HomePod Late Adopter
We’ve been using an Amazon Echo Dot in our kitchen for several years, principally for timers and answering basic questions. Lately, it has not been responding as reliably. Also, it never worked well as a Bluetooth speaker for my iPhone because the phone would always reconnect to the Echo, even when I was in a different room trying to use my AirPods or just the built-in speaker. I decided to finally give HomePod a try and ordered a HomePod mini about a month ago. This is my experience as someone who has read about HomePod and Home.app since the beginning but never actually used them until now.
Setup and Home.app
The power cable is USB-C, non-detachable, and too short for where I wanted to put the HomePod on a dining room shelf. I had a variety of power extension cables already, but I didn’t really want the power brick to be hanging in the air. I provisionally chose a different location. A better solution would be to get a USB-C extension cable.
Setting up the software was really easy, though for some reason the Home app wouldn’t display my name properly. I was instead shown as “AT&T Voicemail,” which I guess came from an old contact I had created for calling my own phone number. When I deleted that contact it showed my proper name.
The Home app is disappointing, both in the available features and in the iOS-style interface of the Mac version. Confusingly, some of the features are available from Control Center, but if I start there there’s no button to get into the full settings; I have to start over by going through the Home app.
At one point, Apple support asked for my serial number, and turns out that this is visible but not copyable in the Mac version. (Apple support chat transcripts also aren’t copyable, except after screenshotting and using Live Text.)
The command to Restart HomePod doesn’t seem to work from either iOS or macOS. It doesn’t report an error, but it doesn’t do anything, either. Apple support said I should instead unplug the HomePod mini to restart it—shades of the Studio Display—but that’s easier said than done with the non-detachable power cable.
Siri
Siri is really slow, so even though it supports multiple timers I still prefer to use Alexa for that. Also, there’s no way to customize the sounds for timers or alarms. It seems worse at understanding weather questions than Alexa. General questions often tell me to open my iPhone to see the information, rather than speaking it to me.
Siri does have some advantages, though. It’s handy to be able to use Find My to ask where family members are. It can also check my calendar and make reminders that get imported into OmniFocus. I thought it would be great for adding reminders, hands-free. My phone doesn’t respond to Siri from my pocket, and Siri on my watch doesn’t work when I’m doing the dishes. Making reminders with HomePod works but is annoying because it repeats the entire text back to me. There’s a setting in iOS called Siri ‣ Accessibility ‣ Spoken Responses ‣ Prefer Silent Responses, but this only seems to affect my phone, not HomePod. This is also annoying when requesting music; it speaks the whole title and artist before playing the song. These can be especially long and uninteresting for classical pieces.
Multiple devices are a problem because Siri doesn’t always know which one I’m talking to. There doesn’t seem to be a way to say “Hey, HomePod” to disambiguate. It’s supposed to be automatic but often chooses incorrectly. It seems like the only thing you can do to be sure HomePod will respond is to turn off “Hey, Siri” on certain devices, but I don’t want to do that.
In summary, we still use the Echo for everything we were doing with it before, but now we use HomePod and Siri for music and for tasks that Alexa can’t handle or where we want a second opinion.
Playing Music
The sound quality from the HomePod mini is better than with the Echo, but I have higher expectations because I’m usually using it for playing music rather than talking with a voice assistant. The biggest problem is that there’s very little bass. There does not seem to be a way to adjust that on the HomePod itself. When AirPlaying, it seems to respect the EQ preset on my iPhone, but the effect was slight and I don’t want to change that setting because it also affects my AirPods. Overall, I would say that the sound quality is reasonable considering the size of the device, but I did not enjoy it.
I’ve heard lots of complaints about AirPlaying music, but it’s worked well for me. It certainly seems more reliable than Bluetooth.
But my goal is to avoid AirPlay where possible and have the HomePod play most music directly. I’d long had a mental block about HomePod because it doesn’t support Home Sharing (to play music from my Mac’s library) and I didn’t want to pay for iTunes Match or risk it messing up my library. Still, we’ve purchased a lot of music from the iTunes Store, and HomePod has access to that.
