after months of delays and tens of millions of devices shipped by their
competitors apple's late entrant to the home smart speaker game has finally
arrived but can it possibly compete with the google home max a speaker twice its
size armed with the almighty google assistant
yes but it's also a little more complicated
than that
cablemod pro series cables use extra thick wires for a fuller more robust
look merged terminals on the component side of each cable have also been
eliminated for a cleaner build check them out below
despite some people's observations that it looks kind of like a giant toilet
paper roll subjectively i would still say that the homepod wins on the design
front the seamless 3d mesh fabric looks great from any angle though i would
recommend washing your hands before you touch it the capacitive glass top is an
elegant haptic and visual interface displaying volume buttons when you're
playing music and a beautiful listening animation when you're talking to siri
and we even found the physical interface more pleasing to use
tapping or holding volume buttons feels more intuitive than the slide gesture
you have to do on the google home max and it's nice to be able to hail siri
without using your voice a feature that google removed from all of its home
devices wrong now the homepod is small
but don't let that fool you it's much heavier than it looks at five and a half
pounds and this is thanks to the incredible amount of hardware that apple
packed inside it it's got a four inch subwoofer at the top
six microphones around the middle and seven tweeters at the bottom
and not just regular tweeters these are really cool for one thing they are horn
loaded which allows them to more efficiently turn mechanical energy into
acoustic energy increasing their effective radiating area and making them
sound bigger than they are and for another their diaphragms are balanced
mode radiators meaning that they can produce high frequencies by rippling or
low frequencies by moving the diaphragm in and out the old-fashioned way so if
the homepod senses that the base demands will make the subwoofer distort it will
actually offload work to the tweeters and
there is more to this technology than just
using good speakers both homepod and
google home max use special low frequency calibration microphones to
give themselves spatial awareness this functionality does allow these devices
to map the room around them and then apply automatic base correction to
increase clarity now apple said in their keynote that the
homepod would direct certain musical assets like the main vocals to the
center of the room and ambient sounds and backup vocals to the side which is
really good news because otherwise an omnidirectional wired speaker would not
be ideal a lot of the time
so i guess it's all of that stuff combined that made this thing take so
darn long and also what allow the homepod to avoid
distortion even when it's turned way up so the rumors are true it sounds really
really good especially for its size
but what about the elephant in the room the google home max
from our evaluation it actually sounded just as good but
with a different sound signature while the homepod has pronounced mids and
highs that are very forward max offers a
wider sound stage with deeper chest bumping bass thanks no doubt to its dual
four and a half inch high excursion subwoofers although this is interesting
while max gets significantly louder before it starts to compromise on sound
quality at lower volumes the homepod can
actually deliver surprisingly strong and pleasing bass compared to the max due we
think to its ability to transfer sound down into the surface it's resting on
okay then so they both sound great but
these aren't just speakers they're smart speakers which brings us to the next
question we have to answer which one is smarter
while both assistants offer the usual fare weather stock prices
news we were disappointed to learn that
unlike her competitors sirion homepod
doesn't search the web so while she can rely on native API
hooks to answer questions like who is the president of france the answer i
found is emmanuel macron at this time she stumbles on novel
queries like how long is the average ferret i can't
get the answer to that on home pod ferret typically has a length of 15
inches it's very gebo of you siri
sad although your mileage may vary since some people have reported it working but
while that's a clear disadvantage today the two devices are about equal when it
comes to response time latency and their ability to hear your commands over loud
music and homepod does have one awesome
feature that google home doesn't have yet siri
send a text message what do you want to say
with that said homepod does not have voice recognition profiles like google
home does so in theory anyone could ask
your homepod to read out your last text message whenever they want i found your
most recent message from edsel hey fire buns
last night was amazing speaking of privacy while both devices allow you to
turn off the microphones max is the only one that lets you do it with a physical
switch so which one should you buy then
we actually think the answer is pretty simple and comes down to whether or not
you use apple music see with a google
home or amazon echo you can use all the major music platforms spotify google
play music pandora iheartradio you pretty much name it including apple
music and the same goes for the homepod
so why did we bring that up ah because it's how you can interact with
those services that makes all the difference here
with google or amazon solution you get
full voice control with everything but
apple music which is limited to next song and pause with the google assistant
and even then only if you are casting your entire device via bluetooth
by contrast the homepod does feature voice control with apple music
but only apple music so if you're using spotify the only way to control it even
if you have an iphone will be through the buttons on your device
and there's some more general inflexibility like we've come to
expect from apple unlike the max the homepod does not include a three and a
half millimeter jack for third party speakers and it requires an iOS 11
device for its initial setup that's right Android users and even
those of you with older iOS devices you will need to go buy an ipod touch on
craigslist to get your home homepod working
well mostly working which brings us then to the features
that apple promised that aren't out yet and won't be until airplay 2 launches
later on this year one the ability to connect multiple home pods in stereo and
two multi-room playback from airplay 2
devices be they homepods or apple tvs or whatever
max can do both of these things today
so then that answer wasn't so simple after all but it's okay i have a summary
if you don't have any wooden tables and
you're already deep into apple's ecosystem with an apple music
subscription and a bunch of money sunk into itunes
homepod is a beautiful piece of hardware and a fantastic speaker
but if you are almost literally
anybody else you're probably better off with a competitive offering like a
google home max and alexa enabled sonos
or even some regular dumb speakers plugged into an echo dot
hey siri tell me a joke
well this whole experience wasn't very funny at all so this has been quite the
project so far yeah i know hey siri read out my last text message i
found your most recent message from edsel hey fire buns last night was
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