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Apple’s HomePod Is a Good Smart Speaker. But the Mini Is Better for Most People.

By Nena Farrell and Brent Butterworth
Updated
One black Apple HomePod next to one white Apple HomePod.
Photo: Brent Butterworth

The Apple HomePod is back. Nearly two years after discontinuing the original HomePod, Apple has resurrected the Siri-based smart speaker with minor improvements. Although the second-generation HomePod looks almost identical to the original, the formula was altered with some subtle design twists and new features, including temperature and humidity sensors, support for spatial audio, and integration of the new Matter smart-home protocol. For most people who favor Siri and HomeKit, these upgrades don’t make it a must-own speaker—the smaller, lower-priced HomePod mini is the better choice. But for music lovers, the new HomePod competes sonically with other popular smart speakers from Amazon and Sonos, even if it may be a matter of preference.

What you need to know


  • Audio specs

    The HomePod uses five tweeters and a 4-inch woofer, it supports Atmos spatial audio, and it tunes the speaker to suit your room.

  • Smart-home specs

    The HomePod is a Siri-based voice speaker that can serve as a HomeKit control hub. It supports the new Matter smart-home protocol.

  • Our audio tests

    We measured the HomePod’s volume and bass abilities and compared it with the Amazon Echo Studio and Sonos One SL.

  • Other tests

    We also tested the responsiveness of Siri, Apple TV integration, basic HomeKit integration, temp and humidity controls, and more.

Our pick

The HomePod sounds good, responds well to voice commands, and supports new trends like spatial audio and Matter. But it’s really only suited for iOS users, and it costs a lot for the performance it delivers.

For music fans who are heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, the HomePod (2nd generation) is Apple’s biggest, best-sounding smart speaker—a step up sonically from the HomePod mini. It is roughly three times larger than the Mini, incorporates five tweeters and a 4-inch woofer, and includes a large LED control screen on top, as well as a detachable power cord. It’s no surprise that the HomePod can play louder than the HomePod mini and deliver more bass, and in our tests, its sound quality was competitive with the best-sounding smart speakers we’ve tried. Through Siri voice control, you can play music from Apple Music and other linked streaming services, as well as your own iCloud-based music library. The speaker also supports room sensing (to automatically tailor the sound to your environment) and Atmos spatial audio (available on many tunes in Apple Music), and you can link two HomePods together to listen to music in stereo mode. For those who have embraced HomeKit as their smart-home platform of choice, the new HomePod and the HomePod mini are equally good control hubs, but the HomePod adds support for the new Matter smart-home protocol.

Unfortunately, the HomePod also has its share of potential downsides. Compared with smart speakers from Amazon and Google, the HomePod isn’t nearly as versatile or affordable. It’s three times more expensive than the Amazon Echo (4th Gen) and Google’s Nest Audio, and $100 more than the Amazon Echo Studio, which we preferred the sound of in our tests. The HomePod requires you to already be an Apple user to some degree—since you need either an iPhone or iPad to set it up. It lacks Bluetooth (which all Echo and Nest speakers have) or a line-audio input (which is featured on some Echo speakers) to connect external audio devices; AirPlay is the only way to stream external music sources to it. From a voice control and smart-home perspective, almost all the things we like about the $300 HomePod can be found in the $100 Mini, so its value is questionable.

But if you’re still on the fence about which HomePod (if either) you should buy, here’s a rundown of what the HomePod does well and what it doesn’t.

A white Apple HomePod plugged in.
Photo: Brent Butterworth

It sounds pretty good (for a smart speaker)

No smart speaker we’ve heard sounds as good as a decent pair of bookshelf speakers, but the new HomePod performs well sonically—although not really better than its top competitors in the smart-speaker category.

We compared the HomePod directly with two of the better-sounding tabletop speakers that we’ve tested: the Amazon Echo Studio and the Sonos One SL, both of which usually sell for about $200. (The latter, though technically not a smart speaker, is sonically identical to the Sonos One smart speaker, which supports both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.) For our listening tests, we matched the volume within about 1 decibel, which is a barely noticeable difference and the best we could achieve given the relatively coarse volume adjustments on these speakers. We also made sure to play music from the same streaming service (either Spotify or Apple Music) on all of the speakers so we’d know we weren’t hearing different versions of a tune.

To our ears, all three speakers sounded good, but they definitely sounded different from one another. The HomePod’s most obvious sonic difference is that the middle bass frequencies sound pumped-up. It’s not the bloated, dull sound of, say, a bad car stereo system, but it does tend to increase the sense of punch in the range around 100 hertz, which hypes up the sounds of bass guitar, synth bass, and kick drum in a way that a lot of people will probably like. It really brought out the impact of the bass in tunes like Three Days Grace’s “Animal I Have Become” (video) and Audrey Nuna’s “damn Right” (video) without obscuring the vocals the way most bass-boosted speakers might. If you find the bass bump to be a bit much, the HomePod settings menu (in Apple’s Home app) has a switch to reduce the speaker’s bass output; you can easily switch it on and off during playback to see which level you prefer.