Forced Apple Music
The initial experience of playing music directly from HomePod was confusing. I would ask for a random album from a certain artist, and it would play an album that I was sure I had ripped from CD—and so it shouldn’t have access to. It would also play random songs that I had not purchased or even heard of. It seemed like this must have been coming from Apple Music, but I had disabled that in the Home app.
Eventually I figured out from the Subscriptions screen on my iPhone that, despite declining the free Apple Music trial, I had been enrolled in a free 7-day preview for Apple Music Voice. Apple’s support couldn’t explain why this had happened or why Apple Music was being used when I had turned off Apple Music as a music source. They also told me that there was no way for me to remove the subscription; I had to wait for the trial to end.
So there are really three issues here: being opted into a preview that I didn’t want, the switch to disable Apple Music not working, and not being able to remove the subscription until after it expired. I said that I wanted to remove it right away so that I could see, during the return period, how well HomePod worked without Apple Music. Eventually, a senior advisor was able to directly remove the preview subscription from my account.
Music and Siri
Requesting music with Siri is barely adequate, except for classical music where it’s almost useless. I can request songs and albums by name, and sometimes it works but sometimes it just says, “Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music”—even though I’m using the iTunes Store, not Apple Music. With my iPhone, I can ask Siri for a random song or album by a certain artist, but this never works with HomePod. It just reports that it couldn’t find anything (again, “in Apple Music”).
I wish I could ask Siri which albums or artists are available, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. Nor does it support my playlists, even the ones that consist only of songs that I purchased from Apple. The Siri documentation is sparse and geared towards Apple Music, so it’s not even clear which commands are intended to work. I ended up creating a smart playlist that shows my purchased music. HomePod is kind of like the streaming video experience, where you have to know the source of the content in order to initiate playback in the right way, even though the sound is ultimately coming out of the same device. Of course, there’s no support for third-party podcast apps, so I can’t use Overcast via Siri and have to initiate it via AirPlay.
Missing Purchased Music
With a playlist of my purchased music, I thought I would eventually learn which albums I could request from Siri and which I’d have to initiate via AirPlay. Instead, I got more and more frustrated as Siri sometimes worked and sometimes failed, no matter how many times I made simple, specific requests. I eventually found that the problem wasn’t my inconsistent speech or phrasing but that certain purchased albums (and their individual songs) were not accessible on HomePod via Siri at all. I hadn’t considered this as a possibility because these same albums work via Siri on my iPhone and show up in the list of Purchased Music on all my devices. Oddly, the albums do not show up as purchased if I search for them in the iTunes Store. It shows the button with the price as if I had never bought them. I went through my purchase history and found more than 25 albums that are in this inconsistent half-purchased state. These are exactly the ones that don’t work on HomePod.
I chatted with Apple support and was told that there was a simple fix where the albums in question could be pushed back into my account, but that only a phone support agent could do this. Multiple phone support people said there was no such thing and wanted to treat this as a HomePod-specific problem. I eventually made it up to a senior advisor, with whom I spent several hours, over the course of a week, installing configuration profiles, trying different things, and gathering logs. We ran into multiple problems with enabling logging and submitting the logs, and some tests had to be redone because the expected information didn’t get saved to the log. Engineering then examined the logs and asked for more. Eventually, their conclusion was that the problem of inaccessible albums is a known issue and that there is no fix yet.
Apple also confirmed that I should be able to request music by artist. This works on my iPhone but never on HomePod, even for albums that are otherwise accessible there. I chose not to dig into that issue further. Now, I initiate nearly all playback from my iPhone, as that is consistent and reliable, though once music is playing I do find Siri useful for controlling it. My wife’s music is almost all from the iTunes Store. She uses Siri to play music directly on the HomePod and so far hasn’t encountered any inaccessible songs. She likes to request individual songs, so the artist limitation isn’t a problem.
Sensors and Automation
I was excited to use HomePod as a temperature monitor, so I can make sure our heat is working when we’re out of town. The temperature sensor consistently showed about 2°F warmer than it should, but that’s close enough. The humidity sensor seems to be off by a lot (showing 48% instead of 38%). The automation leaves a lot to be desired.
