This is the second or third pass at this article I have written. HomePod is the most challenging piece of hardware I have ever tried to review because it is at once terrible and terrific. I always start these pieces out with the intention to say glowing things about it. Then, reality takes over. But they are both reality. So rather than start from the beginning as I always do, allow me to begin from the other direction.

I am listening to a classical flutist right now. And I am elevated to heights of joy, dare I say, euphoria thanks to the audio fidelity of the stereo pair of HomePods in front of me spaced about 3’ apart.

I have something of a HomePod addiction. I have three right now. More to the point, I have two in a stereo pair. And the other belongs to my wife and is in the kitchen where she does her computing. I throw my audio to it when I have business in the kitchen and don’t want to stop the good vibrations.

Now it’s Kanye.

A Sound Investment

It is so easy to forget what the HomePod is at its core. HomePod is a speaker for Apple product users that is trying to use technology to punch above its sonic weight. At that single task, it overwhelmingly succeeds. If that is all you care about, there is no need to finish reading this review. You should already be on your way to the nearest Apple Store to pick up a pair. But there is more that you should probably care about. So keep reading.

Bon Jovi.

If you just want to pay $600 for a pair of them at the Apple Store, you can. But a better bet is to go online and find OWC discounting the white model for $228 in non-retail packaging. With delivery and taxes, you can easily have them shipped for just under $500 for a pair. It is easily worth it and you should just do it.

Phantom of the Opera.

Starting at the bottom, you can’t ask for better bass. I don’t just mean that you can’t ask for more bass. You can’t ask for better sounding, well-rounded, fat-bottomed, thumptastic bass. There are tracks intended to punch you in the chest. HomePod delivers those breath-taking body blows as intended. Base-heavy funk as with Earth, Wind, and Fire will force you to involuntarily dance.

The pluck of a staring double-bass is sublime. The scrape of the bow across the strings of a cello will startle you and jerk from you tears of joy you didn’t know you had. From disco to acapella, the bass is as rich and smooth and violent as it needs to be. I will go as far as to say you really shouldn’t want more bass than what a pair of HomePods deliver. It would be like wanting too much salt on your steak. You can do it. But it would not really improve the steak.

While the bass foundation is critical, it means nothing without the fat middle to go with it. I believe less bass can be forgiven by crunchy miss. With Abba’s Dancing Queen plain way too loud right now, I can tell you that the horns piping out the mids are easily up to the task.

Classical music lives and dies by the throaty violin, or the lack thereof. The piano is a muddy mess without steady mids. And you just as well fire the lead singer if the mids are too low. Mids are what allow sirens like Whitney Huston to pierce your emotional barriers and strike at your very soul.

Obviously, the sound profile is not complete without tingling treble at the top. But treble is like icing on a cake: too much and it’s cloying. When it is done right, you don’t hear the sizzle of the treble. You hear everything else much clearer and cleaner.

Were I listening to a single HomePod, I could find something to complain about with regard to the sound. But the vast majority of music available in the world was mastered for stereo. And when heard in HomePod stereo, there is nothing to criticize. Having owned professional studio equipment and done a bit of production work (I have an album on iTunes that I produced myself), a pair of HomePods bring me as close to the studio as I have been since those days of making music myself. I can afford no higher complement to the audio quality of speakers.

Shining Star by Earth, Wind, and Fire.

Bigger on the Inside

If you want to make a speaker sound bigger than it is, buy two of them and put them in a stereo pair. Put them wide apart in front of you and create a sound field. The sound is always bigger on the inside of that field. Stereo sound is always greater than the sum of its parts.

It is not just the sound field that is bigger. It is the actual volume. Even playing something as tame as Peter, Paul, and Mary, I can’t sit in front of them at full volume without having to move across the room. There is nowhere in my apartment I can be and tolerate it at full volume. I can’t imagine the room or setting in a good-sized room where a stereo pair doesn’t fill the space quite nicely.

You continue to be pleased with the audio fidelity throughout that range of volume. It could just be the source material I was testing. But I couldn’t get it to break even at its loudest. For $500 or even $600, I don’t believe you will find a better stereo set that can outperform these speakers in the sound category. They punch well above their weight class in almost every category important to a traditional set of speakers.

Randy Travis.

More Is Less

So far, I have extolled the virtues of the HomePod as a speaker. And if we stopped there, this would be a review so glowing, even I would suspect myself to be a shill. But the HomePod is more than a speaker. And from here, the review glows a bit less brightly.

These speakers would almost be better off without Siri integration. It is fine for requesting and controlling music. With the latest software, setting timers works well enough. But I find “Hey Siri” to be as much a liability as an aid. When you have HomePods in your house, forget about any other device responding to your call. Regardless of location and proximity, all requests go to the HomePod. And that is not what you are after most of the time.

