You’ve heard of the Amazon Echo, now get ready for, Apple’s new HomePod, the long awaited competitor of the Echo. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple stated on the company’s WWDC keynote that their goal is that “We want to reinvent home music,” creating the new speaker/mic system with music in mind, rather than a Siri home assistant.
Source: Business Insider
The company pretty much made it clear that the HomePod isn’t just an Amazon Echo competitor, but also Sonos home sound system killer. “Sonos aren’t smart speakers and Amazon Echos aren’t good speakers,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Global Marketing. They basically made the HomePod as a “best of both worlds” scenario, and is planning to begin shipping of the device to stores and consumers later this year.
Onto the device itself, it’s basically one huge rounded cylinder-shaped speaker and microphone. It has a seven beam-forming tweeter arrays, a custom made woofer, and an Apple A8 chip. It also comes with multi-channel echo cancellation, real-time acoustic modelling, and so much more things to turn your home into a live music concert if you wish.
Source: Tech Crunch
The HomePod “reinvents” music by scanning the space around it and then automatically optimizing the audio to match it. Schiller couldn’t contain his excitement for the device that he basically spent most of his time talking about just how good it sounds.
Source: Tech Crunch
The speaker works with Apple music, which is basically a given. You can basically talk to the speaker and command it to play anything you wish that’s inside your Apple Music library. You can even tell it to “play more songs like that,” or “I like this song,” to have it sort of bookmarked for easy access.
And on the more home-assistant side of things, you can use the device the way you’d normally use Siri. You can ask about news headlines, the weather, sports scores, etc. And if you have HomeKit devices built into your home, you can ask Siri to control your lights, garage door, air conditioning, and other HomeKit controlled devices with the HomePod.
One HomePod would cost around $349, which isn’t bad, considering what it can do. It comes in the colors white and space gray. Shipping will begin this year in the US, UK, and Australia, while the rest of the world will get it by next year.
For now, that’s all the information we know about the HomePod. Even if it’s just the first announcement, we know it can do a whole lot, so we can’t wait to know about the whole list of other things it can do.
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