zroger73

No, thanks. Facebook is creepy enough without putting even more cameras and microphones in my house.

tmay said:

After some thought experiments, I came to the conclusion that some experimentation might be of interest for HomePod users, of which I am not, yet anyway.

The experiment is to partially overhang the surface that the HomePod is sitting on, such that there is no proximate reflectance for forward facing tweeters; think of a diver on the edge of a pool. With that, I would note that the user can also align the tweeters in an alternate fashion by a rotation of 25 degree off of center, as each tweeter is located at a 51 degree spacing, giving a bit of asymmetric bias to the setup. Raising the HomePod has been already demonstrated to help on reflective surfaces, and even a slight fore or aft tilt would potentially have an effect.

I'm thinking that this might give the user cleaner, high frequency output, and is easily testable. The HomePod, because of its configuration, doesn't necessarily have to play by rules and be locked to a particular orientation, height offset, or mounting plane. 

Of course, HomePod will still attempt to optimize itself for the room. Likely these will be subtle differences.

I wonder how it would sound hanging from the ceiling by its power cord in the center of a room?  

Well, the honeymoon is over...or at least it was interrupted. After a weekend of aural romance with my beloved HomePod, I came home from work yesterday evening and asked Siri to play a song. She played something different with an artist and title that sounded phonetically similar - well, somewhat similar. Once it became apparent that she selected the wrong tune, I requested the song again with slower, more distinct pronunciation. Instead of choosing the same or the desired song, she changed the volume from 30% to 100%!I then asked her to stop. She ignored me. I raised my voice and tried a few more times. Each time, she ignored me. Finally, I lowered the volume and stopped playback using my iPhone. Now that everything was silent, I tried asking for another song at a normal speaking volume from 8 feet away. She continued to ignore me without so much as even a status light. I finally got the status light to appear by speaking loudly only few feet away, but Siri wouldn't obey my commands. I unplugged and replugged the HomePod and operation returned to normal. Aside from this "glitch", I remained impressed that Siri can hear me when I can't even hear myself.

16 GB of flash memory...in a speaker? I guess - why not, since it's so cheap and it may come in handy in the future, huh?

And, it's good to know the power cord is replaceable for those concerned about pets chewing through them.

tipoo said:

I think it's really neat they went with an actively cooled A10X.

I'm on the other side of the fence - I prefer no moving parts to wear out.

On the other hand, my AirPort Extreme and TiVo Stream's fans have been spinning for years with no problems and my ATV 4K will probably be obsolete long before the fan wears out.