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The personal site of Jamie Knight, an autistic web developer, speaker and mountain biker who is never seen far from his plush sidekick Lion. View the Archive

Topics: Autism Development

Homepod First Impressions

I’ve only had the homepod on my desk a few hours, however in that short time it has made quite an impression. Here’s a quick post to capture why i brought one, how it handled setup and how the first experiements have worked out.

Why a homepod?

I’ve kinda wanted one for a while, but i didn’t need one. In the office i had my iMac which has great speakers, and i don’t have much use for a voice assistant in my life.

However, i recently sold my iMac in favour of a MacBook + 4K display combo and the display i picked doesnt have any speakers… so i needed some speakers.

The homepod can act as speakers for my Mac as well as being good for podcasts and the like. So it seemed worth a go. It’s expensive, but i figured if it dont get along with it i could always return or resell it.

Argos?

I got mine from argos. I debated the colour for a while (i went with white, but it was a close run thing!) and then ordered it online for instore collection. I was impressed they had them in stock locally; especially as my local argos is inside a sainsburies.

I didnt buy it from the local apple reseller as while the staff are nice enough they don’t offer a very competitive returns policy and i had no way to see if they had them in stock. I couldn’t easily travel to both so i went with the more established seller.

I paid the retail price of £319, which is a bit steep… its got a lot to live up too.

Initial setup.

The very first impression i had was “wow, this thing is heavy”. It’s heavy enough i needed help getting it out of the box safely.

The packaging was easy to open and as i pulled the homepod out a little guide fell out telling me to wave my phone near the homepod to set it up.

The homepage is going in my office, so i plugged it in, and waved my phone in its direction…

… Nothing happened. So i waved it some more, and then it worked! A screen came up, telling me to install an update to my phone…

… Update installed, i tried again and it worked. Taking me through the setup process. My speech can be a bit diffifult, so it took a few times for it to understand me.

I was really impressed with the setup process. It had a clunky start but once everything was lined up it was very smooth.

Playing Music.

I brought the homepod as a speaker first and foremost. It happens to have Siri (which is kinda handy) but in my life its taking the place of a mini speaker or some PC speakers. With this in mind, the first thing i did was connect it to my Mac and play a youtube video.

I was really impressed with the sound quality. Its loud and clear and it handles tone well. It sounds much better than my iMac did for music.

It is somewhat directional, espcially at lower volumes. It has to be pretty loud before it can really “fill a room” with audio. I’m going to experiment a bit with placement incase this is because i have it on the corner of my desk.

Siri stuff.

I have used siri a little. To ask for different tracks and the like. It’s very cool and It has mostly worked. I asked siri what was on my calender and it directed me to my phone… so i guess there are some gaps.

I also used Siri to turn my lights up and down, very cool but perhaps not super useful!

Thoughts so far.

So far i am impressed with the homepod. The setup was pretty seamless and it sounds great. I am looking forward to living with it for a bit to see how i feel in a few weeks time.

Published: 19 August 2018 | Categories: , Permalink

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