Apple's homepod was a bit of a tough sell when it launched in 2018. The $350 speaker was far more expensive than the Amazon Echo or Google Home and Siri was less capable than Alexa or Google Assistant. One thing was undeniable though the home pod sounded excellent. Two and a half years later, Apple is expanding its lineup but the home pod mini a tiny spherical speaker price of $100 that promises great audio quality and improved Siri smarts.
At the same time, Google and Amazon both released updates to their speaker lineup with similar problems as a better sound at the same price. Considering how dominant Amazon and Google are the home had many successes far for short. But after spending a few weeks at Apple might have hit on the right formula. This time, small gadgets are often undeniably cute, in this case with the home pod mini holding the small speaker my hand feels like holding an orange.
It is only 3.3 inches tall and just under four inches wide. Despite its ball like shaped, the home pod mini feels quite similar to its larger sibling, but a fabric covered that comes in white or space gray rubber bottom in glossy plastic top. The home pod Mini is meant to blend into your environment that small size means it's easy to tuck away anywhere you want like Amazon's new spherical design for its eco lineup, their own shape takes a little getting used to, and some may not care for. But it's fairly an offensive to my eyes, setting up the original home pod was easy, and that's the case here as well. Just put in a speaker and bring iPhone or iPad near, it'll automatically detect the device and guide you through setup. Once that's done, you can start asking the home pod me to play music from your Apple Music account for getting into series broader capabilities as a voice assistant, and it works well for music control.
Despite the home but many small sites, it does include four microphones, which meant it reliably responded to Hey Siri requests, even if the music was pretty loud or it was across the room. Siri seems a little smarter than Alexa or Google Assistant about music requests, at least in my testing is certainly scientific, but I felt like Siri was usually more accurate at parsing my commands and pulling up the songs albums or playlists I wanted. I ran to the occasional hiccup, but I generally didn't have problems with Siri as a music assistant. That said, you can also start music playback and directly control the speaker through Apple's a music app on the Mac or iOS, if you don't feel like dealing with Siri.
Apple claims the home pod mini will offer quite, amazing sound, but the diminutive speaker has a few challenges to overcome compared to its competitors. For starters, it's a much smaller speaker than Amazon's new echo or Google's nest audio. It's simple matter of physics when it comes to sound reproduction doesn't work in Apple's favor here, Dell pod mini speaker also has fewer components. It includes a single full range driver coupled with two passive radiators to increase bass presence. There's also an acoustic waveguide at the bottom of the speaker that pushes audio out and 360 degrees.
The echo and nest audio on the other hand, each have dedicated woofers and tweeters Apple's response to this is computational audio. The company says the S5 chip in the speaker applies tuning algorithms 180 times per second that analyze and understand the music being played and adjust the output accordingly. Most people won't care about how the home pod mini optimizes its sound though, they only care if it sounds good. Fortunately for Apple the home pod mini does indeed sound much better than you'd expect from such a small speaker, your product is balanced either that is vocal forward, but not at the expense of instrumentation mids and highs are generally clear in the passive radiators are effective at delivering good bass.
Don't put many offered surprising clarity and densely layered guitar heavy songs from bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Metallica. It sounds better with the volume up over 50%, but even at quieter volumes does a good job reproducing complex arrangements, like the last two minutes of the Nine Inch Nails classic closer.
In modern public Love To and Dua lipa has decent bass, that I could feel through my desk provided the speaker was turned up loud enough. Ultimately the home pod mini performed better than I expected. But it's still a small speaker. It sounds comparable to Google's nest audio, but Amazon's new echo is clearly better than both of them. It's much lighter, with more bass and clear highs of these three new $100 Smart speakers the echo is the clear winner in terms of pure audio quality.
If you want to throw a larger space, you can get two homepod mini speakers and pair them together in stereo or place them across the room and group them together and play music simultaneously. In stereo the home pod mini sounds even better with increased clarity, volume and bass. Since the original home pod launched two and half years ago, capitalists added a host of new features to Siri like intercom and voice recognition. This means I can send voice messages to other home pods around the house and multiple people can ask Siri to send messages, add reminders create notes and add new calendar items and so forth.
Finally the home pod mini can work with other music streaming services besides Apple Music, currently Pandora is the only other supported option, but Apple also showed amazon music when it introduced the home pod Mini. So it seems to expect that soon I set Pandora as my default music service to test and it worked just as you'd expect. There was a little slower to pull up songs and Apple Music. The home pod Mini is a lot easier to recommend than the original. It's significantly cheaper than the first home pod, which automatically means more people will consider it. And it's a lot more capable than the original was in 2018, with more of the features you'd expect from a smart speaker.
And like the audio It sounds very good for the price, making it a solid value has been the strong option for $100 could help Apple take more of the smart speaker market in a way the original home pod simply couldn't because of its price. That said, the new echo provides better audio quality at the same price. So it's definitely worth a look. But even if the home Putman isn't the best $100 speaker, it still offers a lot, especially if you're already invested in Apple's ecosystem.
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