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Seems like Apple executed the way Google should have with their Google Home Max. They've added stereo pairing, so you can have two of them sync up together and

Seems like Apple executed the way Google should have with their Google Home Max. They've added stereo pairing, so you can have two of them sync up together and then connect them to an Apple TV 4k and you basically get a pretty nice wireless sound bar with Dolby Atmos enabled. Still, at $300 per pod, I really need Siri to do better than the "dumber than a bag of rocks" vibe she currently gives off for this to be at all tempting. As someone that does applied DL for work, especially NLP, I just don't understand what Apple is doing with Siri. It's like they see low user engagement metrics with Siri and assume it's because people don't want it. Instead, everyone I know that's an Apple fan uses Google Assistant, because it just works most of the time.

selykg 4y ago
The stereo pairing was available on the 1st generation. I have three of the 1st gen models, they're fantastic. I think I paid $200 for each. At that price they're a steal.
- highwaylights 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm a little confused as to what's actually new here from the video? I assume a newer chipset but it's not really clear what else has changed?
  - kgermino 4y ago
    They're for sale again for starters. The first generation was discontinued a couple years ago. I think they had some manufacturing issue which meant they kept dying prematurely. It's possible this is basically a small spec bump + they should actually work this time
  - robbiet480 4y ago
    The display on top is much larger. The new HomePod has 4 microphones and 5 tweeters. The original HomePod had 6 microphones and 7 tweeters. New one weighs 5.1 pounds vs. 5.5 pounds previously. Via https://twitter.com/rsgnl/status/1615719411813593097 https://twitter.com/rsgnl/status/1615719411813593097
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      New one has a thread antenna for Matter mesh.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    The size. Apple discontinued the OG size HomePod a while back, and sold only the tiny baseball-sized ones. This is a re-introduction of a larger-size, better-sounding device that I assume is essentially the same form factor as the original one.
    - Terretta 4y ago
      Careful on 'sounding' as this appears to have cut back speaker array.
  - owlbite 4y ago
    I wouldn't discount the difference chipset can make, especially with respect to features it can support - the original homepod had an anaemic processor in comparison to just about any other apple kit.
blowski 4y ago
I’m very much an anecdote here, but want to give a different perspective. I’m an Apple “fan” (at least, I have more of Apple’s devices than other brands), and I don’t want voice activation. I don’t feel comfortable something listening to all my intimate family conversations. Maybe Apple fans are more likely to be privacy conscious. All that being said, it doesn’t need to be either or. They could have a great Siri product for those who want it, and allow it to be deactivated for those who don’t.
- agloeregrets 4y ago
  You want a Sonos SL or Ikea Symfonisk (Sonos sw/hw in Ikea design). Great products, no mic, Airplay 2 support, massive group pairing and the same room detection tuning Apple bragged about in the Homepod via the App on a phone instead of mics. (Sonos holds the patent on it and famously made no claims about Apple stealing it while asking Google and Amazon to pay licenses, aka: Apple Ponied up.)
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > Sonos holds the patent on it I’m a huge Sonos fan but I think their patent was “volume control for connected/synced speakers” and apple had a UI to control each speaker volume separately. I also suspect that apple shared Airplay with them j stead of paying. I know lots of people that bought Sonos instead of the HomePod because it supported airplay. Edit: nevermind
    - agloeregrets 4y ago
      https://www.engadget.com/sonos-google-itc-compliant-initial-ruling-220232437.html https://www.engadget.com/sonos-google-itc-compliant-initial-... Nope. Google turned the trueplay knockoff off real fast (as it was easy to remove) and took time to disable group volume control.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Room detection isn't exclusive to Sonos, unless you're claiming YPAO/Dirac/Audyssey also licensed it. The HomePod is different because it does detection at the source, where everything else needs you to sample with a mic or phone app.
greggsy 4y ago
I use Siri for mundane things. Horses for courses. For music though, I prefer browsing through a playlist or artist discogs. Recalling a track from memory and requesting an assistant to play it isn’t very intuitive. Siri aside, I’m very much looking forward to this update.
- plusminusplus 4y ago
  You can ask voice assistants to play playlists or albums as well, not just a single track.
  - greggsy 4y ago
    I mean, I like scrolling through track names, albums and cover art. I rarely walk into a records store knowing exactly what I want, and live the process of discovery.
zitterbewegung 4y ago
Stereo pairing was a feature of the original first generation HomePods . Siri has always been a limitation of buying this product due to the best bang per buck for the audio quality.