With more microphones in the house, there are more opportunities for false positives. The speakers are always perking up when you are not talking to them. It’s funny the first time, and annoying every time thereafter. Worse still, Apple does not seem to be addressing the problem at all with updates, as if they think everything is okay. Apple is treating a broken experience as if it were good enough. It isn’t.

That is not the only place where the experience is broken. Setup seems simple enough. But the moment you are forced to interact with the software, it all breaks down. First, you can only deal with the HomePod via the Home app. That does not make a lot of sense, and feels like a cynical way for Apple to force people into discovering HomeKit. Second, there are a number of places where you will find settings. Some are redundant while others are the only place you can find certain things. It is never clear where you need to be to perform a given task.

HomePods are best experienced in stereo pairs. But it is not obvious how to get them into stereo pairs. And once paired, it is not a simple matter to unpair them. I had to look it up on the internet. Now it is trivially easy to group two or more speakers together so that they play the same content in sync. But that is vastly different than stereo. It seems Apple could have used the same simple interface to make and unmake stereo pairs. You have to work a little harder to achieve that stereo sweetness.

Reinventing the Speaker

We should all get nervous when Apple sets out to reinvent something that isn’t broken. It is going to be half brilliant and half frustration. That is the HomePod. Apple didn’t need to reinvent the speaker. Lots of companies are producing great sounding speakers. It is a solved problem. If the HomePod did not exist and all you had to choose from were Sonos and Bose, you would still experience sonic bliss.

All Apple needed to do was wed current speaker technology with the Apple ecosystem for a seamless experience. That is the one thing they didn’t do well. Really, they had one job. And they muffed it.

One obvious use of an Apple speaker would be as computer speakers for the Mac. Guess what HomePod is bad at doing. HomePod is an AirPlay speaker. It uses only wifi for connection. That makes no sense whatsoever. Connecting to it requires special hardware and software. And no version of the Mac hardware or software is completely compatible with HomePod.

You can select a single HomePod from the volume menu. But there will be a noticeable lag between what you do on the Mac and what you hear on the HomePod. Don’t bother watching video as it will be out of sync most of the time. And you can’t group two or more speakers at the system level.

Apple could have gotten around this by including bluetooth and a headphone jack in the HomePod. There is no good reason why they did not. The components are practically free in volume. And there is plenty of room inside the HomePod. Space is simply not a factor. Apple’s speaker should be able to connect with anything that can output content without latency. But it can’t even do that for the Mac.

This bears repeating. Any modern speaker with bluetooth and a headphone jack will have more versatility than Apple’s reinvented speakers. The only thing they won’t have is Siri. And right now, that is not necessarily a bad thing. The Mac story isn’t all bad. AirPlay 2 works perfectly well within certain app experiences like Music and Apple TV. But you need to set up your listening experience directly from within those apps. Forget about Safari, YouTube, Hulu, etc…

iOS offers far more compatibility. But even that experience breaks down when using accessibility. You can play media from iOS devices just fine. But you cannot get your spoken interface to play through anything other than the phone. That is not the only place where the experience falls down on iOS.

How about as speakers for your Apple TV? Nope! It is not any better there either. Sure, you can play your TV content through the speakers. But the sound is not persistent. So when you leave the TV to do something else, then come back to it, the Apple TV has forgotten all about your speaker preferences. And you have to select the HomePod again, and again, and every time you want to watch TV. That is maddening.

Conclusion: Buying Advice

These speakers sound great, especially as a stereo pair. They are worth it for the sound. However, they are not just speakers. If they were, my advice would be to buy as many as you can afford. But they are Apple speakers that do not do their primary job well which is to integrate excellent speakers with your existing Apple ecosystem. They integrate about as well as you would expect from a product made by Amazon or Google. So you might as well save some money and get products that were made by Amazon or Google. Just be sure to turn off the digital assistants.

I love the HomePod idea, and I would buy even more of them if I could justify the purchase. My 3 year old, $200 Bose speaker is a better accessory for my computer and Apple TV than the newer, more expensive speaker made by Apple.

When Apple made the iPhone, what they needed to do was produce a smartphone that would integrate well with the Apple ecosystem since they couldn’t get any other phone manufacturer to do it. They succeeded. The same was true for the AirPort router. It had one job. And it did it brilliantly. Ditto for smartwatches. That is all they needed to do for smart speakers. They failed to deliver a product that integrated with the rest of your existing Apple ecosystem. For this reason alone, you should give the HomePod a hard pass.

Rumor is that Apple will be reinventing the Homepod in 2020. Right now, they have a half brilliant product that suffers from a lack of focus. Apple has no idea why the HomePod exists. And it shows. Next year, they might return to their roots of making products that enhance rather than frustrate the Apple experience.

David Johnson