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Apple HomePod
- daviddumenil 9y agoCan someone shed some light on why Apple would release this with only Apple Music as a music source?
- mahrain 9y agoNot being able to play local mp3’s Or even CD’s ripped through iTunes is a deal breaker for me.
- clamprecht 9y agoDoes it not play MP3s? Under Tech Specs it says for audio formats: "HE-AAC (V1), AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), protected AAC (from iTunes Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, and FLAC"
- kgwgk 9y agoYou can use itunes and send the music to the speaker, right?
- danieldk 9y agoUsing AirPlay. But as far as I understand from the media coverage, it does not support Home Sharing. So, you cannot say "Hey Siri, play me some King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard" and expect it to be played from your computer. Not having to go to your computer and enabling AirPlay and selecting an album is kind of the point of a home assistant ;).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tudorw 9y agoBecause Apple, Amazon, et all know when all is done, they will be media companies, not utility providers.
- omarforgotpwd 9y agoYou can stream music from any provider using your phone, but Apple mostly does not allow third party integration with Siri aside from a few preset commands that apps can register to implement. So using the Siri voice commands you can only control Apple Music, because that's all Apple chose to implement. I think they probably will add support for third party music players through Siri in the future, but Apple is probably not unhappy to give users another reason to choose Apple Music. Presumably there would have to be some kind of Spotify "app" running on the HomePod, to access Spotify without a phone, but there is no SDK for that yet
- mojuba 9y agoIt's amazing how so many people have been misled to believe that HomePod is limited to Apple Music, which is not true. I think it's both a failure on Apple's marketing part, and our own fears that Apple can deliberately lock us in to their ecosystem. Not entirely unbelievable unfortunately, but in case of HomePod it's just not true.
- omarforgotpwd 9y agoSpeaker marketing failure, or Apple Music marketing success?
- scarface74 9y agoIf you want to take advantage of the "smart" part of HomePod you are locked into Apple Music. Otherwise, it's just another Airplay speaker.
- ozmbie 9y agoBecause they can add functionality over time through software updates. This is their MVP.
- ClassyJacket 9y agoSo they make money off you buying Apple Music, too...
- Y_Y 9y ago> Available starting 2.9 What the hell is this? After some thinking I realised it must be a date, 2018-02-09, but this is not clear. Do they think it looks cool or something?
- BillinghamJ 9y agoI think that’s more standard in the US, but sure looks weird to me.
- tabs_masterrace 9y agoIts a date? What else would follow after the words "Available starting", month is first since it's US locale. Whats so confusing about it.
- duiker101 9y agoThat it's not obvious. It's not a standard format and a lot of people will be slightly confused. It's understandable if you think about it but still not something everyone will get at first glance. Also the fact that it's localised to US only but both digits could be a day or a month will be even more confusing. Just adding a .18 or even better making it 2.09.18 would have made things easier and I can't believe that it would have hurt the page design that hard.
- imran3740 9y agoOr just, you know, February 9.
- bringtheaction 9y agoI thought the US used slash. I mean it's usually 9/11, not 9.11.
- Larrikin 9y agoSlash is for official forms, period is pretty common stylistically
- piyush_soni 9y agoWhat is the 2017 cliche? : "We completely reimagined" for the things that are obviously not so.
- jackvalentine 9y agoIn the delay between announcement and release, and the lack of advertised features at launch (airplay 2) I have completely lost interest. Apple need to get back to releasing things soon after announcement.
- bkmn 9y ago”An Apple-designed A8 chip powers the most complex audio innovations in HomePod. Like real-time modeling of the woofer mechanics. Buffering that’s even faster than real time.” Faster than real-time. That IS fast!
- galad87 9y agoWell, that's actually true, it can buffer the entire song and more. So it's faster than real time.
- mojuba 9y agoWhich is not a great achievemnt with audio over WiFi really.
- phnofive 9y agoWere it only real-time, could you even call that buffering?
- deweller 9y agoSure. Load 10 seconds, start playing and then always have a buffer of exactly 10 seconds in memory.
- comboy 9y agoBut what does it have to do with the powerful cheap? Buffering is not very useful if it's slower than real time, and all that's needed for it is a connection and some memory.
- Yetanfou 9y ago"real-time modeling of the woofer mechanics" reminds me of those Philips Motional Feedback speakers [2] my parents bought in the late '70s [2]. Instead of digital "real-time modeling" they used an analog feedback loop to control and correct woofer cone movement. These were self-contained active speaker cabinets containing a 35W (later also available in 75W) amplifier and two or three speakers with the feedback mechanism controlling the woofer. They did not have wifi or an always-on microphone, true, but the former is easily remedied (use a Raspberry Pi Zero or something similar) while the latter is more of an advantage than a disadvantage. [1] http://www.extra.research.philips.com/hera/people/aarts/_Philips%20Bound%20Archive/PTechReview/PTechReview-29-1968-148.pdf http://www.extra.research.philips.com/hera/people/aarts/_Phi... [2] http://hifipig.com/philips-motional-feedback-speakers/ http://hifipig.com/philips-motional-feedback-speakers/
- gkanai 9y agoI just am not impressed by this. Maybe I need to hear it in action?