Apple seems to have balanced out that bass boost with an accompanying treble boost, which gives the speaker an initially exciting sound that works pretty well for most modern pop and hip-hop recordings. However, it can sound unnatural for genres such as folk, jazz, and older rock recordings. For example, it de-emphasized the guitars in “Animal I Have Become” and seemed to hype up the bass and vocals. It did the same for Toto’s “Rosanna” (video), which made the tune sound somewhat harsh.

In comparison, the Echo Studio had a much more balanced sound, with more-even reproduction of bass, midrange, and treble. In jazz-oriented recordings, such as Patricia Barber’s rendition of “Trouble Is a Man” (video), the Echo Studio let us hear more of the piano and more of the fundamental (aka lowest) tones of the double bass. The Sonos One SL also had a more balanced sound than the HomePod, but its bass response wasn’t quite as satisfying.

The HomePod’s tweeter design, with five of them around the top pointing in different directions, produced a pleasingly spacious sound, whether we listened to conventional stereo sound mixes or immersive, spatial audio mixes from Apple Music. It didn’t sound notably more spacious than the Echo Studio, though.

Overall, though we enjoyed the HomePod’s sound, it wasn’t a clear upgrade over what you get from the less expensive Amazon Echo Studio and Sonos One SL. It was just … different. Whether you like it comes down to personal preference. We preferred the balanced sound of the Echo Studio.

It’s a good listener

HomePod’s built-in Siri voice assistant is quick to recognize and respond to voice commands, even when you’re talking to it from across the room, jamming to loud music, or both. This 2nd-generation model actually has two fewer microphones than the original (cutting it from six to four), but we still found it detected our voice well and quickly responded to questions, music requests, and smart-home commands. But Siri is also more likely than Alexa or Google Voice to direct you to the web for answers to complicated questions.

The only thing that slightly slowed the HomePod’s response was when we used two of them in stereo mode. Even in that situation, we only noticed a slight, split-second delay in getting answers to our questions.

Handoff is a convenient trick

If you want to send a song or podcast that’s playing on your iPhone over to the HomePod, you can simply bring your iPhone near the top of the speaker, and the song will transfer over. (You have to enable handoff in your iOS setup menu.) It’s more convenient than asking Siri to play the song from the beginning, and it’s easier than using AirPlay (if you’re near the device, at least). You can also transfer in reverse to move a song from the HomePod to your iPhone. Other iPhones on the same Wi-Fi network can use the feature, too.

Impressive temperature sensing (for a speaker)

Other smart speakers have a built-in temperature sensor, but the Apple HomePod and the HomePod mini are the only ones with a humidity sensor. These features give you real-time feedback on the state of your room, which is especially helpful if you’ve set up a HomeKit-based automation that triggers a smart thermostat or humidifier. Compared with the temperature sensor on the Amazon Echo (4th Gen), the HomePod’s sensor is much more responsive—we noticed that the Echo might lock on to the same temperature reading for a few days, while the HomePod’s would fluctuate at the same rate as our home thermostat.

Apple’s Home app also makes it easy to find home climate information, listing all temperature data that it’s getting from any HomePods or other smart-home devices in your home at the top of the app. In comparison, the Amazon Alexa app makes it hard to find this data, burying it in settings pages, making it easily accessible only through automations.

Apple TV and multiroom audio integration

If you own an Apple TV streaming media player, any HomePods on the same network automatically appear as speaker options in the audio menu. You can set up a home theater audio system using one or two HomePods and play Atmos audio soundtracks from services that support the format.

Since the HomePod is an AirPlay 2 device, you can also incorporate it into a Wi-Fi-based multiroom audio system, along with the HomePod Mini, Apple TV, and any third-party AirPlay-2-enabled speakers. AirPlay 2 is also included in a lot of AV receivers and TVs. You can launch playback via Siri voice control, move audio around the house, and group speakers together. In our guide to multiroom wireless speaker systems, we like AirPlay 2, but only for people who are heavily invested in Apple devices.

An Apple HomePod in the middle of an Amazon Echo Studio and a Sonos One SL.
We tested the Apple HomePod (center) against the Amazon Echo Studio (left) and Sonos One SL (right). Photo: Brent Butterworth

It’s not a sonic or bass powerhouse

We measured the HomePod’s maximum volume capabilities, just as we do for our guide to portable Bluetooth speakers—and it fell far short of the Amazon Echo Studio and the Sonos One SL. The Echo Studio hit 94.1 decibels, the One SL hit 89.6 dB, and the HomePod only reached 87.2 dB. So, although the HomePod can play loud enough to fill a large living room with music at a satisfying level, the Echo Studio can play loud enough to drown out conversation in that same room.

