $ 180 and Sonos Play: $ 1 – $ 199. Google Home costs $ 129. They all spy on you in one way or another.
Better sound, dumber assistant
Homepod is not foisted on consumers as a voice assistant or even as a hub for the smart home. Apple is betting it sounds pretty damn good and hoping that everything else will fall into place.
Among its competitors, HomePod seems to have the best audio setup of them all. There are 7 tweeters and a 4-inch subwoofer inside, and the HomePod supposedly adjusts its sound characteristics depending on its placement in the house. The Echo has never received high marks for sound quality with a single tweeter and subwoofer, while the Sonos range is the multi-room system of choice for coastal liberal elite and corporate bathrooms around the world.
Looking to create a multi-room audio system in honor of your Palo Alto overlords? It will set you back $ 700. This is closer to a thousand dollars than zero, so I hope you enjoy listening to tunes. You can achieve the same sound in multiple rooms with two Sonos Play: 1 speakers, all for under $ 400.
The company’s self-assessment of Siri’s shortcomings is evident in the way they describe it on their HomePod page:
“Thanks to Siri, HomePod can hear and answer questions from the most popular categories. Timers. Clock. Measurements. Translations. News. Sports. Weather. Motion. And general knowledge. He does a great job of doing what you want to know and do in your home. “
This description of what Siri can do pales in comparison to the skills that Alexa boasts thanks to its Alexa Skills Kit, an API for third-party developers to integrate an assistant into their apps.
HomeKit is trying to catch up with Alexa’s ubiquity
The HomePod can also act as a hub for the smart home, the newest HomeKit-compatible hub beyond the Apple TV (and your iOS device). This means you don’t need your phone every time you want to turn on the smart light and turn on the music – just shout into the void: “Hey Siri!” With an array of six microphones, it needs to hear you.
Ditching the phone in favor of permanent smart home control is great, but not uncommon. Basically, this is what makes the Echo best, and Amazon’s edge means it already has a foothold in the home automation market, however nascent it may be. Amazon’s site is full of Alexa-enabled devices, and its compatibility with smart home hubs like Samsung’s SmartThings means Apple is already catching up.
However, this will not be a huge gap that needs to be closed. Companies like Ecobee and Belkin have added or are adding support for Apple HomeKit through the addition of hubs or software updates.
Spotify fans (or Amazon, or Tidal, or Google Play, or Pandora) don’t need to apply.
Right now, HomePod only supports Apple Music’s own music streaming service. Apple’s HomePod press release questioned the future of streaming music from your personal library. I contacted Apple to clarify what can and cannot be played on the HomePod, but I never got a response.
I didn’t expect Apple to come out of the gate with support for Amazon or Spotify music streaming, but I was definitely hoping, especially after the company announced Amazon Video support on Apple TV in the same presentation. I expected to play music from your personal library. Apple has no way of stopping users from streaming their own tunes to the HomePod, but they got rid of Magsafe on their MacBooks so anything is possible.
Aside from looking like a concept design for what has morphed into a lethal artificial intelligence, the HomePod is pretty cute, if not a little bland. This is a 7 “high round speaker with a microphone array that allows you to listen to your demands.
As a reminder, Apple’s $ 349 HomePod has a less capable assistant than Amazon, is compatible with fewer music platforms than Sonos, and is more expensive than Google Home. It’s good that it comes in two colors! It will release in December, so who knows what will happen from now to launch day? Prepare your wallet.