Karunamon 4y ago
I would go so far as to describe Siri as "aggressively useless". I try to squelch my alarm in the morning and she replies with "sorry you'll need to continue in the app" (silencing the alarm anyways but not actually dismissing it). If I wake up before my alarm and want to stop it from sounding, I tell her to turn it off, she says she has done so (with a follow-up question confirming that I have no alarms enabled)… And then the god damn alarm goes off at the usual time anyways. Most recently she has started replying to my requests to send text messages and start phone calls with "who is speaking?" I don't know maybe the only person who matters on this single user device? If I don't say my name to her satisfaction then the call doesn't get made. I never did any kind of voice training or enabled any kind of restriction based on voice matching so what the fuck? The last straw which led to me unplugging my home pod was when both it and the phone started triggering at nearly the same time with the result that the speech of one started interfering with the requests to the other one. Bonus points: the speech recognition tech is bad enough that I tend to wait for acknowledgment before speaking a command. The "Boop" that you get from Alexa and Google. Not only does Siri not have this, it triggers, waits for a moment, and then says something. One of these responses is a annoyed sounding teenager "yeah?" that has more than once had me fantasizing about the immediate defenestration of the speaker.
davidy123 4y ago
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but Google smart speakers have had stereo pairing for a while. https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7559493?hl=en-CA&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7559493?hl=en-C...
- Tagbert 4y ago
  So have HomePods. What is them automatically noticing another HomePod and offering to setup a stereo pair.
- rektide 4y ago
  Bought Google Max for the parents, & holy cow the pairing is terrible. Unusable entirely with a TV, huge lag. I have the "headphones out" line coming from the tv, which I split, and then send to the line-in on each speaker. At least there is a line-in! Less and less smart speakers have a line in, it feels like. Absurd. (Different story, but also, really wish the Chromecast Audio were still a thing. Some inventory left but what a great product for adding amazing connective capability to any sound system! Smart being counter-analog-line-level stuff is such a shite hellworld thing.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
agloeregrets 4y ago
> Seems like Apple executed the way Google should have with their Google Home Max Google properly executing on Google TV would require them to not build hardware with 1/12th the single core performance of an Apple TV. (Seriously, it has single core performance around that of a 2011 Intel Atom while the Apple TV has an A15 throwing 12th gen Intel laptop numbers. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19594628 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19594628) Seriously, what is with The Chromecast with Google TV? People are like "It's laggy!" and Google is like "We do update!" and people are like "Now it's laggy AND crashes!" My entire experience with my three of them. Software is great, hardware is pure eWaste and they should feel bad about that.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  I’ve seen the GTV on sale for $20, the ATV is almost $200. That’s a 10x in price difference. I think the most sensible way to use both devices is as a dumb “cast” target. FWIW, the fireTV literally had a bug where it’d crash because the ad data collecting daemon used up too much processing power. For $20, just be thankful Google has that much self control.
  - agloeregrets 4y ago
    Fair point but, this is the definition of fuzzing the margins here. The Google TV retail price is $50, the Apple TV is $129 now. I get that that is a big jump but it's not 12 times the price. The performance per dollar tends to go down as you go up in price, not up.
- jen20 4y ago
  To be fair, google extend this to software on the Apple TV too - the YouTube and YouTube TV apps are both complete trash that don’t respond to scrolling properly because they’ve been built using some cross platform garbage instead of for the target platform. HBO Max is another offender.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    Worth noting that Google has gone to extra effort here to make YouTube bad on AppleTV; their original first-party AppleTV app was actually significantly better.
gnicholas 4y ago
> Instead, everyone I know that's an Apple fan uses Google Assistant, because it just works most of the time. Really? I know lots of Apple fans and I've never seen any of them use Google Assistant on their iPhone or anything else. How do your friends do this? Via a Siri shortcut that passes requests through? Or by opening up a Google app every time they want to use the voice assistant?
Terretta 4y ago
> They've added... HomePods OG do stereo pairing, and with ATV can act as eARC playback so you can play your console sound via HomePods stereo pair. For a couple years now, though weirdly the full firmware revamp landed after discontinuation.

