HomePod mini: a small HomePod that sounds great for a fair price
The title is also my review. Buy two of them for a stereo pair. If you want more just for the sake of entertainment, read on. But I assure you, it is not necessary. Enjoy:
What the HomePod mini isn’t
It is probably more useful to talk about what the HomePod mini is not rather than go on and on about what it is. You should definitely know what the product is good at being. But rather than provide information for a buying decision, I will start with a not buying decision. You should walk away from the product if:
You want computer speakers
Just as with the big HomePod, the mini is not a computer speaker. If you are looking for a great speaker or set of speakers for your computer, forget about anything with HomePod in the name. Apple seems to go out of their way to make this possibility a nonstarter.
To begin with, there is a distinct lag when pairing a single HomePod to a Mac. That lag is often more than a second. The exception is if you use the HomePod in conjunction with certain Apple apps such as Music or the TV app. If, however, if you want to watch some video from YouTube, Hulu, or anything from the web, forget about it. You will have a terrible experience.
Even more egregious is the fact that a stereo pair of HomePods will not be recognized at all with the exception of the aforementioned Apple apps. You can only select one HomePod from the speaker list for normal use. This is worse than an egregious oversight. It is intentional. Apple has contempt fo the idea of any HomePod being used as a computer speaker and are intentionally keeping it a bad or impossible experience. If that is what you want from a speaker, forget about it. Look elsewhere.
You want the big HomePods, only cheaper
Apple put in a lot of time, talent, and treasure into building the first HomePod. It is genuinely a marvel of engineering. It launched as a $350 speaker, and not entirely without cause. A pair of them are $700 speakers. Knock $100 off the price and you still have $600 speakers. By comparison, a pair of minis is $200. And that is appropriate for what you get.
What some people expected Apple to do was apologize for the original HomePod price and offer speakers that are just as good for $200 to $400 less. In no way should the HomePod mini be considered a cheaper version of the same speaker. This is not a price apology. This is a different and lesser product.
Apple also did not break the laws of physics. The first HomePod is huge and heavy. These are excellent attributes for a speaker because they have the ability to move a lot of air with a lot of velocity. Small and light speakers like the HomePod minis don’t have any of that. However, what they do have is some excellent engineering and even better software. We should think about speakers from computer companies as computational audio generators in the same way that cameras from these same companies are computational photography generators. They sound great. But they do not sound like the big ones.
You want ultra-portable speakers
These are super small speakers. But they are not ultraportable speakers. That is mostly because these are not portable speakers. When you encounter speakers this small and cute, you expect to be able to pick them up and carry them with you from room to room. They only work when plugged into something. It doesn’t have to be a wall.
Each speaker has a non removable cord that ends in USB-C. That fits nicely in the ports on any new Mac. While it fits, it doesn’t not work. However, it does work plugged into a mobile charging station with the right wattage. Therefore, you can turn it into a portable speaker if you don’t mind carrying around a beefy power station. No one wants to do that. But I suspect this will become a third-party opportunity.
You have a mixed ecosystem
Apple speakers don’t play well with others. There is a reason for this that makes perfect business sense. Apple is not just a product company. They are an ecosystem company, a lifestyle company. Apple is also the owner of the most valuable brand. They have the loyalty of the wealthiest customers in the world.
Apple doesn’t need to make products to work with those made by other companies. Other companies cannot sell products that don’t play well with others. No other ecosystem can attract the number of users who are all in on the ecosystem. Apple can, and does. That said, no one cares what the business reasons are. They only care if the product works with what they have.
If you prefer a music service besides Apple Music, don’t count on it ever working as well on an Apple speaker. If you have other speakers you want to be interoperable, forget about it. If you want the Apple speaker to play nice with your PC or Android phone, you are looking at the wrong product.
You want a general purpose-speaker
Sadly, no HomePod is a general-purpose speaker. It doesn’t have ports. It was made during the Jonny Ive, white world era where Apple won the war on buttons and holes. The volume buttons are just touch-sensitive areas marked by thinly drawn plus and minus symbols. There are no ports of any kind. You will not plug these speakers into anything, or anything into these speakers. There is no bluetooth. So forget about wirelessly connecting them to other devices. They should at least be bluetooth. Shame on Apple for that.
Those are the reasons a person should walk away from the HomePod minis. Here are the reasons why people should bring them home:
What the HomePod mini is
This will be the shorter section. But I don’t think you need a lot of reasons to buy and be very happy with HomePod mini. All of the reasons to buy take into account that you have read and understood all of the caveats in the previous section. With that, you should buy HomePod mini if…
You want an affordable Apple speaker that you can place almost anywhere
We should start with the most practical reason. HomePod mini is one of the few Apple products that doesn’t feel like it comes with an oppressive Apple tax. It is actually priced reasonably and fairly. Anyone following Apple pricing for accessories would have guessed $129 at the minimum. But at $99, the HomePod mini is less expensive than the second-generation Apple Pencil.
That also makes HomePod mini an excellent gift. If you have other Apple people in your life, they will be thrilled with this speaker. If you have a bathroom you wanted to upgrade with sound, $99 is almost an impulse buy in Apple world. Sometimes, it feels like Apple is incapable of pricing things for the rest of us. They really did it this time. $99 is possibly the biggest selling point of this tiny speaker.
You want speakers with great sound for your Apple Music
There have been a lot of discussions around the audio quality of the HomePod mini. I believe this is the wrong question for this particular product. People who buy internet speakers are not buying them for sound quality. For the most part, they are buying them for the digital assistant, convenience, and home automation. Having music in a given corner of the house is a nice bonus.
The vast majority of people listening to music are not doing so with sound quality in mind. They listen on the radio, on portable music players with the lowest possible quality headphones. They listen from the speakers on their smartphone or computer. The HomePod mini is a lot better than all those sources.
A lot is made of the bass, or lack thereof. The HomePod mini has plenty of bass. You just need to turn the volume up a bit to appreciate it. I would say it needs to be at about 75% to start really feeling the bass. But make no mistake about it: You really will feel the bass. But this is not the speaker you buy if bass is the only thing that really matters to you.
What these speakers do best is accentuate the vocals. Apple does not do room tuning with the mini as it does with the big one. But it does do adjustments based on what’s playing. My theory is they are balancing for vocals so that no matter what you are listening to, the vocals are up front and very clear. This is true throughout the volume range. At times, it feels like there is a little too much midrange. But that would be consistent with making decisions that favor vocals.
I mostly find the sound quite pleasing. But I recognize there are different standards of quality when it comes to sound. It has to be qualified. HomePod mini has great sound relative to its class. I have had much better speakers. So it makes no sense to compare them. I have also had much worse speakers. As I said in an earlier section, these are not identical to the big HomePod. So if you want to get $300 sound from a $100 speaker, look elsewhere, or nowhere.
I will say that these speakers sound better as a stereo pair than as individual speakers. Then again, I tend to think that about all speakers. If you buy these speakers to put sound in a room, you will not be disappointed. If you are looking for magic sound that defies the laws of physics, you will not be happy.
Conclusion: Don’t worry about it
There can be a lot of angst when it comes to buying speakers you haven’t heard. I get it. I care about sound. And I don’t mind overpaying for what I want. But when I do, it better be exactly what I want. However, HomePod mini delivers exactly what you expect it to deliver in exactly the way you expect it to be delivered.
What I am trying to say is that these are speakers you can buy without worrying about the sound, or the price, or how they will fit into your home and your life. They are affordable, with great sound, and they will fit. Don’t worry about it. If you can live with the caveats, these are the speakers for you. Get two.
David Johnson