I’m completely in love with my HomePods. Nothing else in my home makes me feel like I’m in the future which I dreamed of as a kid more than my HomePods. Yeah, the sound is amazing from my full-sized HomePods but it goes way beyond the rich sound and deep bass.
I have HomePods in most rooms of my house and I love to play music which is perfectly sync’d to every corner. And not just for music, I can do the same thing for TV shows or YouTube videos. It still makes me smile when I walk up the stairs with a load of laundry and I can hear every word of my show at the top of the stairs on another HomePod. And who needs a remote any more? You can just say into the air “Hey Siri, pause” and your wish becomes your TVs command. Brilliant.
But this is all great when the HomePods are working without any hiccups. And that would be about 80% of the time. That other 20% though. Is bad. Some HomePods will inexplicably stop working. Other times the audio just drops everywhere for no reason. Or I get the dreaded “There’s a problem with Apple Music” error.
The more you use your HomePods, the more these errors will become apparent to you. So perhaps I have a skewed perception which is more negative than most people who simply play a song now and then. But I’m adding items to my grocery list, curating my music playlists, replying to text messages and on and on. I don’t think there’s an hour of my day that isn’t without some interaction with one of my nine HomePods.
But what seems the most surprising thing to me is that HomePod software doesn’t seem much better today than it was maybe two or three years ago. It might even be worse. That is the troubling part. If Apple hadn’t introduced new products recently like the 2nd generation HomePod I would be worried that Apple was going to give up on the whole product line. Because in my corporate business experience, it is product lines which are marked for death which are allowed to whither on the vine and not warrant expensive coding attention.
So what is going on with the HomePod? I don’t think Apple wants to kill this foothold they have in home automation. But yet, they don’t seem to pay much attention to making this line work better.
But this is all great when the HomePods are working without any hiccups. And that would be about 80% of the time. That other 20% though. Is bad. Some HomePods will inexplicably stop working. Other times the audio just drops everywhere for no reason. Or I get the dreaded “There’s a problem with Apple Music” error.
The more you use your HomePods, the more these errors will become apparent to you. So perhaps I have a skewed perception which is more negative than most people who simply play a song now and then. But I’m adding items to my grocery list, curating my music playlists, replying to text messages and on and on. I don’t think there’s an hour of my day that isn’t without some interaction with one of my nine HomePods.
But what seems the most surprising thing to me is that HomePod software doesn’t seem much better today than it was maybe two or three years ago. It might even be worse. That is the troubling part. If Apple hadn’t introduced new products recently like the 2nd generation HomePod I would be worried that Apple was going to give up on the whole product line. Because in my corporate business experience, it is product lines which are marked for death which are allowed to whither on the vine and not warrant expensive coding attention.
So what is going on with the HomePod? I don’t think Apple wants to kill this foothold they have in home automation. But yet, they don’t seem to pay much attention to making this line work better.
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