Apple is taking a new responsibility in the world of delivering music to your home by unveiling the HomePod, a new wireless speaker and assistant for your house.
This intelligent new wireless speaker uses similar technology to what’s available in the AirPods, except it’s incredibly more advanced on both the software and hardware ends of things.
Complete with a 7 beam-forming tweeter array, each of which have their own amplifier for sound quality, and a 4-inch up-facing subwoofer system that delivers clean bass without distortion, HomePod is made to really ‘rock your house.’
This speaker system is more advanced than any other, as it has sound awareness technology that can detect when the device is against walls and adjust the sound output accordingly so that the most of the sound is spread out into a wide-open area instead of muffled against a wall.
To make things even cooler, you can team up two HomePods in the same house setting, and the intelligent A8 chip inside of the device will enable the devices to work together to deliver richer sound.
With 6 omni-directional microphones, the HomePod is also a fully-capable “Hey Siri” listener that can interpret what you say. It’s easy to speak to your HomePod no matter how close you are to it; more importantly, it can hear you even when loud music is blaring.
When you access the Hey Siri function, a waveform appears at the top of the device, just like on your other Apple devices, providing a nice visual any time you access the feature so you know it’s working.
It works seamlessly with your Apple Music subscription, giving you instant access to over 40 million individual songs, and in addition to music, HomePod is intelligent thanks to its full Siri integration, and can help you access critical information like:
- Basic Siri queries
- The latest news headlines
- HomeKit controls
- Access traffic, sports, weather & more
Like with most Apple devices, your HomePod Siri queries are encrypted and sent to Apple’s Siri servers with a unique Siri identifier rather than with personal information, so your privacy and security are safe.
HomePod pairs with your iPhone 5s or later running iOS 11 just as easily as your AirPods do with your current devices; all you have to do is walk within range of your HomePod and your device will remember it and be able to take full advantage of it.
Fairly priced at $349, HomePod comes in both white and space gray colors. It will be available in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States starting in December, and will join the rest of the world starting in 2018.
In what looks like a very fairly-priced home assistant that can not only play music, but control your HomeKit devices and answer Siri queries, Apple’s HomePod bids good competition against Amazon’s Alexa and Google Now.
Will you be picking up a HomePod or two for your house? Share why or why not in the comments section below!