What I want is for HomePod to send me a notification or text message any time the temperature gets below a set level, but that does not seem to be possible. The Home app supports events triggered by a sensor, but these can only trigger actions for other HomeKit devices, e.g. playing or pausing the music. The best I could do was to create a shortcut that shows a notification if the temperature is low. Then I can use a Personal Automation in the Shortcuts app—not available for Mac—to run this shortcut at a certain time of day. If I want it to check the temperature every hour, I have to create 24 separate automations.
I set the notification to tell me the Current Temperature (using the magic variable), but it always shows the temperature in °C even though the HomePod is set to display using °F and the If statement in the shortcut also uses °F. The answer seems to be that I need to use the Convert Measurement action and then display the Converted Measurement variable.
What happens if the HomePod’s power or Internet is not working? Apple doesn’t make this super clear, but it seems like, even if the HomePod is set as a hub, personal automations are triggered by the phone rather than the HomePod or cloud. So, in the event of a problem, I should be able to get an error report on my phone. I created a condition in the shortcut for if the Current Temperature has no value, then unplugged the HomePod to test it, but this code was never reached. Instead, the shortcut reported a generic “Read/Write operation failed” error. At least I got an error, though. It turns out that handling the no value condition is still a good idea because that’s what will happen after resetting HomePod, if the “new” HomePod hasn’t been reselected in the shortcut.
Ghost in the Pod
We had a scary incident where, late at night, the HomePod mini spontaneously started playing a random song (Crofters: The Musical) that was not in my library and which I had never searched for. At the time, I had not yet figured out that I was in an Apple Music preview, so it was extra confusing not knowing where the song came from. In theory, no one else should be able to control our HomePod because it’s set to the strictest setting of only allowing people who are part of the home. I’ve read that sometimes the button is triggered by ghost taps and have now set the Touch Accommodations to hopefully make that less likely, though I’m not convinced that’s what happened. Wouldn’t a ghost tap, e.g. from one of the ladybugs we’ve seen recently, just resume the last song played?
Returning HomePod mini
I decided to return the HomePod mini, both because of the sound quality and because there was a chance of Siri working better on a HomePod 2. Apple was happy to facilitate this, even though the return period had ended during the time I was troubleshooting with them.
However, the return ended up not being straightforward because I couldn’t print the shipping label. Apple e-mails a link to their Web site, where you click a button and it’s supposed to open a print window for the label. However, the recently redesigned navigation bar at apple.com breaks this. When browsing directly, the navigation bar pops down on hover. When printing, a garbled version of the navigation bar is drawn on top of the shipping label. This happened with multiple browsers. I started a chat with Apple, and they offered to e-mail me a PDF of the label but said that this would take up to 24 hours. In the interim, I recalled that StopTheMadness has a workaround called Protect mouse movement for the hover menus. Unfortunately, it does not fix the printing problem (where there is no mouse movement), but the developer traced the problem to a bug in Apple’s CSS, which I was able to override by telling StopTheMadness to add the CSS:
@media only print {
#globalnav { visibility: hidden }
}
for secure4.store.apple.com. This hides the navigation bar when printing.
HomePod 2
The big HomePod also has a short power cable, but it’s removable, not USB-C, and has no brick. Unlike what others have reported, I found the temperature and humidity sensors to be identical to HomePod mini, i.e. not very accurate but good enough for my purposes.
The sound quality is much better than HomePod mini, particularly in the bass. It fills the room better, and I can hear it over the kitchen range fan without going near the maximum volume. Overall, it just sounds very clear. Still, I would say that the bass is a bit lacking, and while the sound is impressive for the size, HomePod is not magic. I did not find it to be notable compared with larger, older, cheaper, lower-tech speakers I’ve used. It’s good for my purposes, but now I understand why people buy HomePods in pairs. I would be interested to see a HomePod Max product that doesn’t prioritize size so much, or a HomePod nano that’s just a bridge, like the AirPort Express, to a standalone speaker.
Siri on HomePod 2 is faster than with HomePod mini but still seems slow compared with Alexa. It is still not able to access all of my purchased music, nor query it by artist.
