Apple HomePod (2023) review: Big sound for Apple fans

Apple’s HomePod is back for the first time in years, and frankly, not much has changed.

The original HomePod, launched in 2018, will be discontinued in early 2021, leaving an empty space in the lives of those who wanted an Apple speaker that could be louder than the HomePod mini. It was an ambitious product for its time, with seven tweeters, six mics and the magic of Apple technology that made it possible to adapt the sound to any room. It also had an ambitious high price of $349, which probably contributed to its rapid demise.

Things have changed since then. On the one hand, Smart His speakers are so ubiquitous that now he can buy a decent-sounding speaker at IKEA for $99. On the other hand, you can easily decorate your home with a $2,000 line of smart speakers from Sonos and Bose.

It’s an old-fashioned design, but it’s still cool

With the new HomePod, it looks like Apple has decided to walk in the middle of the road. The new HomePod is 0.2 inches shorter, a bit cheaper at $299, and comes with five tweeters and four microphones (the subwoofer is still here and has the same 4-inch diameter). It’s powered by Apple’s new S7 chip, with humidity, temperature, and voice recognition sensors.

If you just watch from a distance, you won’t notice the change. The new HomePod looks pretty much the same, with the only big design difference being the new Midnight color (replaced by the much more consistent Space Gray). The HomePod is still beautiful, so it doesn’t matter if the design hasn’t changed. The body of the mesh fabric has a nice texture, and if you look closely, you can see the lattice-like weave pattern. Siri’s eyes, which pop up when you summon Siri, are bigger than the 1st gen and are very cool to see, especially in a dark room. But the most important thing about this design for me is that the HomePod fits nicely into any home.

The new sensor (surprisingly, it’s also been built into the HomePod mini before, but Apple only decided to enable it now, two years after its launch) is a nice addition, but It’s not groundbreaking. This makes the HomePod a bit more viable as a smart home hub, allowing you to quickly check the temperatures in different rooms in your home (if you have more than one of his HomePods) and for example when a carbon monoxide alarm goes off will be notified. It has disappeared.

apple warm hug

If you own a lot of Apple gadgets, the best thing about HomePod is how they work together. Setting up one HomePod was incredibly easy. Plug in, scan with your iPhone, and you’re good to go. Adding another one was even easier, and Apple immediately asked if it would play stereo sound (which is only possible with two identical HomePods of his. On the HomePod and HomePod mini, stereo playback is you can’t). I used eARC on my LG TV set to make my HomePod act as a TV speaker with the help of my Apple TV 4K and it worked seamlessly. I even started using Apple’s Home app, which I rarely used before, to overview and even control all aspects of my smart home setup, and it proved to be very capable.

Thanks to its built-in microphone, HomePod is great at picking up voice commands. Even if you yell at some other Apple gadget listening for input. Siri is still just plain old Siri, often surprisingly smart and sometimes frustratingly ignorant of what it wants (no, you can’t run other voice assistants on the HomePod).

Most of my frustration with Siri stems from Apple’s lack of integration with third-party services like Spotify. When I asked her to play one of her songs, she declined. Simply because Spotify had certain songs and Apple Music didn’t. Sure, you can transfer her Spotify songs to her HomePod via AirPlay, but that takes extra time. Likewise, there’s no full Tidal integration with Amazon Music, but Apple supports third-party services like her Deezer and Pandora.

Even if you’re trapped in the warm and welcoming world of Apple’s ecosystem, you’ll still encounter bugs from time to time. Playback would occasionally pause for some unknown reason (which, fortunately, was quickly resumed). Unlike the Home app on my iPhone, the same app on my MacBook Pro didn’t show two of his HomePods in the living room. Overall, though, the integration between all the moving parts of my system, especially the one with his Apple logo, is great.

If you could change one major thing about the HomePod, it would be battery power. It would be nice if I could plug it into an outlet and take it with me on the terrace, in another room, or even when I travel. It weighs in at 5.16 pounds, which is pretty heavy, but not too bulky to make it a portable product. Sonos’ portable Move speakers, for example, are big and heavy (the obvious caveat to this is that the HomePod is also big and heavy if it includes a battery). Perhaps Apple could include a battery-powered version in the future.

sound that fills the room

The sound coming out of a HomePod (or two HomePods) is surprisingly loud. Thanks to HomePod’s five tweeters designed to shoot sound in all directions and Apple’s compute audio magic, you’ll be able to produce airy, loud sound that sounds good wherever you stand in the room.

As if to prove that small speakers can play deep bass, the sound signature coming out of the HomePod is incredibly bass-heavy. This might be desirable at parties, but for home listening, the bass was too loud and distracting. Hidden in his HomePod settings in the Home app is a “Lower Bass” option, but it feels like it’s turning the sound down too much. It would be nice to add some kind of equalizer, or at least some presets (Apple Music offers a lot of presets in settings, but it doesn’t work on HomePod).

Thanks to its booming bass, the HomePod sounds slightly muffled in the highs and mids. I compared it to my $149 Audio Pro T3 speakers. This produces an incredibly bright and detailed sound for its size. Vocals sounded like a step back when I switched from the T3 to the HomePod. To be fair, the T3 loses out when he’s forced to recreate something with more than two instruments, but the HomePod has a more balanced sound and doesn’t sit right in front of Sometimes it sounds better.

I’ve had the luxury of connecting two HomePod speakers to get stereo sound. Not surprisingly, everything has improved exponentially. The soundstage is now properly sized both horizontally and vertically, the sound is louder, the drums and percussion are richer and more detailed, and the bass is precise and surprisingly deep. Vocals and acoustic guitars weren’t as clear as I’d hoped. Again, if Apple gave me an equalizer, I think I could tweak the HomePod’s sound to make it even better.

Sonically, the HomePod is perfect for playing modern pop. The Weeknd, Billie Eilish and Rosalia all sounded great. Not satisfied with the crunchy rock sound of The Arctic Monkeys and The Mars Volta, it offered a slightly thinner sound, but it still worked well. Fink-like intimate acoustic performance the wheels turn at your feet It gives you an amazing sense of space, as if you were in an auditorium, but sadly the vocals always remain a bit understated.

HomePod is good, but consider the HomePod mini

The new HomePod is one of Apple’s quintessential product upgrades. It’s not revolutionary, but it offers enough novelty to drive you towards a purchase. A lower starting price also helps. This applies to people who want a HomePod but don’t have one. That said, if you own the original his HomePod (or two), you probably don’t need to upgrade.

The competition is tough when starting from scratch. If you look hard enough, you’ll find better-sounding speakers, and even cheaper ones. You’re sure to find a speaker that’s better suited to your musical tastes. But no other speaker sounds as good and works so well with all your other Apple gadgets. Oddly enough, perhaps the HomePod’s biggest competitor is Apple’s HomePod mini. One he can buy three for the price of a HomePod and comes with nearly the same feature set.