I have wondered why homepods don't include the ability to act as a network extender, at least for just Airport networks. From a hardware perspective, it obviously could serve this purpose, and adding in a functionality like this would help justify the high price.

My guess is that future versions of homepods will offer additional features like this, and hopefully the long-distance charging that Apple seems to be working on: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3234911/mobile-wireles...

As an aside, I just bought my second homepod and was disappointed to learn that one cannot use a linked pair of homepods to listen to anything from a Mac other than iTunes content. This is bizarre because a pair of homepods can be used as the output device for any app on iOS. But if you want to watch that youtube/hulu/netflix video on your computer? Tough luck — you can't use the homepods as a stereo pair.