Apple Music Voice and HomePod Mini
This past week saw yet another Apple event. I was sure to tune in despite the fact that I was laid up sick, but really… if I was awake, then I had little better to do than sit on the couch staring at my iPad regardless. By far the main attraction for the event was the announcement of the new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors, building off of the insane performance of last year’s M1 release. As someone who has been using an M1 MacBook Pro for work almost since the devices were available last year, the type of performance offered by the M1 Pro and M1 Max is truly insane to me. The names are rather apt, as you really do need to be a professional working with heavy media to really require horsepower like that; I laugh a little when I think about people lining up to purchase one just to spend 97% of their time in a web browser.
Far more relevant to me, though, were some of the other announcements which came up around Apple Music and the HomePod Mini.
Apple Music Voice
I’ve been using Apple Music as my streaming music service of choice more or less since I started using an iPhone back at the tail end of 2019. I’ve made a few forays into testing other platforms like Amazon Prime Music and I exclusively used Spotify for years prior to my swap to an iPhone, but I’ve not found any type of compelling reason to switch from Apple Music to anything else.
The announcement of the Apple Music Voice plan is interesting to me, even though it’s not something I’d ever consider using myself. The idea is that you get access to the full catalog of Apple Music, including new releases and curated playlists, but only via your voice through Siri. Why would you ever do this? The big reason is that the plan comes in at half the cost of a standard Apple Music subscription. That doesn’t really stack up if you’re already getting Apple Music through an Apple One subscription like I am, but I could see it making the difference if you both have no streaming music subscription and primarily listen to music through a phone and/or smart speaker. I also think it seems like a fairly intuitive idea if you’re mainly just wanting to listen to a particular genre of music. For example, I regularly will ask Siri to play indie, k-pop, jazz, or dance music if I just know what I’m generally in the mood for. Likewise, Apple’s selection of curated playlists is, in my opinion, the best of any streaming music service. “Hey Siri, play Bedtime Beats” is easy enough to rattle off, and having full access to the entire suite of those playlists is amazing for just $5 USD per month. Apple’s lineup is just a tad better than Spotify’s in my opinion, and both of them are leagues ahead of Amazon Prime Music’s playlists. Google’s playlists, on the other hand, are almost comically bad.
Where I really think this plan falls apart are:
- If you maintain a large library of your own playlists. While you can certainly maintain and manage playlists just through your voice, I wouldn’t relish that being the only avenue for doing so.
- If you regularly want to listen to very specific artists. This can become problematic if selecting an artist through voice can be tricky. For example, trying to listen to CL can often throw digital assistants through a loop as they think I’m saying “seal.”
Apple HomePod Mini
Anyone hoping for something really new from the HomePod lineup was likely sorely disappointed by the event, as the only thing new on that front were new HomePod Mini colors. After Apple effectively killed the massive — and massively expensive — original HomePod, they clearly seem to be focused on the HomePod Mini for their slice of the smart speaker pie. I was happy to see a renewed focus on the product, though, in the hope that this would mean some new firmware to fix the plethora of bugs which seem to plague the series of devices; so far that hasn’t manifested itself, though.
I actually got a HomePod Mini shortly after their original announcement last year. While I already had several Amazon Echo devices, I figured my current investment in the Apple ecosystem meant the HomePod Mini would be a welcome addition. Initially, that seemed to be true. It integrated very well with the Apple services I was already using, and it was nice to be able to simply tap/click a button and transfer music from my phone or laptop to it. Siri isn’t quite as “smart” as other digital assistants, but rarely am I asking questions more complicated than what the weather is or what’s on my calendar for the coming day. While more expensive than the “mini” versions of smart speakers from Amazon or — shudder — Google, I found the quality to still be fairly impressive for such a small package. Some friends with apparently far more acute hearing than me claim that the sound quality is sub-par, but I’ve not personally had any issues with it between my typically used volume range of 30% to 60%. As an apartment dweller, I also found myself appreciating the option to reduce the bass for when I want more volume without driving my neighbors insane.
After a few months of use, though, some of the problems with the HomePod Mini started to emerge. First up was the fact that some extremely basic settings were essentially locked in to the device’s configuration and could not be changed without a factory reset. Need to change the WiFi network it’s connected to? That’s a factory reset. That seems absolutely insane to me, but at least it’s not something most people likely need to do too frequently.
Like many smart speakers, the HomePod Mini uses light as an indicator for when it’s listening. The “Hey Siri” prompt, for example, will cause a screen at the top of the device, which also features volume up and down buttons, to light up. After a while, this screen simply stopped working on my device. Siri was still listening and would respond to queries, but the screen remained off rather than lighting up like this:
I just dealt with this for about a month before kicking off another factory reset to fix the issue. It was so bizarre that I had almost been thinking it may have been a hardware issue, but nope… a factory reset had things working like normal again.
By far the biggest issue, though, is the that device regularly seems to be confused about whether or not it’s connected to the Internet. This exchange happens all the time:
The device will fail to be able to respond to basic queries, buying a little time before eventually saying:
I’m having trouble connecting to the Internet.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, Internet connectivity is not the issue. Everything else on the same WiFi network continues to operate just fine. In some cases, music will even continue to play from the HomePod Mini while Siri fails to respond to any new queries… including requests to stop playing music. In other instances, after playing music for hours the device will simply stop and begin to claim it has no Internet connectivity when it’s prompted to begin playing music again, which was the scenario for the video above.
In all instances, power cycling the device will fix the problem… for a while. This is extra painful considering that, unlike every other smart speaker, the HomePod Mini’s nicely braided cable is physically connected to the device side. You have to be able to access where the power adapter is plugged in to either remove it from the socket or disconnect the USB-C cable.
Searching online has brought me to dozens of discussion threads from others with the same issue but no fix. In some cases I’ll manage to go for weeks without encountering the problem. At other times, I’ll experience the issue multiple times in a single night prior to simply giving up and using a different, non-Apple speaker for my music. Of course, Apple in their infinite secrecy doesn’t publish any kind of release notes for HomePod Mini software, so I never have any idea of there has been something new pushed to the device which may fix it. I had been hoping for something to finally squash this nasty bug when the new colors were announced, but just earlier today I ran into the same problem and had to pull the power from it.
My HomePod Mini currently sits in my living room and is most commonly used for playing music while I read. If the device was reliable, I would consider a second one for my bedroom to replace the old Amazon Echo Dot I currently have next to my bed for an alarm and white noise. I can’t justify the expense when the reliability is still so flaky after more than a year, though.
Originally published at https://looped.network on October 25, 2021.