selykg 4y ago

The stereo pairing was available on the 1st generation. I have three of the 1st gen models, they're fantastic. I think I paid $200 for each. At that price they're a steal.

highwaylights 4y ago
Yeah, I'm a little confused as to what's actually new here from the video? I assume a newer chipset but it's not really clear what else has changed?
- kgermino 4y ago
  They're for sale again for starters. The first generation was discontinued a couple years ago. I think they had some manufacturing issue which meant they kept dying prematurely. It's possible this is basically a small spec bump + they should actually work this time
- robbiet480 4y ago
  The display on top is much larger. The new HomePod has 4 microphones and 5 tweeters. The original HomePod had 6 microphones and 7 tweeters. New one weighs 5.1 pounds vs. 5.5 pounds previously. Via https://twitter.com/rsgnl/status/1615719411813593097 https://twitter.com/rsgnl/status/1615719411813593097
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    New one has a thread antenna for Matter mesh.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  The size. Apple discontinued the OG size HomePod a while back, and sold only the tiny baseball-sized ones. This is a re-introduction of a larger-size, better-sounding device that I assume is essentially the same form factor as the original one.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    Careful on 'sounding' as this appears to have cut back speaker array.
- owlbite 4y ago
  I wouldn't discount the difference chipset can make, especially with respect to features it can support - the original homepod had an anaemic processor in comparison to just about any other apple kit.

blowski 4y ago

I’m very much an anecdote here, but want to give a different perspective. I’m an Apple “fan” (at least, I have more of Apple’s devices than other brands), and I don’t want voice activation. I don’t feel comfortable something listening to all my intimate family conversations. Maybe Apple fans are more likely to be privacy conscious. All that being said, it doesn’t need to be either or. They could have a great Siri product for those who want it, and allow it to be deactivated for those who don’t.

agloeregrets 4y ago
You want a Sonos SL or Ikea Symfonisk (Sonos sw/hw in Ikea design). Great products, no mic, Airplay 2 support, massive group pairing and the same room detection tuning Apple bragged about in the Homepod via the App on a phone instead of mics. (Sonos holds the patent on it and famously made no claims about Apple stealing it while asking Google and Amazon to pay licenses, aka: Apple Ponied up.)
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > Sonos holds the patent on it I’m a huge Sonos fan but I think their patent was “volume control for connected/synced speakers” and apple had a UI to control each speaker volume separately. I also suspect that apple shared Airplay with them j stead of paying. I know lots of people that bought Sonos instead of the HomePod because it supported airplay. Edit: nevermind
  - agloeregrets 4y ago
    https://www.engadget.com/sonos-google-itc-compliant-initial-ruling-220232437.html https://www.engadget.com/sonos-google-itc-compliant-initial-... Nope. Google turned the trueplay knockoff off real fast (as it was easy to remove) and took time to disable group volume control.
- astrange 4y ago
  Room detection isn't exclusive to Sonos, unless you're claiming YPAO/Dirac/Audyssey also licensed it. The HomePod is different because it does detection at the source, where everything else needs you to sample with a mic or phone app.

greggsy 4y ago

I use Siri for mundane things. Horses for courses. For music though, I prefer browsing through a playlist or artist discogs. Recalling a track from memory and requesting an assistant to play it isn’t very intuitive. Siri aside, I’m very much looking forward to this update.

plusminusplus 4y ago
You can ask voice assistants to play playlists or albums as well, not just a single track.
- greggsy 4y ago
  I mean, I like scrolling through track names, albums and cover art. I rarely walk into a records store knowing exactly what I want, and live the process of discovery.

zitterbewegung 4y ago

Stereo pairing was a feature of the original first generation HomePods . Siri has always been a limitation of buying this product due to the best bang per buck for the audio quality.

