Review: Apple HomePod (2023)

Apple cares a lot about music. Steve Jobs loved it so much that he invented the iPod and iTunes to let us bring all of it everywhere, and personally owned multi-thousand-dollar Finnish speakers in his sparsely-decorated living room. To this day, Apple Music is one of the best-sounding streaming services you can subscribe to thanks to lossless audio support. The headphones it makes, both itself and via Beats, are largely fantastic.

It’s a shame, then, that the company still fails to make a great full-size smart speaker. Not only is the recently revamped HomePod a near-perfect visual reproduction of the discontinued model from 2018, but it barely has any audio improvements. The new HomePod has less drivers for audio, remains incompatible with Spotify and other popular services, and still can’t communicate with anything but Apple devices when your friends are over. The full-color screen on the top is larger, but it fails to convey more information than an Amazon Echo’s blue stripe.

In 2018, foibles like these were mildly acceptable as long as the voice assistant worked and the speaker could fill your room with sound. But given that so many excellent competitors now exist in so many different shapes and sizes, it’s hard to let the HomePod slide. The smaller HomePod Mini already accomplishes the same Siri voice control (if you prefer that to Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, which are objectively better), and offers more than enough sound quality for folks who just want to put some music on.

Unless you spend $600 for two HomePods to listen in stereo, the sound quality isn’t that great, with a heavy helping of bass and not much definition in the mid-range. You can get the same “I have music playing” feeling from the smaller model, or from any number of competitors, for less. If you want high-end sound, you won’t find it here.

Photograph: Apple

Physically, the new HomePod is slightly more squat than the older model, a fat little marshmallow of sound that’s about 7 inches high. Otherwise, the main difference you’ll notice is the larger screen on top, with integrated volume up and down buttons. Say “Hey Siri,” and Apple’s voice assistant wakes up, with a splash of colorful plasma showing up on the top screen to let you know she’s listening.

One difference that many who remember the old model will welcome is a removable power cable, which allows buyers to snake it through the sometimes-small holes in furniture. The last one lacked this and pissed off many people with custom furniture. 

Like the previous model, the new one comes in two colors: White and Midnight, which is a slightly darker black than last. Some early reports have indicated that the white model, like the last one, stains wood with rings when left on wooden surfaces. I haven’t had that issue, but I would still get a black one; Apple’s white fabric tends to become stained over the years with dust and wear and tear.

Photograph: Apple

Like the last model, setup is a breeze. Hold a late-model iPhone (with the latest software) up to the thing and the HomePod instantly recognizes it and sets it up. You tell it what room it’s in and you’re off to the races, so long as your phone is already logged in to Apple Music. You won’t get Spotify, YouTube Music, Tidal, or Amazon Music compatibility here, but the HomePod does support Pandora, Deezer, TuneIn Radio, iHeartRadio, and others. You can use AirPlay to play unsupported services on the speaker, but it’s a pretty annoying workaround and requires that guests have iPhones.

Siri’s voice search also leaves a lot to be desired. For one thing, I noticed she really likes Kanye West in the post-Kanye era. When asked to play the British indie band Good Morning, Siri plays “Good Morning” by Ye. When asked to play “the band Good Morning,” she does the same thing. When asked to play Jay-Z, she plays a few classics, then a lot of Jay-Z/Kanye West collaborations I have to skip over.

When provided the same query, Alexa easily pulls up Good Morning from the UK. The same is true for Google Assistant. Those services frankly just work better than Siri, as anyone who has compared them can attest.

I will say, though, that the included mics work great to wake her. You might get two fewer than in the previous HomePod, but I can’t tell in terms of audio pickup. You can be facing the opposite direction in a room and say the wake phrase at normal speaking volume, and be heard while music is playing. That’s impressive.

Siri works absolutely fine for things like setting timers and asking the weather. Now you can ask it the internal temp and humidity, too, and use those sensors to program devices in your Apple Home ecosystem. If you prefer an Apple interface, that’s great stuff. But it’s also stuff you can do on the HomePod Mini, which had those sensors all along, but hadn’t had them enabled. Both HomePods now support the open source protocol Matter, which means all the latest smart devices will work with them in your ecosystem.

I also don’t mind the premium price of the new HomePod. It’s still $50 cheaper than the original one, and Apple tends to always be the top-end of the market when it comes to pricing on anything. For its smart speaker to cost $100 more than the Amazon Echo Studio, in a similar form factor, is fine … on paper. But when I compare them in terms of sound quality, the differences are too stark. The sound quality is just not here.

I am not joking when I say that the $130 Amazon Echo 8, which is primarily designed as a screen, not a speaker, sounds better than this thing to my ears. I have no idea what happened between generations, but the new HomePod is among the muddiest-sounding smart speakers I’ve ever heard. There is plenty of bass—I’d say gobs too much, though it does have more punch than most for hip-hop—and then a mess of musical information above it. I miss all definition in the midrange, but can hear every bass note clearly. That’s odd.

Some of this has to be down to hardware downgrades. You get five beamforming tweeters, two down from seven. This is a change that Apple clearly tried to make up for with better processing; you get the S7 from an Apple Watch Series 7 in the now-HomePod, while the original had an A8 from an iPhone. The chip change allows the latest one to do more background processing to tune the speaker to your space, but I’m not sure it makes up for the lack of physical hardware. 

And if you want to change the sound to your liking? Apple is in charge there. The only other changes you can make are to reduce bass temporarily in settings. It will ignore your EQ settings in Apple Music. This is not ideal.

Photograph: Apple

You can pair multiple speakers together for better sound overall, and I was impressed with how a pair of new HomePods filled my room with some of Apple Music’s spatial audio tracks (it can optimize these for your space). If you own a late-model Apple TV, you can even use a pair as TV speakers, too. Some may argue that you should just buy a pair if you’re gonna buy one at all. Then again, I’ve heard many pairs of $600 speakers that sound better. Heck, you could get an entire Dolby Atmos soundbar setup for that.

When compared to options like the Echo Studio, Echo Show 10, and even a standard Echo, I prefer the Amazon models for clarity and audio quality, not to mention voice assistant. The Google Nest Hub Max sounds better, costs $70 less, and comes with a large touchscreen that you can use to watch YouTube videos and make video calls. You can buy two Nest Audios and use them as a stereo pair for more than $100 less than a single HomePod. An entry-level Sonos speaker also costs less, sounds better, supports two smart assistants, and offers Spotify in addition to Apple Music.

Unless you're really set on the HomePod's specific looks, you can get all or nearly all of the same functionality from a much cheaper speaker, Apple's or otherwise. This is a rare product from the company that falls flat, even if you're willing to pay a premium. Sometimes going back to the future just doesn't work out.

Updated February 5, 2023: A previous version of this article called Steve Jobs' Genelec speakers Swedish, we have corrected this article to reflect the fact that they are Finnish.