Barnes TechIn a recent Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP) episode, Marco Arment discussed his journey from HomePods to Sonos, and how irritating the HomePods have been. While part of the conversation about sound quality is subjective, I have been thinking about this topic in general for a while, and Marco’s comments made me finally want to write it down.
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I have been somewhat of an Apple fanatic ever since high school. That year I took a video editing class where we would produce a TV show for the school every week, and I got to start really using Macs for the first time. I primarily edited using Final Cut Studio on the flowerpot G4 iMac (still my favorite Mac design of all time). I was hooked, and quickly got one of the first iPods, and have been an Apple fan ever since. About 5 months before the iPhone was announced, I started working at Apple Retail, where I worked for almost 5 years. After that, I went to work for a company called Simply Mac, an Apple Premiere Partner that had explosive growth for several years, and now I’m working at a Managed Service Provider that is part of the Apple Consultants Network. I mention all of that just as an illustration of where I’m coming from.
I won’t go through all of the Apple products I’ve gotten over the years, but it’s a lot. Like… A lot. I’ve also always really been in to Music, and audio in general. Next to Apple, I’ve probably spent more on speakers, amps, etc. than any other tech. It’s more than I care to think about. So naturally when the HomePod came out, I was thrilled. After hearing them in person I was even more excited. I went all out on HomePods. They sound fantastic, particularly in a pair… When they work. Unfortunately that turned out to not be a given.
In all I ended up with about 6 HomePods, and of all of the Apple products I’ve ever gotten over the years, they are the first and only product that I completely regret getting.
Let me first mention Siri. This part has honestly not surprised me. Siri has always been a mess. This is probably a whole other discussion, but Siri has been really bad for as long as I can remember. Some people seem to have better luck than me, though I honestly don’t think anyone has a good experience with it. Some people are also just less picky than I am about that. I bring this up because Siri has been really bad for me on HomePod, but for me, this was fairly expected. I have hoped for years that it would improve, and I hoped the HomePod would be better, but it wasn’t. And if that was the only issue, for myself personally, it is not a deal breaker.
As I mentioned, the sound quality is fantastic. When they work I love how they sound. But they were immediately plagued with software bugs that are infuriating. AirPlay works like 75% of the time. Sometimes the HomePod pair doesn’t work right. In some cases that means it just won’t play until I reboot both of them. Sometimes it will only play through one until I reboot both of them. AirPlay sometimes just wouldn’t start, or would freeze. Other times it starts streaming directly to the HomePod when started from my phone while other times it would stream from the phone. If it starts streaming directly, after a few minutes my phone would just go back to it’s own playlist and forget to “remote control” the HomePods. I couldn’t ever get it to consistently do one or the other though. Sometimes when it did start playing, it would become unresponsive to remote controls at all. Often (and this seems to happen with all Apple Music unfortunately…) it just decides to stop playing mid playlist. Why? Who knows. It never tells you.
This didn’t happen every day, or every time, but it happened enough that it has been driving me crazy. Luckily, these are software problems, right? So they should be able to fix this with future updates… Right? Well in my experience, they have gotten worse over time. Some updates make them clearly worse, others make them slightly better than a previous one, but overall they are worse than when they started.
On top of that, after about a year, some of them started clearly having electric issues. They would become unresponsive entirely, and would occasionally just do a fairly loud speaker pop on their own when nothing was playing. Shortly after that started happening, those HomePods would completely die. I’ve had 2 completely die, and a 3rd that is showing the same signs.
These issues have largely made it so I don’t use them almost ever. It is hugely disappointing to me. These were released in 2018, which is not very long ago, especially for speakers. My parents have a set of nice speakers by Boston Acoustics that are nearly as old as me, and still sound fantastic. I have a Sonos Soundbar and Sub that I’ve had for over 10 years and still work and sound fantastic as well. HomePods were $350 each when they launched, or $700 for a pair to make them sound truly fantastic. That’s a lot of money in general, though not unreasonable for a nice set of speakers, but also definitely not “cheap”, yet these have effectively not lasted more than a couple of years.
From the sounds of it, Marco’s experience is that the HomePod 2 is not much better. They probably fixed the complete failure issues, though time will tell, but the underlying software issues seem to still be there. Even if it did fix all the issues, it’s not reasonable for Apple to expect people to replace all their 1st generation ones with the new ones.
I don’t know what the right answer is for this scenario, but I feel like they were bad enough that Apple should have done something to make it right for people. I am still a huge Apple fan, but I feel burned by the HomePod. Some products I’ve disliked more than others over the years. Not every one will knock it out of the park, but HomePod is different. It feels like a defective product in my opinion, and I strongly regret not getting Sonos at the time.