- sheraz 9y agoYeah I'll stick with Sonos, thanks. We have one at work, and the only complaint I have is the terrible taste in music of my colleagues :-)
- mojuba 9y ago... and the fact that you can only use the Sonos app with it.
- jonah 9y agoOr Spotify.
- i386 9y agoProving that yet again Apple is held by a different standard to everyone else
- danieldk 9y agoThey are going to add AirPlay 2 support once it is available: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/4/16418944/sonos-airplay-2-support-apple-ios-siri-2018 https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/4/16418944/sonos-airplay-2-... (AFAIK AirPlay 1 requires dedicated hardware support.)
- kiallmacinnes 9y agoGoogle Play Music and Spotify both work with Sonos, without needing the awful Sonos app. (I think you need the Sonos app installed, but, you don't need to use it)
- Tempest1981 9y agoDon't you need Spotify Premium?
- lower 9y ago> Create stereo sound with a second HomePod. That seems really lazy [edit: making you buy a whole second thing instead of just a speaker]. What will they do next? Sell iMacs instead of external monitors?
- fastball 9y agoSound is literally not stereo unless there are two or more speakers...
- lower 9y agoYes, so maybe they could have offered a slave speaker instead of letting you buy the whole thing again?
- fastball 9y agoThe other smart speakers didn't even have multi-speaker support from the outset, much less slaves. Plus slaves in the same room don't really make much sense. I want my sound to be balanced. It's not really going to balance well if I have a tiny speaker on one side of the room and a big one on the other.
- tga 9y agoThe HomePod already has eight speakers inside.
- thomassnielsen 9y agoThe HomePod does channel differentiation with one device, but for true wide stereo you need two.
- melling 9y agoThere’s no discussion here about the device as a voice assistant. While I’m sure the audio quality is excellent, I think I’d rather use cheap Amazon or Google devices to build a home automation system, for example. The cost of a multi room assistant is too high with the HomePod. People are also starting to work on open source solutions: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-mark-ii-the-open-voice-assistant https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-m...
- cbg0 9y agoSince they advertise this is made for music and comes with a woofer and 7 tweeters, it would be useful if the specs offered some details like frequency response, harmonic distortion, sensitivity and power usage.
- tzahola 9y agoPeople will be listening lossy crap from Apple Music anyways. Why bother with such technicalities?
- blux 9y agoI do not want an always on microphone in my house. And for sure I do not want one that is connected to the internet.
- johnpowell 9y agoI don't either. But if the choice is between Amazon, Google, and Apple.. I am going Apple.
- rollcat 9y agoNo, the choice is between having and not having one. We've turned off all of the "assistants" in our home - in our phones, laptops, etc. We find they provide nothing of real value, and the invasion of privacy is not acceptable.
- Yetanfou 9y agoWell, you turned off all the obvious always-on listening devices. In reality any phone can be listening all the time without you knowledge. As to whether they are actually listening is another question, accusations on the subject fly [1] and [2] get rebutted [3] all the time [4] but it is hard to prove or disprove either thesis. On the subject of the usability of these 'assistants' I mostly do agree except for the possibility to use voice commands which can sometimes be useful. Fortunately that option does not need an always-on internet connection to some faraway mothership and is easy to implement in free software, e.g. [5]. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/10/30/facebook-listening-conspiracy-theory-refuses-die/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/10/30/facebook-li... [2] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41802282 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41802282 [3] https://lifehacker.com/facebook-isn-t-recording-your-conversations-but-it-may-1820193946 https://lifehacker.com/facebook-isn-t-recording-your-convers... [4] https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=facebook+phone+listening https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=facebook+phone+li... [5] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-mark-ii-the-open-voice-assistant https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-m...
- johnpowell 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- 0xBA5ED 9y agoQuestion: Is there a "smart device" in existence which can function well without requiring a remote agent on the backend who watches you? Where do I find such a thing?
- thomassnielsen 9y agoThe HomePod is probably the closest you’ll get. Voice recognition for the trigger word happens on device, and requests are anonymized using differential privacy. iMore goes into more detail. Apple has no use for watching you, so they don’t. Amazon wants your shopping habits, Google wants anything they can use in advertising.
- verytrivial 9y ago"Buffering that’s even faster than real time." What? Buffering AT real time isn't buffering at all. Storing data faster than real time is the definition of buffering, no? I can't make sense of that statement.
- Someone 9y agoEarly internet movie players typically buffered the video stream at whatever speed was available until the software was reasonably sure it would be able to play the full (where ‘full’ at the time typically was less than a minute) video without stuttering. Those old enough probably remember RealPlayer, which was famous for buffering at slower than, often a lot slower than real time. I think modern video players still take the same approach, but if bandwidth is high enough, they need very little time before they start playing.
- qplex 9y agoI'm quite sure a standard 2.1 setup will get you better sound than this at a fraction of the price. I also don't want my speaker to "run my smart home" or anything like that.
- qplex 9y agoTo further my point (in case of additional downvoting): You can get a quality 200W subwoofer for $150. Pair that Mackie or JBL studio monitors for another $150. One homepod costs $349. And you need TWO for stereoscopic sound. Its just another vanity item, much as all Apple products of late - they add no real value.