Thoughts on the HomePod Mini

I write this listening to music on one

Published in

Mac O’Clock

5 min readDec 2, 2020

I’d first heard the original HomePod in an Apple store. It was love at first sound. The original HomePod was smaller than what I imagined it to be and the sound that came out of it blew me away. One of my favourite HomePod reviewers calls the sound coming from the OG HomePod an envelop of power. Thogh his expressions tell you a lot, words or video cannot, CANNOT, demonstrate this. You have to be in front of a HomePod (or anywhere around it) to know what it’s like.

By the time the OG HomePod entered the Indian market, it was already a two year old product. And while the sound was amazing, and I knew it would tie in well with my Apple Ecosystem, I could not convince myself to buy a two year old product at that price point (₹19900). So I waited, for Apple to either update or launch a mini version of it (as the rumours kept suggesting through 2020).

Enter HomePod Mini

I would have really liked it if they had updated the OG HomePod — I don’t know how they could have made it better, but I’m sure the engineers at apple are far more qualified to think about these things (and are already working on something in some secret lab?). From a business point of view, I get why Apple went for a mini. The original HomePod was big and expensive in the smart speaker race compared to the rivals. And the lock-in to apple ecosystem meant that it was suitable for only Apple die hard fans. So coming up with a smaller HomePod, at a much competitive price point was necessary. And now, we have the HomePod Mini.

I was a little sceptical when I first saw it in the Apple Keynote. I was less into the smart speaker side of things and more interested in getting a speaker for playing music. One that fit into the Apple Ecosystem — which I live in. That’s it. What was more important to me was the sound quality. I knew what the OG HomePod delivered. Could the Mini live up to that?

After scouring through many, many, many reviews, I bought the HomePod Mini. It was half the price of the OG HomPod, here in India (₹9900). It’s playing music as I sit…