WTimberman

Thanks, Mike. Speculation is fun among people who are honest with one another, especially when it comes to Apple, with its long history of making magical things appear in the real world. This stuff you’re calling out, though, is just what you’ve called it: crap. It poisons the fun, and it’s disrespectful to the people who put in long hours to make the magic, and to tell us all about it when it appears.

mike1 said:

sflagel said:

kiowawa said:

foregoneconclusion said:

sflagel said:

Did the old one have this:

Yes, the original HomePod had Bluetooth 5.0. 

I had the impression the Mini version did not have Bluetooth, which made it hard to use for me as I travel a lot and wanted to bring it along without hooking to Hoel wifi.  

Although apparently the large HomePod did have Bluetooth 5.0, you could not use it to play music…. So if someone came to your house with a phone that is not from Apple, they could not share their music. The biggest reason not to get one.

Why would that matter? If they wanted me to hear something, they could just tell the HomePod to play it.

Not really concerned with how my home interacts with visitor's devices.

My understanding is that its limited bandwidth makes bluetooth inferior to wi-fi as a music transmission protocol. Apple apparently had do do some pretty impressive voodoo to make AirPods sound as good as they do, and even they can’t handle lossless audio at present. So I think Mike1 is right. Have your Android friends tell the HomePods what to play, ask you to play it for them, or keep a cheap bluetooth boombox around for them. (I mean that seriously. May daughter used to keep a JBL pill around just for that purpose.)

Just ordered a pair, which’ll mean some shuffling around, but I don’t mind a bit. (I’ve so been hoping for these.) They’ll replace the OG pair, which will be moved to the office. The mini pair now in the office will go to the guest bedroom. Weird part is, I’ve also kept an ancient iPod Hi-Fi in the kitchen. Hooked it up originally to an old AirPort Express and once I went to Eero, to a Belkin Soundform Connect receiver dongle. Gotta say, it’s been an amazingly reliable AirPlay speaker. A testament to Apple quality, it still sounds as good as it did when it I bought it new 16 years ago. Hope the HomePods prove to be just as durable! 

This stuff is insanely complicated, and there are now so many products from so many different manufacturers on the market that testing anything like all possible scenarios is simply unthinkable. And that’s not even to mention the nightmare of troubleshooting systems actually installed in the real world. I run a strictly HomeKit-powered smart home, but the more stuff I add to my network, the more peculiar failures I get. Even though I’m rocking a very recent mesh router setup and have been scrupulous about keeping all the verkakte software and firmware up-to-date, there are only a few of my attached devices that I can rely on to stay functioning as advertised for anywhere near 100% if the time. If I had a nickel for every failed geofencing routine on a device that was working perfectly fine four hours ago, or had Siri tell me randomly that  “You can only make one request at a time,” or “I’m having trouble connecting to the Internet,” or settled down on the couch to watch something on HBO only to have the HomePods linked to my TV suddenly decide not to play any sound, I’d already be richer than Tim Cook.

I prefer the aesthetics of Apple’s podcast player, but functionally speaking, Overcast is an order of magnitude better in almost all respects. Marco Arment, the developer of Overcast, seems acutely conscious of what it takes to design and test a truly intuitive and complete user interface, and as a result his app is an absolute joy to use. Years ago,  when I first encountered Instapaper — also his invention —  I remember thinking “whoever came up with this is a genius.” All these years later, I’m still of the same opinion. Apple is huge and as a result, often appears to be content with the basics in anything they view as non-critical consumer-facing software. Bug fixes, improvements, etc., are often abysmally slow to arrive, if indeed they ever do…. The apps Apple provides as defaults are serviceable, but indie developers, who are just as competent as Apple engineers, often take a far more granular approach to customer satisfaction. So, yeah, Overcast. Absolutely. God bless the independents, who really were and are crucial to making Apple what it is today! (If only Apple would treat them a little nicer, but I’m not holding my breath….)