Apple Home Pod Review

Apple’s $349 HomePod has excellent bass and consistently superior sound quality across a wide variety of music genres. The speaker is easy to set up and Siri can hear you from across a room.

The fabric mesh-wrapped HomePod, available in either space gray or white, weighs a hefty 5.5 pounds (2.5 kg). It’s 6.8 inches tall and 5.6 inches wide (170 by 140 mm) — petite compared to the 11.7-pound (5.3 kg) and foot-wide Google Home Max.

In true Apple form, the HomePod has a sleek, minimal design. It looks good, but not distractingly so, and I’m glad you get a couple color finishes to choose from. We got a white HomePod and while I like how it looks, I can easily imagine smudging it with repeat handling. The HomePod’s mesh exterior isn’t interchangeable like the Amazon Echo’s removable shell. What you buy is what you get. You can, however, clean it with a dry or damp cloth.

The HomePod relies on a single, two-prong power cord, which you can plug into any standard outlet. Apple says the HomePod can go pretty much anywhere in your home, from the bathroom to the garage, either near a wall or in the center of the room. Just be aware that the cord isn’t detachable as the HomePod doesn’t have a battery onboard, so you might have to hide it under a rug if you want to show it off in the middle of a space.

At the top of the speaker, you’ll find a touch display. It isn’t a screen, so it can’t display high-res text or video content like an Amazon Echo Show or Spot, but it does have integrated plus and minus signs for adjusting the speaker’s volume manually. Tap or hold them to increase or decrease volume. Follow Spotlife Asia for the latest technology product reviews.

Touch and hold the center of the display to get Siri’s attention without having to say, “Hey, Siri.” A familiar, blue-green-purple LED status indicator will begin to glow on the display to let you know Apple’s voice assistant is listening. Tap the display to play or pause music or to stop Siri mid-sentence. You can also double tap to skip a song or triple tap to skip back and replay a song.

The display glows white to tell you it’s ready for initial setup and green during a phone call. You can’t place or accept calls directly from the HomePod, but you can use it as a speakerphone. The various taps and LED status indicators have a slight learning curve at first, but the HomePod is easy to control straight from the speaker.

The HomePod doesn’t have a button on the speaker itself to mute Siri, weirdly enough. Both Amazon and Google speakers have dedicated mute buttons so you can manually disable voice control. With the HomePod, you can only decrease the music volume from the speaker itself, which isn’t really the same as muting Siri. Instead, you have to use the app or voice control to turn the “Hey, Siri” feature off or on.

Apple’s HomePod has seven tweeters, all placed in the bottom of the speaker. Each tweeter has an amplifier and a transducer. Six Siri-ready microphones sit above that, followed by the woofer and Apple’s A8 chip at the very top. The HomePod’s uniform sound across so many different types of music separates it from its two main competitors, the Google Home Max and the Sonos One.

Apple’s HomePod won’t slay Amazon Alexa out of the gate. But if you’re an iPhone user who prizes sound quality above all, you should seriously consider this speaker.

Also read: The Motiv Ring Tracker Review