Six months with the HomePod: a review

Jun 15, 2020

In december of last year, I went visiting my wife in the US as she was spending some months there for her PhD studies. Since the HomePod wasn't (and still isn't) available in Italy yet, I took the chance to find a good deal there and (legally) bringing it home. For the past 6 months, the HomePod has been in our livingroom acting as the main sound source for listening to music, and has recently been coupled with a new one we bought used 2 weeks ago.
As in the past, this review is by no means coming out in time for early buyers. Nevertheless, I think 6 months of experience with the device might prove useful to somene who is still pondering whether to buy it or not.

Setup

Setting up the HomePod is fairly easy and quick: upon completing the booting process, the speaker plays a chime; once it doest that, you just need to bring an iPhone close and the setup screen will appear on the smartphone. If we hadn't grown accustomed to these kind of features, this could have well been one of those it works like magic Apple moments. As the 2 devices connect, the setup process asks few questions (among which, what room the HomePod will be placed in) and then offers to use iCloud and the device setting to finish setting up the speaker. The whole process takes less than 2 minutes.
The first time I tried to set up the HomePod in my wife's room in the dorm she was renting in the US, the procedure didn't go as smoothly as expected, with me needing to restart the HomePod and the pairing process a few times for it to work. Once that was done, I couldn't stream anything over from my iPhone to the Pod. A bit of research brought me to this support document which I think outlines the problem I had with the facility's WiFi and might prove useful for someone else with a peculiar WiFi configuration.
The process of setting up the second HomePod last week went flawlessly: being under our house's WiFi, after an initial speedy configuration, since the HomePods were both told to be in the same room, the option to set them up as a stereo pair popped up straight away and kicked into place immediately.

Sound Quality

As always with Apple, what makes this device so capable is the integration between software and hardware.
On the software side, the HomePod OS (tvOS as of now) leverages the power of its A8 processor to shape the sound it produces. By means of its array of microphones, 6 for far-field Siri and music listening and 1 for automatic bass correction, the HomePod can understand how the environment it is placed in responds to the sound waves it emits and can deflect music to account for that. The end result is music that always sounds calibrated and room-filling. To hear the difference, just take a functioning HomePod and turn it around its vertical axis by 90°: for the first 15s the music will sound empty, colorless, but as soon as the software can process this new environment input, it will begin to render music well again.

On the hardware side, together with those 7 microphones, the HomePod is equipped with 7 horn-loaded tweeters and 1 high-excursion woofer, all with their custom amplifiers. These allow the A8 to drive each speaker separately, both for volume and sound, rendering the highs and medium frequencies quite well.
But what the HomePod excels at, to me, is the bass range. With its 20 mm p-p woofer, the HomePod can deliver high quality bass notes without distortion both at high and low volume, making details emerge from music and songs.
Few years ago, when I bought my iPhone 5, I was finally able to come in contact with the then-new Apple EarPods, the newly released earbuds shaped by studying many ears, and I was amazed. Those tiny headphones were capable of drastically improving the sound they reproduced in comparison to the previous generation. Above all, the bass frequencies were one of the strong points of the new design and when I let them be tried by my brother - an amateur bass guitar player - he rejoiced as he was finally able to properly hear the bass section of songs without the need to crank the volume up.
The HomePod has had a quite similar effect: with respect to any other means of listening to music, Apple's smart speaker has unveiled a whole range of frequencies I had never heard while listening to songs. What this translates into, is not just the possibility of hearing lower notes, but to add valuable nuances to the songs and music we play, providing a much, much richer listening experience. To some degree, I now think I am closer to experiencing music the way it was played or even composed.

