HomePod mini works effortlessly with your Apple devices.

and only apple devices.

Burned myself on apple years ago, got myself an ipod, learned my lesson with itunes, sold it, never come back.

Too bad it seemingly relies so much on Siri. I haven’t been able to make Siri play me any music what so ever, despite multiple attempts. Once I’ve started playing, I can’t even make Siri skip tracks forward or backwards. Absolutely worthless.

Caveat: not using Apple Music.

So unless this has some other redeeming quality over “Siri in your living room”, I don’t think it will sell well. The original HomePod regularly went on sale for 33% off already.

I can’t wait for reviews and comparisons on the sound of HomePod vs. HomePod mini.

Without having dedicated Apple TV/iPad/Homepod at home, you can't access devices in Home app, even if you have VPN.

This meant that even at home I had to unlock the phone and wait for it to connect to Wifi before Siri would do anything with devices. This delay made it impractical to use Siri for controlling devices through Siri.

Maybe it's possible to make it work with VPN by also forwarding some autodiscovery packets, but I'm not sure.

I'm sure my wife is going to drive me up the wall with the intercom feature though!

Generally speaking, while the sound is excellent that user interface and implementation are atrocious.

...

Nope. Not useful enough yet.

As long as it's sending data to Apple, it's anything but private.

This is a full 5 years after the Amazon Echo was introduced.

This just adds to my creeping feeling that innovation is dead at Apple.

Oh wait, it’s not available in my country...

However, there's probably a bit of a difference with the amount of on board processing that the two devices can do.

For example, my iPhone can do voice to text while on airplane mode.

{guessing} Similar on board processing would allow a HomePod Mini to work with HomeKit without needing to go to the cloud - Amazon working with Hue does need to go out to the cloud to get that voice to text to command layer. {/guessing}

South Park, being; well, South Park - actually did an episode taking advantage of this and trolling thousands of viewers:

https://mashable.com/2017/09/14/south-park-alexa-google-home...

(not really SFW content, strong language)

I suspect that the device is constantly recording the audio in your room, and sending that to Amazon’s servers in the cloud. Because I doubt that the little puck has enough processing power inside it to handle speech recognition.

This allows Amazon the ability to continually upgrade their servers, without the need to upgrade the puck.

And only when the server detects it’s prompt, “Alexa”, will it send a response back to the puck. This is how the little device appears to be so responsive.

And not surprisingly, this bit of functionality is not marketed by Amazon. After all, who the hell in their right mind, would want to be constantly monitored, and have all their private conversations at home be secretly recorded by Amazon.

In fact, I suspect that all the voice assistant devices from other manufacturers, like Google, are doing exactly this.

He's interested in it to connect his speakers to AirPlay. Does your model do that?

On device you can only ask it to play songs on the device, calling people in the phone book etc.

You can also fashion a Chromecast audio out of a normal (video) Chromecast and an HDMI->audio adapter if you're looking to preserve the same experience.

Hey HomePod, play something sinister.

there's no way to delete photos from icloud immediately and I was also googling a bit and there's some article from infosec company and they were able to recover deleted photos few months after they should be deleted forever (I was googling about how to delete those photos immediately).

now, I don't have anything useful there but it pissed me off a lot and I'm definitely not going to use devices from one company, no matter what they say I'm missing

Apple's privacy stance is really just marketing, like "There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it."

You don't have to use an apple device for more than a minute to realize this.

For example, you cannot use a new apple iphone without activating it with apple.

In the first screen or two, you are presented with their privacy policy, with is literally hundreds of pages long.

The rest of the setup is full of dark patterns, and even though it is GDPR compliant, it is very hard not to come out of the process without signing in or allowing them access to your data.

I think all of this comes from "business common sense" which is based on fear. They want data (and control) because it is an easier and more guaranteed way to make and sell things.

The only way out of this (for all of us) is actually robust competition by someone who will do it right and not collect data in the first place. (hint: it will help if they use rounded corners, gradients and transparency)

I mostly use Roon or my phone to control my music, so I haven’t really tested the match stuff in a long time.

Also, Sonos speakers from my research outperform HomePod in terms of sound - but if you have data to suggest otherwise feel free to share

Remember when we were freaking out about the unprecedented performance of the A7, the first 64-bit mobile chip? And now it's in a speaker.

And the out-of-warranty repair cost is $279. Perhaps they got it on sale at $280. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/12/17003296/homepod-repair-i...

And here is Apple’s rebuttal [1]

[0] https://www.timetoplayfair.com/timeline/

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/addressing-spotifys-c...

Inquiring minds want to know.

If I say "Hey Siri, turn on my lamp" it turns it on within a second or so of asking.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeKit/comments/hzc7lr/powerboardp...

As an aside, the timeline given by Spotify is somewhat disingenuous because it doesn't include any of the times that APIs were opened up and is missing significant details about why rejections happened — for instance, early watchOS rejections (as far as I recall) had to do with the lack of a power efficient streaming API in watchOS. Once Apple had a streaming solution that was fit for public consumption (internal/private APIs almost always aren't and cleaning them up takes time), they added it to watchOS.

Don't get me wrong, I think iOS would be better if it opened up a little, but Spotify is no saint and has a tendency to embellish the story.

1: https://jod.al/2016/02/18/guide-to-poor-api-management/

2: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/2/6/16979102/sp...

