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“At $99, HomePod mini and, by extension, Siri, significantly boost the potential for household ubiquity.”
Lance Ulanoff published his review of Apple’s new HomePod mini today, praising its sound, ease of use, and on-device privacy. Some of these features already existed in the first HomePod, and Apple has greatly improved on them in this new smaller version.
But the HomePod mini is still no Amazon Echo or Google Home. It can’t, for example, let you play Spotify without connecting to your phone. And although Apple’s promised new Intercom features supposedly lets you use your HomePod mini to talk to the members of your family through their iPads and iPhones, Ulanoff calls this feature “clunkier than I expected.” I also polled the three teenagers who live in my house, who called the very idea of this feature “abominable.”
Ulanoff says that although the HomePod mini is a little late to the smart home speaker game, the price may be right for many consumers.
Read the full review here: