I took advantage of holiday sales to replace the girlfriend’s pair of Dots and outfit every room of our homes with better Alexa-enabled speakers. Everyone in our households are listening to music more often and the sound experience is alright as each speaker is covering a smaller space, but more importantly, we’ve got everything Alexa offers, everywhere.
I’m curious to see what Apple’s ultimate strategy is. Will they push into lower-end products to get Siri into more places, open Siri up to 3rd-party devices, or is an expensive music player that happens to also be a voice assistant be as far as they go?
As invested as I now am in Alexa hardware, I’m willing to give Siri a shot. $350 for a HomePod in rooms I consider most important isn’t terrible... but to me it’s a non-starter without less premium options for other rooms. I want one voice assistant to rule my home.
One of those programmable universal remotes might help as well? So it's one button to get to tunes.
A cheap Android phone plugged into the speakers? You can "OK google" that.
a wife has no time nor tolerance for half ass home baked tech.
Apparently wives differ, because my partner has proved to be capable of pressing a couple of buttons on a remote, and is rewarded with better quality sound from better speakers.
Also that comes with the added bonus that I don't have to buy a $350 device that is going to be completely useless in a couple of years when Apple decides it won't support the only proprietary, closed way to persuade it to actually perform it's sole function which is to emit music, so all the lucky s̶h̶e̶e̶p customers are forced to purchase the next shiny disposable trinket.
Homepod is a completely throwaway product, something that embodies the worst aspects of our society, a disposable object for a myopic consumer.
Lol, another experienced married man on hn! :)
I think of the home pod much like air pods just serve a different function. Sure there are better sounding headphones for 160$ but I personally still use them all the time over my studio headphones because of the better usability, form factor, and aesthetics.