 So, this is the HomePod. The HomePod is Apple's answer to the Google Home and the Amazon Echo and every other smart speaker out there with a voice assistant. It's a $350 speaker that has Siri. The basic idea is pretty simple. It's covered in a weird spongy fabric. There's a touch display on top and it's surprisingly heavy. But the HomePod is pretty limited. Siri just can't do as much as other assistants and the only music service you can control your voice is Apple Music. If you're a Spotify person, the HomePod is probably not for you. And I think Apple knows it's pretty limited because all of the company's focus is on sound quality. The truth is most other smart speakers sound crappy and the HomePod sounds incredible. So, I'm a huge speaker nerd. My house is full of speakers. There's a vintage all analog system in the living room, a brand new Atmos home theater downstairs, Sonos everywhere, and all kinds of smart speakers tucked into every other corner. So, there's a lot here to compare the HomePod to, especially since Apple says the HomePod is all about music first and smart assistant stuff second. And the HomePod sounds incredible for its size and price. We've been comparing it to the new Amazon Echo, a bunch of Sonos speakers including the new Sonos One and the Play 5, the Google Home and the Google Home Max, and even Bluetooth speakers like the UE MegaBone. And it's just obviously better than all of them. The HomePod isn't just one speaker, it's actually eight of them, all controlled by an A8 processor and tons of custom software. There are seven tweeters that fire down and out from the bottom and a single four inch woofer pointing out of the top for low frequencies. There's also a total of seven microphones, six around the middle for Siri and a seventh inside that measures the location of that woofer so Apple can precisely control the bass. When you first plug in the HomePod and start playing music, it goes through a series of steps that tune the speaker to the room it's in. First it uses the mics to detect any walls nearby so it knows how sound will bounce off of them. Second, it uses those seven tweeters to form a virtual array of sound beams that are assigned to direct and ambient sounds like vocals and applause. The ambient channels are pointed at the walls to reflect and the direct sounds are pointed out at the listen. Sometime during all of that, it detects the walls again to refine the model of the room it's in. Then it analyzes the difference between the left and right channels of the music you're playing to figure out what sound should go into what beams, ambient or direct. And then it measures the position of the subwoofer and the reflections of the bass constantly as you're playing music to make sure the bass doesn't overwhelm the rest of the music. And all of this happens at once within like 10 seconds. If you move the HomePod, an accelerometer inside detects motion and it does it all over again. In terms of ideas I'm into, a virtual array of sound beams that points guitar solos at my face is super high on the list. So here's the thing. The HomePod sounds great, but I don't think it sounds so much better than other speakers that you should switch away from Spotify or give up all of the features of Alexa or Google Assistant. If you're a huge audio nerd, you will definitely be able to hear it. But if you're just a regular person, you might get more from another speaker that sounds almost as good. Something like the Sonos One sounds almost as good and you get a huge array of Alexa skills, Google Assistant support in the future, and you can use almost any music service you want. And when you get away from sound quality, the HomePod just isn't a very smart, smart speaker. Siri just can't compete with Alexa's huge array of skills or Google Assistant's ability to answer questions. There's this display on the top of the HomePod, but it doesn't show information, just blurry colors to let you know what it's doing. The Amazon Echo Show and the Echo Spot actually show information. Google Assistant devices are coming out with screens too. There's just something missing there. You can control smart home devices like locks and light switches, but you have to use HomeKit, which is way more fiddly than what Amazon lets you do with Alexa. Siri can't even set more than one timer, which is the main thing I use my Alexa devices for in the kitchen. It's crazy. And in the weirdest omission of all, Siri on the HomePod can't recognize multiple voices. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but if you just power through the setup without thinking about it, literally anyone can ask the HomePod to read your text messages if you're on the same Wi-Fi network. So if I'm in the basement and the HomePod's up here, someone can just roll up to it and start sending iMessages or ask it to read my most recent message, and I'll never know. Hey Siri, can you read me my last message? I found your most recent message from Phil. Hey Neelay, I don't know what kind of lonely audio nerds Apple designed the HomePod for, but I think you should turn off all the personal requests features of the HomePod until the company adds voice detection to this thing. Would you like to reply? Yes. What do you want to say? Hey, it's Neelay. I'm leaving. Becca runs the verge now. Your reply to Phil says, Hey, it's Neelay. I'm leaving. Becca runs the verge now. Ready to send it? Yes. I'll send your message. That's a huge glaring weakness in the HomePod. If you have roommates, you have kids, you live with any other people at all, you should turn off personal requests on the HomePod settings until Apple adds detection for multiple voices. And I still just don't know why it's not there. Amazon can detect multiple voices. Google can detect multiple voices. Apple can detect multiple voices. If you say, Hey Siri, only your phone responds. The HomePod is running an A8 chip, same as the iPhone 6. Should be able to do it. It's just not there. The HomePod is limited in other ways too. A lot of people on Twitter asked me if you could use it as a TV speaker and the answer is basically no. You can set the Apple TV to AirPlay to a HomePod, but the second you ask it to play music, it loses the connection and then you have to set the Apple TV to AirPlay again when you want to watch something. So you can do it. It's just super inconvenient. You also can't tell Siri on the HomePod to play something on the Apple TV the way that you can with Alexa and a Fire TV or Google Assistant and a Chromecast. Until AirPlay 2 comes out sometime this year, you can only use one speaker at a time. You can't have multiple speakers going at once. You can't use it as a Bluetooth speaker at all and you can't even set it up if you have an Android phone. You have to have an iOS device. And then there's Spotify and other music services. I've mentioned this a couple times already, but Spotify has way more subscribers than Apple Music and the HomePod doesn't really know Spotify exists. You can play Spotify on the HomePod over AirPlay if you want, but you won't really be able to control it with your voice. And Spotify is everywhere. You can get a ton of devices that support it directly. Apple Music is pretty much just limited to Apple's ecosystem. So you lose a ton of flexibility about where your music is available if you switch to Apple Music. It's a huge and frustrating limitation. Look, Amazon makes the Echo and they own Amazon Music, but they still let you set Spotify as the default. Google makes Google Home devices. They own Google Play Music and YouTube. They still let you set Spotify as the default. Apple just wants to lock you into that ecosystem and it's incredibly restrictive. I am an Apple Music subscriber. It's my primary music service and I still think this is frustrating. As a speaker, the HomePod is a huge accomplishment. It sounds incredible. Apple's audio engineering team should be so proud of itself. I actually went to Cupertino a couple days ago and toured Apple's audio engineering lab and got to see all the rooms they tested in. They've put so much work into this thing and it totally paid off. But Apple's audio engineering team should be pretty frustrated with the executives at Apple who decided that this thing needed to be restricted entirely to Apple's walled garden. If the HomePod would just open up a little bit and let you use the music service you wanted, let Siri be a little bit more extensible and would just be a little bit more capable, it would be the only speaker to buy. Absolutely. Look, if you're a huge audio nerd, you use entirely Apple products and you subscribe to Apple Music, you should get a HomePod. It sounds really, really good. But if you use Spotify, you should get something else. There are other speakers out there that sound almost as good and fit your life better. And ultimately, Apple needs to compete with that. Man, I really put a lot of words in this video.