Conclusion
My overall impression is that HomePod is OK but not great. As a late adopter of Apple Watch, I was pleasantly surprised that most aspects of that product seemed better and more thoughtfully designed than I had expected. I kept running into little details that impressed me. With HomePod and the Home app, it was the opposite. Never have I contacted Apple’s support more times about a single product, and with less success. For a product that’s more than five years old, it seems unrefined, and the features are curiously limited.
The listening history could have been a great feature, with integration across multiple Apple devices, but in reality it seems to be missing a lot of functionality and/or is inconsistent, to the point where I don’t even understand how it’s intended to work.
I’ve purchased a lot of music from Apple over the last 20 years, but Apple has done the bare minimum to honor those purchases and the library that I’ve organized over the years. Instead, I get an experience that’s seemingly deliberately bad to encourage me to subscribe to Apple Music.
In the end, I feel happy but defeated. Happy because the overall concept of the product is a good fit for my life right now. I’m happy with the sound quality from HomePod 2. I’m listening to more music lately and often enjoying it with my family rather than just my AirPods. When the content is purchased from Apple, and when Siri works, it’s glorious. As a fallback, my entire music library fits on my phone, and being able to play it via AirPlay—and pause and adjust the volume via Siri—is also pretty great. But I also feel defeated because I paid Apple a lot of money despite them doing a bad job in many respects. I have all Apple devices, everything at the latest version, and lots of Apple content. Apple is supposed to be at its best in this sort of situation, but HomePod just does not live up to its potential. Yet there’s no alternative that would clearly be better, so here I am.
Part of my negativity is that I have no expectation that Apple will ever improve the experience with purchased or ripped/downloaded music. It’s all about getting you to subscribe to Apple Music now. And I’m a bit worried that, as happened with the first-generation HomePod, this one may get slower and less reliable over time. The speakers themselves should last forever, but the software won’t. My first thought was that if only there were a line-in the hardware could outlast the software. But, though a line-in might be useful for other reasons, it wouldn’t really matter. Siri and AirPlay are the reasons to purchase a HomePod, and I would have no use for it without them. The ecosystem and the product are increasingly inseparable.
Previously:
- Apple Music Classical
- HomePod (2nd Generation)
- Amazon Alexa to Lose $10 Billion This Year
- Apple Watch Late Adopter
- Apple Music Lobotomizes Siri
- HomePod mini
- HomePod Now Supports Multiple Timers
- Stop The Madness
- A Blind HomePod Test
- HomePod Reviews
- Nest Cam Waking in the Night
Update (2023-04-22): Rodney Haydon:
I am renting a car, and use Apple CarPlay to listen to my downloaded music on my iPhone. When I asked Siri to play one of the albums, it incorrectly chose a song I don’t have and automatically subscribed me to Apple Music 7-day preview. I was never asked if I wanted to join, and the only email I got said “Your Apple Music Voice Plan is now live. With your 7-day preview, you can play any song in the catalog with Siri.”
No way to unsubscribe, either. I’ve never had it where I was automatically subscribed to something I didn’t explicitly request. This is so wrong.
I am not a fan of auto-expanding menus on web sites. If I overshoot when targeting something under the menu, suddenly a big part of the window is covered and I have to move the mouse way away to get the menu to hide again. (And then I have to be very careful as I target my destination again, lest the whole thing happen all over.) Plus in my experience (like just now), sometimes they get stuck and don’t disappear, so I have to do a bunch of waving around to trigger them to get out of my way.
Nena Farrell and Brent Butterworth:
No smart speaker we’ve heard sounds as good as a decent pair of bookshelf speakers, but the new HomePod performs well sonically—although not really better than its top competitors in the smart-speaker category.
At breakfast, Tiff said “play, volume 1”. Siri played an album entitled “Volume One” by an artist we’ve never heard of.
At lunch, I said “play music”, so it played random songs from only the same three early-2000s-rock artists it always thinks I like.
I then said, “Play new rock music”, it said it was playing the “top 25 new rock hits”, and it played:
- Fleetwood Mac from 1977
- Santana from 2007
- A random 2021 country song
- Don’t Stop Believin’
I stopped believin’.
Oh, I forgot to mention that every third or fourth song just ends abruptly and advances to the next — sometimes after only a second or two of playing, sometimes in the middle of the song.