In the weeks I gathered thoughts about this review and kept on thinking on the right way to picture the incredible sound quality the HomePod has, one expression kept on coming back to me: the HomePod is the Retina of sound.
As for Retina screens introduced since 2012 across Apple's screens, the HomePod has had the ability to reproduce songs in their full quality, bringing to the ears some hidden details of songs I had never noticed. Similarly to Retina screens, whenever I go back to some other audio reproduction, I find myself missing that sound richness: as they say, once you go Retina you don't go back. Moreover, as it is the case with Retina screens, increased details don't always mean good music per se: bad songs are rendered even worse, as low definition pictures are on high-definition screens.
This is particularly bothering for songs that have been balanced as to have hitting drums: if that's necessary with regular speakers to have the rhythm clearly emerge with that disco feel, the effect is terrible on the HomePod. Luckily for me, I almost never listen to disco music and, maybe, what sounds awful to me is much appreciated by people who like the genre.

Smartness, or lack of

The HomePod is sold as a smart speaker and on this field it has to be measured too.
Let's begin with some premises:
first of all, the HomePod still doesn't support Siri to speak Italian, my mother-tongue and the one we (of course) use at home. This means we cannot yet ask for personal requests such as adding notes or sending messages;
second of all, I know how Siri works and that has not infused me with great confidence in the system;
third of all, I don't yet have any HomeKit devices for the HomePod to act as a central device to prompt for controlling lightbulbs, thermostats, fans or cams.

All this said, we don't use the HomePod as a smart speaker much. We ask Siri to lower or raise the volume from time to time, or to pause and resume a song, but I still prefer to tap on its top to do that, or use the iPhone as a remote. Similarly, when I want to play a song, 90% of times I use Music on my iPhone or Mac and stream it over, rather than asking to play something out loud for the reasons I outlined before. I'd say the only thing we often do via voice command is to set timers when we cook.
The inability of speaking Italian to the HomePod (and being understood) I think it's a major issue here: for one, the previous owner of the second HomePod we bought sold it specifically because he could not get Siri to understand him in a way sufficient enough to be comfortable to use. After all, lacking the Italian language I think is one of the reasons Apple still doesn't sell the speaker in Italy. Let's be clear: Siri does speak Italian in iPhones, Apple Watches and Mac, and it has for a long time; let's hope they will implement the feature in HomePods soon too.
Apart from what the software can do, the hardware is there and it works great: the HomePod(s) is able to pick your voice well even while playing music, and it works best if placed on surfaces at least in par or above your waist. Similarly, music reproduction sounds the best if the HomePod is not put on low furniture.
Again, what lacks here is the software: last week Siri on the HomePods kept on answering for prompts coming from a YouTube video I was playing, making me stop to play that specific video altogether.
Sincerely, 9 years after its introduction with the iPhone 4s, I thought Siri could do better, especially when it runs on one of the best case scenarios it could hope for: a 7 microphone equipped device.

Wish list

As the rumor mill has been saying for a few months now, the HomePod might have a successor, or a mini-successor in the future.
As curious I am for new stuff to come out, I really love the incarnation of the HomePod as of now: all my complaints are actually on the software side of the smart assistant functions, and those I hope can get fixed via one software update in the future.
As for the audio part, the Pod is just great to listen to and one of my favorite Apple devices in the recent years.
For what I am concerned, the right-for-me price tag on this speaker is 200$/€: I know that maybe the technology there is more valuable, but that hits a sweet spot between being cheap and over the budget for a non-essential device as it is.
Regardless of a new model coming out, I would be more than happy to see this version being sold at 200€ for the next years as the "las year model" of the HomePod family.

One last big shortcoming is the inability of streaming from macOS to a stereo pair of HomePods. This is actually more of a macOS deficiency, but I suppose it ends up impacting HomePod sales and user experience more than it does for the Mac platform. I too hope this gets finally fixed in macOS 10.16

Final Words

The HomePod(s) have gained a central role in our evenings: while cooking, as background when we have guests over and when we want to have some quality-time and just want to listen to some music properly reproduced.
The sweet setup we now have is an Apple Music subscription to have access to almost any song and music we want, ready to be played through the HomePod in its full glory.
If I needed to sum it up in one, final sentence, I'd just say that of all the devices we have at home, the HomePod is the only my wife not only likes, but uses with pleasure.

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