Even if we were designing the perfect tech ecosystem that was free of business or competitive constraints, it still wouldn't be a good idea to have an app developer, with their own motivations that may not be aligned to users, dictate SDKs and standards to ecosystems or platforms. It's a weird and unsustainable power dynamic that misaligns incentives. It'd only be viable if in the process the app developer opened the standard and shared control of its future.

As much as Spotify wants to be a platform, what they offer is just a service, and they're not positioned to be controlling such standards. I love Spotify and much prefer it to Apple Music, but what they're doing is choosing not to build features that their customers want on platforms their customers have chosen in order to gain leverage in the regulatory battle over the 30% cut. I respect the desire to have a more level playing field but their other complaints are disingenuous and are not in the best interest of their customers.

I’d much prefer the sound of the HomePod but it’s hard to justify the expense when I have something that works fine. If I could do it over, I’d absolutely spend way more for the better audio experience. While I use the assistant for things apart from music, music is still more than 99% of what comes out of that thing.

Nexus Player still works though.

https://mashable.com/article/google-glass-explorer-edition-f...

Apple is consistently worse on privacy than alternatives. Don't let them get away with it, or everybody will play Apple's game of just pretending that they care about privacy.

If you want better privacy, don't continue to let companies who lie about providing better privacy get away with it. So far, I haven't seen Google deliberately lie about the privacy of their services. That should be the bare minimum that we expect.

The gulf between the "issues" that these devices solve and real problems in the world (starvation, war, death by covid) has never been wider.

I honestly am happy that they're useful for people but they feel like devices looking for a real purpose. I know someone with 70+ "smart" lightbulbs and cameras and devices all over his house and I do not understand how turning the light on or off can be considered too difficult for him to do.

I think reading through this thread confirms it! Didn't mean to target your comment in general but this is as far as I've got reading through this thread.

Like you, I wouldn't trust the Google or Amazon devices at all!

From the lawsuit: for years, Google has known that the user experience they designed misleads and deceives users. The evidence obtained from within Google—such as internal emails, presentations, and memos—is overwhelming in this regard

They knew that they were deceiving users, and liked it that way.

An example of of how Google uses this data: Google will track if you click an ad for Cheesecake Factory and later physically visit one. This allows them to charge higher rates for ads. This isn't a secret, they brag about that capability. It's why they use so many dark patterns to push users to enable location tracking.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6100636?hl=en

This is a false statement that you continue to repeat.

As a start, I'll paste some information from Apple and TechCrunch around when they rebuilt maps from the ground up in 2018:

---

“We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B. We’re collecting the segments of it. As you can imagine, that’s always been a key part of doing this. Honestly, we don’t think it buys us anything [to collect more]. We’re not losing any features or capabilities by doing this.”

The segments that he is referring to are sliced out of any given person’s navigation session. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the “ground truth” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this “probe data” sent back from iPhones.

Because only random segments of any person’s drive is ever sent and that data is completely anonymized, there is never a way to tell if any trip was ever a single individual. The local system signs the IDs and only it knows to whom that ID refers. Apple is working very hard here to not know anything about its users. This kind of privacy can’t be added on at the end, it has to be woven in at the ground level.

The secret sauce here is what Apple calls probe data. Essentially little slices of vector data that represent direction and speed transmitted back to Apple completely anonymized with no way to tie it to a specific user or even any given trip. It’s reaching in and sipping a tiny amount of data from millions of users instead, giving it a holistic, real-time picture without compromising user privacy.

All of this, of course, is governed by whether you opted into location services, and can be toggled off using the maps location toggle in the Privacy section of settings.

Apple says that this will have a near zero effect on battery life or data usage, because you’re already using the ‘maps’ features when any probe data is shared and it’s a fraction of what power is being drawn by those activities.

----

Impressed they can do that when I’m using offline mapping in an area with no mobile signal.

But Apple requires a credit card to sign up for a developer account so obviously they're much worse.

That lawsuit is completely irrelevant to the question of which devices provide more privacy.

> Maybe you can get an Android phone and thoroughly deGooglefy it by flashing LineageOS or whatever.

You don't have to do that. Just don't use apps that use Google services. Done. It's that simple. On Apple devices, you have no choice but to give up your privacy. Worse, you give up your privacy to use garbage services that are less useful than their Google and Amazon counterparts.

That's a really wacky contortion. Whose location is it then?

> nowhere states that your location is sent to Apple every time it is requested.

You're right. It's worse than that. I pointed out in that post that Apple periodically gets your location even if no app requests it. Apple also says that you consent to having your location collected every time another app requests it, so even if it is not true now (which you have not been able to show and which would mean they wouldn't need such a scary consent, so I highly doubt it), it can be true tomorrow.

The actually privacy-respecting Android devices from Amazon and Google do not suffer from this issue. Nor do they require you to tell anybody if you install an app on your device, tied to your identity, which you have once again ignored.

The principle of Privacy isn't the act of giving people options (Facebook uses this excuse all the time - "but users had the option! not our fault!").

The principle is designing privacy into the default way people use things. At an ecosystem level the privacy awareness level and incentive structure is clear between the big companies.

Nitpicking and hyperbole isn't helping make your point like you think it is. Do you think my mom knows how to opt out of something like that on Android or if that's even possible? No. But she's IS going to be using Apple Maps by default and have a heightened level of privacy all the same.

Privacy is taking care of your entire customer base and making intelligent default considerations. Not giving nerds a pane of options.