As a long-time fan of Apple products before the herd of fan-boys jumped on board, I do not often write gloatingly about Apple, as the company has evolved mostly downstream, since Steve Jobs’ passing almost ten years ago.
The little engine that can
Apple’s new $99 HomePod Mini is an exception to that trend in my view.
I have only had the Homepod Mini for one day, but the setup was amazingly simple and the sound incredible for such a small device. Finally, after all those years, Siri works quite well, even while playing music. The recognition of commands is amazing, even obeying commands from another room.
Siri on the Homepod Mini is finally useable, especially for music-related commands and queries like weather and traffic.
The quickly surfacing false positives related to more complicated subjects makes any voice assistant unreliable, happily deferring many queries to web searches pushed back to non-modal windows on the phone (ugh).
Sound Off
The sound coming out of this tiny device is quite remarkable and on par with, if not better, than similarly priced Bose products I have heard.
As Bose is desperately trying to become a technology company, Apple is trying to also become an audio company. And with the Homepod Mini, Apple is currently succeeding faster than Bose on gaining ground on the opposing turf.
The pairing of the iPhone with the HomePod mini is seamless. How to set up other users controlled by different voices is not. HomeKit integration is a little clunky and not very responsive to be reliable.
For now, I am simply enjoying what this product advertises to do. And the HomePod mini lives up to its promise, playing my iTunes purchased music from the cloud diligently, responsively, and beautifully well.
The HomePod mini is going to be a hit.
