Apple HomePod: Apples Cute Answer to the Amazon Echo and Google Home

The World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote just concluded and boy was there a lot to unpack. But Apples most anticipated device was a Smart Home assistant that had its prime focus on music and its called Apple HomePod. The HomePod is something Apple claims to have worked on for a while with its design featuring a big mesh fabric over a cylinder taking cues from the Mac Pro. The speaker comes in two colors: black and white and is about 7-inches in height.caption idattachment_5119" alignaligncenter width640"Siri LED Waveform/captionApples goal was to merge two separate worlds into one: the sound capabilities of a Sonos speaker and the smarts of Amazons Alexa. Apples answer comes with a 7 tweeter array, 6 microphone array, and a high-excursion woofer all of which packs a punch for a speaker of this size. The smarts for the new Apple HomePod comes from Apples A8 chip, yes the same 20nm chip that powered the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. While the design seems to be a little unique for Apple (cue the chamfered edges), its actually more functional than youd think. The speaker is intelligent enough to focus the sound in the direction youre in thanks to its spatial and beamforming technology. The speaker itself further has a responsive LED waveform depicting Siri on the top plate of the speaker that animates based on your voice.It definitely has a pretty high compute power for a speaker and Apple is promising a more optimized Siri to better fulfill the purpose as a standalone assistant and integrate HomeKit deep into the OS. Apple is making it clear that music is the core factor that drives the HomePod and deeply integrates with Apple Music which is a great way to add to the current user base of over 27 million active users.

The speaker will launch in December, just in time for the holidays for a retail price of US$349 which despite being pricier than Amazons Echo and Google Home, is actually reasonable considering youre getting a powerful speaker smart assistant combo.Apple despite being late to the smart assistant market, came back with a product that currently doesnt have a true competitor which is a great way to garner more attention and a reason to buy the new HomePod over its competitors. Well just have to wait and see if the HomePod delivers on its promise!There were much more announcements from WWDC 2017 which you can find here: WWDC 2017 Releases.

·RELATED QUESTION

Can I use an Apple Homepod as a speaker and microphone for WebEx, Skype voice, etc?

Unfortunately no. It is not possible to use the HomePod's built-in microphone for recording audio to a Mac. You cannot Bluetooth pair the HomePod to a Mac in order to use it as a combined speaker/microphone either.Other products exists that does what you're looking for. For example I'm using the Logitech Group speaker/microphone combination for web conferences. However, it is quite a different product from the HomePod