Apple's HomePod


Apple today announced HomePod, a breakthrough wireless speaker for the home that delivers amazing audio quality and uses spatial awareness to sense its location in a room and automatically adjust the audio. Designed to work with an Apple Music subscription for access to over 40 million songs, HomePod provides deep knowledge of personal music preferences and tastes and helps users discover new music. HomePod features a large, Apple-designed woofer for deep, clean bass, a custom array of seven beam-forming tweeters that provide pure high frequency acoustics with incredible directional control and powerful technologies built right in to preserve the richness and intent of the original recordings.

We won't see the HomePod until Christmas. We'll see if that's an aggressive timeline to still make holiday shopping or if they'll have plenty to go around.

The HomePod has 7 tweeter speakers and a single woofer. It also has 6 microphones pointing 360-degrees. The HomePod is also powered by Apple's A8 CPU to do some interesting things with audio production.

While it also some interesting possibilities as a Siri interface, I'm curious how well it performs as a speaker. I already have a nice home theater system for playing tunes that the HomePod isn't going to beat. I'd like it to at least sound good and hopefully make up for it with its Siri features.

I'm not sure how I feel about an always-listening device in the home, but to be fair, I'm currently using the Hey Siri thing on my phone. So, I guess I'm already there.