The HomePod is Back! Does Anyone Care?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the kitchen we get a new HomePod. In what amounts to a sneak attack from the folks over at Apple, we have announcement of the new generation two HomePod. Not the little HomePod, the big HomePod.

It still looks like the same HomePod — the room-filling sound with intelligent directional audio that supposedly puts the vocals in the middle, no matter where it is in the room and stuff like that.

It looks exactly like the first HomePod. I don’t know if it is though. One woofer, five directional tweeters and some kind of brain inside. They don’t say what chip they’re using, I think they did say which CPU was in the original HomePod.

Does the same real-time space analsis, or it sounds like the same real-time space analysis of the room so that you get the best sound no matter where the HomePod is placed. You can still pair two for stereo. It’ll also do Dolby Atmos.

I kind of gave up on the home pod after they canceled the initial HomePod, because I liked that one. And the Mini, while it’s fine, it’s kind of…it sounds okay, but it’s kind of a toy. If you’re serious about audio. The HomePod Mini is just for background noise.

Of course, if you have multiple HomePods around the house, you can set them up for your whole-home audio or you could use Siri to tell people that dinner is ready, apparently And you can tell Siri to do things like turn on the lights.

It works with all the smart home stuff. Hopefully better than the original HomePod it supports Matter, which is, as I understand it, a new smart home, smart things protocol. You can do the digital handoff. So if you’ve got your iPhone and you’re listening to something and you wanna transfer it over to the HomePod, you can do that much in the same way you can go from one device to another with the AirPods, whatever AirPods that you’ve got.

But I do have some questions. One of which is: How, if at all, is it in any way different than the original HomePod? Apple spent a ton of money on the original HomePod, so much so that I think it made the original HomePod difficult to sell because in order to like recoup the investment they made in designing the thing, they had to charge $350 for it. $299 is the price point for the HomePod gen 2.

I’ve already ordered one and it should be here on February 3rd.

Another question I have is, since Apple had the weird infomercial announcing the MacBook, Mac mini M2 release yesterday why release the HomePod gen 2 a day after in this weird sneak attack?

In true Apple style, they’ve given us no specs about what the HomePod can do. No frequency ranges, no speaker power ratings, no anything like that. So, we really can’t compare apples to apples when we look at the HomePod versus say, Any product like it or any other speakers or anything like that, it’s a black box. Quite literally. It comes in midnight, which is black, and white. They don’t tell us anything about the inner workings of it, which is pretty much on par for Apple with things like this because they want it to be magical.

I, for one, am glad the HomePod is back. I was sad when it went away because it was one of those products that actually delivered on its promise. It did sound really good. After all the little bugs got worked out of the operating system. It was great. Airplay two came out and it really worked well. You’ll be able to listen to spatial audio with Apple Music through your phone or even through the Apple tv, if that’s something that you want to do.