HomePod at Home

4 min readFeb 20, 2018

I’ve been asked about the HomePod a few times, so here’s a quick run down of my HomePod experience.

The HomePod is an excellent voice enabled speaker and music system first, with personal assistance added as an afterthought. This is in contrast to Amazon’s Echo products: Alexa as a voice assistant is the focus, and the speaker and music system is just another feature.

TLDR: The HomePod is the best music assistant speaker I am aware of. The HomePod is not the best personal/home assistant speaker available. None the less I am happy I bought it.

Music

The HomePod’s sound quality is excellent when using Apple Music. You can feel the base without it being base-heavy, middles and treble are well defined. It’s on a different level than the Echo or that 100 Euro portable bluetooth speaker you may have. But it’s also not a 5.1 speaker system, which you might expect after reading some reviews. Siri’s music integration is great, she hears you without lowering the volume of the music played, she recommends songs that you’re surprised that you like, and even works for users with a German accent (she’s currently set to US English at my place).

AirPlay allows you to play anything, your Apple TV, Spotify, your downloaded music, via your HomePod. iTunes even allows you to select multiple devices to play to, so you can have your notebook and your HomePod playing the same song in sync. But in practice, AirPlay is unreliable for me. The connection breaks off from time to time, and does not try to auto-reconnect. Sometimes I even have distortions when I change the volume (how is that even possible?). I have no audio measuring equipment I can test this with here, but I have the feeling that music played via AirPlay does not have the same quality than when played directly from Apple Music on the HomePod.

Siri

I didn’t buy my HomePod because of music. Yes I want to use it for music too, but thats just one feature, I bought the HomePod as a voice assistant. And here, the HomePod isn’t quite what I had hoped.

What works:

Audio controls. Duh.
Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha integration: Whats the distance to the moon and how many millileters in an a cup.
Locations: Where is …
Translations: What is “This is delicious” in Mandarin Chinese.
HomeKit: Turn on the lights and I’m cold.
Reminders, Clock, Alarms, to do lists.

Etc… There are guides by Apple that can help you get the most out of your HomePod.

What doesn’t work:

Calendar (seriously?): What’s on my schedule today.
Emails.
Contacts.
Directions.
Rides.
Restart yourself.
Controlling your Apple TV.
Phone calls.

Siri is not going to be your home assistant. I would have expected that, as long as my iPhone is nearby, I can use Siri as my personal assistant as on my iPhone. I can’t.

The microphone is great, it hears you over itself, and you don’t have to “shout” to it like I often find myself doing with my Echo. It even works from adjecent rooms if you raise your voice slightly.

It’s cool that when you say “hey Siri”, the HomePod overrides the iPhone and answers the question, but it isn’t perfect yet: if the HomePod can’t answer the question but the iPhone can, then I don’t want the HomePod overriding. And even though the HomePod overrides, the iPhone screen lights up for half a second, which can be distracting.

Overall

Let me say it again: the HomePod is the best music assistant speaker I am aware of — and is the perfect companion for your Apple Music account. The HomePod is however not the best personal/home assistant speaker available. Still I do not regret buying it. The hardware is great, the music integration is great. My Echo and my HomePod now peacefully coexist, with HomePod being responsible for music, homekit, timers and pretty much anything it can do, while Alexa takes care of the rest on my Echo. If Apple wants me to replace my Echo then Apple needs to seriously invest in Siri:

Anything Siri can answer and do on the iPhone it should answer on the HomePod, no excuses.

And of course, Apple needs to open it up to us developers and let third party developers help Apple bring Siri to the next level — this will bring it up to par with Amazon’s Echo on areas outside of music, somewhere where it should already be. Until then I’ll enjoy “Hey Siri — Play me something I like.”

Patrick Wolowicz is CEO of subzero.eu software, a mobile and chatbot development company based in Vienna, Austria.

Twitter: @PatrickWolowicz