Apple HomePod 2 Review: Best buy?
The newly released second-generation homepod is one of the most perplexing new Apple devices I’ve seen in a long time. We recently reviewed the 10th generation iPad, which was already strange, but this one is extraordinary. Just to give you some background, the first homepod was released in 2018. It was a 350 $ smart speaker with Siri that had fantastic sound and truly remarkable engineering. Because of its non-removable cable and rock-solid construction, it kind of flopped and not many people purchased it. Apple then made the unusual decision to slightly reduce the pricing from 350 to 300.So that’s a pretty good indication of how well things were going. Apparently, it peaked at about 6% of the Home Smart speaker market share, which is higher than I would have expected. Eventually, they gave in and released the Homepod Mini, a much smaller version of essentially the same thing that costs $99. This one started selling much better for obvious reasons, and the Big Homepod was eventually just deleted from their website in 2021. It was discontinued.
It’s new and improved, but didn’t you test it before? I should clarify that while it’s difficult to tell just by looking at it from the outside, this product is superior in a few small ways. However, this is what’s new. The new one is a little bit more stout, I guess you could say, and while we’re at it, this is actually a new hue that is called Midnight instead of the old space grey. You might remember the name from The Midnight iPhone color, which is basically black but with the slightest tinge of grey. They’ve also obviously listened to some of the feedback because the power cable is now fully removable and designed to be removed unlike the previous model, which only had a small portion of the display in the middle. Up top, the touch surface is roughly the same size but it’s inset a little bit this time, and the display covers the entire circle instead of just a small portion in the middle.
Do you recall that strange story about how the original HomePod’s white plastic bottom was staining wooden tables? We verified it on our own; it only took one to two minutes of sitting on a wooden table while doing nothing for it to leave a permanent white ring on that table. Naturally, we tried the same thing with the new one, which does have a bit of a ruffle. So you could tune it to work with our smart home actions, for example, turning on your smart humidifier when the humidity drops below a specific level or turning on your fan when the temperature rises to over 75 degrees. There is also a new sound recognition feature, so if homepod with its microphone here is an alarm or a smoke detector or something like that, it will send a notification to your phone. This obviously makes no sense if you are at home, but if you are away and a smoke detector goes off and you get a notification on your phone, that’s cool to have it built in instead of needing a separate sensor as I have with my Google home setup the phone Now that you know, you should check the cameras in your home or anything similar to see what’s happening. But I should also point out that the 99 Homepod Mini already had those sensors in secret, and the most recent Homepod software update activates them along with the sound recognition feature and matter support.
Apple HomePod 2 The biggest change, however, is actually what they’ve removed, as we previously discussed the homepod as being a feat of audio engineering in this small, portable package. The new homepod and mini actually have a thread radio, meaning they can be used as a matter hub, but there is now that matter support across the board. In this new homepod, the midnight homepod, you would actually have the same woofer but you now have five tweeters around the outside and four far-field microphones so they removed two tweeters removed two. If you took a cross-section of the original homepod you would see a woofer on the Top seven tweeters all the way around the outside playing in every direction and then six far-field microphones. I suppose I should be impressed that it still sounds as good to me as the original despite inferior internal Hardware since I’m not an audio file but I’ve listened to a lot of good speakers in my time, and after some quality time with the HomePod, I can say that it still sounds really good. It still has this super crisp and balanced and not distorted sound in a variety of environments and a variety of music genres.