Karunamon 4y ago

I would go so far as to describe Siri as "aggressively useless". I try to squelch my alarm in the morning and she replies with "sorry you'll need to continue in the app" (silencing the alarm anyways but not actually dismissing it). If I wake up before my alarm and want to stop it from sounding, I tell her to turn it off, she says she has done so (with a follow-up question confirming that I have no alarms enabled)… And then the god damn alarm goes off at the usual time anyways. Most recently she has started replying to my requests to send text messages and start phone calls with "who is speaking?" I don't know maybe the only person who matters on this single user device? If I don't say my name to her satisfaction then the call doesn't get made. I never did any kind of voice training or enabled any kind of restriction based on voice matching so what the fuck? The last straw which led to me unplugging my home pod was when both it and the phone started triggering at nearly the same time with the result that the speech of one started interfering with the requests to the other one. Bonus points: the speech recognition tech is bad enough that I tend to wait for acknowledgment before speaking a command. The "Boop" that you get from Alexa and Google. Not only does Siri not have this, it triggers, waits for a moment, and then says something. One of these responses is a annoyed sounding teenager "yeah?" that has more than once had me fantasizing about the immediate defenestration of the speaker.

davidy123 4y ago

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but Google smart speakers have had stereo pairing for a while. https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7559493?hl=en-CA&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7559493?hl=en-C...

Tagbert 4y ago
So have HomePods. What is them automatically noticing another HomePod and offering to setup a stereo pair.
rektide 4y ago
Bought Google Max for the parents, & holy cow the pairing is terrible. Unusable entirely with a TV, huge lag. I have the "headphones out" line coming from the tv, which I split, and then send to the line-in on each speaker. At least there is a line-in! Less and less smart speakers have a line in, it feels like. Absurd. (Different story, but also, really wish the Chromecast Audio were still a thing. Some inventory left but what a great product for adding amazing connective capability to any sound system! Smart being counter-analog-line-level stuff is such a shite hellworld thing.)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

agloeregrets 4y ago

> Seems like Apple executed the way Google should have with their Google Home Max Google properly executing on Google TV would require them to not build hardware with 1/12th the single core performance of an Apple TV. (Seriously, it has single core performance around that of a 2011 Intel Atom while the Apple TV has an A15 throwing 12th gen Intel laptop numbers. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19594628 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19594628) Seriously, what is with The Chromecast with Google TV? People are like "It's laggy!" and Google is like "We do update!" and people are like "Now it's laggy AND crashes!" My entire experience with my three of them. Software is great, hardware is pure eWaste and they should feel bad about that.

vineyardmike 4y ago
I’ve seen the GTV on sale for $20, the ATV is almost $200. That’s a 10x in price difference. I think the most sensible way to use both devices is as a dumb “cast” target. FWIW, the fireTV literally had a bug where it’d crash because the ad data collecting daemon used up too much processing power. For $20, just be thankful Google has that much self control.
- agloeregrets 4y ago
  Fair point but, this is the definition of fuzzing the margins here. The Google TV retail price is $50, the Apple TV is $129 now. I get that that is a big jump but it's not 12 times the price. The performance per dollar tends to go down as you go up in price, not up.
jen20 4y ago
To be fair, google extend this to software on the Apple TV too - the YouTube and YouTube TV apps are both complete trash that don’t respond to scrolling properly because they’ve been built using some cross platform garbage instead of for the target platform. HBO Max is another offender.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  Worth noting that Google has gone to extra effort here to make YouTube bad on AppleTV; their original first-party AppleTV app was actually significantly better.

gnicholas 4y ago

> Instead, everyone I know that's an Apple fan uses Google Assistant, because it just works most of the time. Really? I know lots of Apple fans and I've never seen any of them use Google Assistant on their iPhone or anything else. How do your friends do this? Via a Siri shortcut that passes requests through? Or by opening up a Google app every time they want to use the voice assistant?

Terretta 4y ago

> They've added... HomePods OG do stereo pairing, and with ATV can act as eARC playback so you can play your console sound via HomePods stereo pair. For a couple years now, though weirdly the full firmware revamp landed after discontinuation.