hawaiianshirtguy

harry wild said:

LOL!  You get exactly what you pay for with this educational version.

Yes, indeed! An affordable iPad that is more than powerful enough for the educational community.

kcammie7 said:

This may very well be the biggest half-baked product ever released by Apple. Great that the sound quality is superb. I can appreciate that. But as far as a Smart Speaker goes, this thing is far behind the power curve.

I found siri to be quite amazing. Granted, I don't want to do a bunch of stuff with it other than play music and check the weather, but it does that remarkably well. I can be in a totally different room and the speaker still responds to my voice, and is able to play my songs, raise and lower the volume, pause, etc. For the purpose of playing music -- which is what I think it was primarily designed to do -- it does it superbly.

I could get upset that my toaster doesn't make ice cubes, but that doesn't mean it's a lousy toaster. 

tmay said:

I'm just thinking how HomePod creates the sweet spot, vs how we decide HomePod's placement. It would be nice if a user could stand or sit at the sweet spot and send a beacon signal covering the audible range to the HomePod, which could then use that as a basis for the algorithms to create the sound balance.

My guess is that the HomePod isn't designed for "sweet spot" listening, so we'll never see that feature. The HomePod is more about filling your whole house (or, at least, room) with sound, and making it sound good no matter where in the room you are.

Soli said:

The lack of Calander data despite connecting to my iCloud account is less than ideal. I've also been unable to connect the HomePod to my Mac either through my Mac or through the HomePod, yet with the Echo I can have it connect with a simple voice command. HomePod doesn't even show up under AirPlay when on the same network as my Mac and with the same iCloud account. This is less convenient than AirPods which does this seamlessly.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "connect the HomePod to my Mac", but for me it just worked. I don't have an Apple Music subscription, though I do have iTunes Match, so maybe it was still pulling music from the cloud. I don't know, and I don't really care (part of why I like Apple so much - I don't need to know how it works).

When I went to my mac a couple minutes after setting up the HomePod, the HomePod showed up as an airplay device and I could easily stream music to it. It all was as seamless as one might hope. At least in my specific case, they absolutely nailed the user experience. 

I'm very, very pleased. I've got to say, the microphones are a-MAZ-ing. I have my speaker in the kitchen, and from my office next door (about 20 steps away) I can speak in a very slightly raised voice "hey siri, who is playing?" and it will identify the song even with music playing at a volume that makes it hard to converse if you're next to the speaker. 

I don't subscribe to Apple Music, but I do hav iTunes Match. It found my music just fine, and is able to identify the artist while it's playing without a hitch. 

I wasn't quite as blown away by the sound as I was hoping for, but it is definitely very good and very clear, and definitely better than my Yamaha wx-030. Of course, it cost more so it should. Hopefully it is considerably less fiddly. The  Yamaha keeps forgetting how to play music; I could never count on it working when I would stream via airplay to it. 

The setup process was just as simple as it possibly could be, it was very slick. 

I will almost certainly be buying at least one more.