We also measured the speakers’ CTA-2010 maximum bass output, which we use to test subwoofers. Again, the Echo Studio outperformed the others, averaging 82.0 dB between 40 and 63 hertz. The One SL averaged 74.1 dB, and the HomePod managed only 71.5 dB. This is a big difference; the Echo Studio is definitely the choice if you want to play music with lots of deep bass. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering that the Echo Studio is about 66% larger by volume than the HomePod. But still, you get a lot more sound for a lot less money with the Echo Studio—and even the One SL, which is slightly smaller than the HomePod.

iOS required for setup

Unlike Sonos, Amazon, and Google smart speakers that are set up via apps that work with both iOS and Android devices, the Apple HomePod requires an iPhone or iPad for setup (here are the system requirements). Once you power up the HomePod, simply bring your iOS device near it, and you should get a prompt on the screen to begin setup. However, Apple requires that your particular iOS device has the most up-to-date software version before it lets you proceed; so, if you haven’t been diligent with your updates, it’s going to bring the setup process to a grinding halt while you deal with that.

The good news is, once any pesky updates are out the way, the setup process becomes pretty straightforward—though, if the update process took awhile, you may have to wake the speaker up by pressing the top panel. Setup takes place entirely on the iOS screen to link the speaker to your existing Apple account. After the speaker is set up, you should be able to find it in Apple’s Home app, where you can tweak the settings, link additional music services, add the speaker to any HomeKit automations, and more.

Siri voice recognition is a mixed bag

Siri can learn to recognize up to six voices to access personal requests, like calendar events and text messages. During setup, you will be prompted to teach Siri to recognize your voice. People on our staff had different degrees of success with this. Some people only had to set it up once, and it worked fine—but for others, even after configuring voice recognition time and time again, we continued to get prompts that it needed to be set up.

Less compatibility across the board

Besides requiring an iPhone or iPad to set it up, the HomePod can only play music over Wi-Fi and AirPlay—you can’t use Bluetooth, and you don’t have the option to connect an external audio player via an auxiliary cable. Apple Music is the default streaming service for Siri; you can add other third-party services like Pandora, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio, but the HomePod does not integrate as many services as an Amazon or Google speaker.

Though not a complaint about the HomePod itself, it’s worth mentioning that HomeKit, Apple’s smart-home platform, currently has the most limited list of compatible devices. The HomePod is set to work with Matter devices, though, so that should open smart-home doors in the future.

No physical mute button

Most smart speakers these days feature a button that allows you to physically turn off the microphones, and they usually have some sort of visual cue—like a red light—to alert you that voice control is disabled. Apple has skipped such a feature on the HomePod, which is surprising given how Apple usually touts itself as a security-focused brand. You can still switch Siri off of a HomePod, but you have to go into the Home app to do so. A manual switch would be easier, especially if multiple people live in your home and want to be able to control the microphones.

High price tag

At about $300, the HomePod isn’t cheap, especially when compared with other smart speakers. It’s three times more expensive than the Amazon Echo (4th Gen) and Google’s Nest Audio, and $100 more than the Amazon Echo Studio, which we think sounds better. And though it’s easy to pair two HomePods to create a stereo pair, two of them would cost you $600. For that price, you could get better sound (and similar convenience) from a set of powered bookshelf speakers connected to an Amazon Echo Dot. Or you could get two Echo Studio speakers for about $400 and pair those.

An Apple HomePod Mini.
Photo: Brent Butterworth

Our pick

The HomePod mini can do most of the cool tricks of its larger counterpart at a third of the price, and it sounds surprisingly good for its size. It doesn’t fill a room with sound, but it’s good for casual listening.

The Apple HomePod mini is the smaller, $100 version of the HomePod, and it has been around since late 2020. Almost everything we like about the HomePod is also available in the HomePod mini: quick Siri responses, HomeKit compatibility, handoff and multiroom audio capabilities, stereo pairing, and a built-in temperature and humidity sensor. Though it can’t play as loudly as the HomePod and doesn’t have as much bass, it still sounds surprisingly good for a speaker the size of an orange—which makes it a good choice for casual listening. The HomePod mini does not support Dolby Atmos or room sensing (although it sounds great without them), nor does it support Matter (it does support Thread). Like its big brother, the HomePod mini requires an iOS device for setup. It comes in more colors than the HomePod and has a much more accessible price, though it’s not as affordable as Amazon’s Echo Dot or Google’s Nest Mini.

Unless you’re looking to truly fill a room with sound or you want a wireless, Atmos-equipped stereo pair for your Apple TV, the HomePod mini delivers as well in every other smart-speaker capacity as the larger, pricier HomePod—whether it’s controlling HomeKit devices, handing off music from an iPhone, or just asking Siri questions. The HomePod is a solid option if you want louder, fuller sound, but if you’re not fully committed to the Apple ecosystem, other speakers that we recommend deliver comparable or better audio performance for a lower price.

A side by side of the Apple HomePod and Apple HomePod Mini.
A size comparison of the HomePod (left) and HomePod mini (right). Photo: Brent Butterworth

Since the HomePod and the HomePod mini are designed to be voice-control hubs for a HomeKit-based smart-home system, we plan to do more long-term testing of both speakers for our guide to HomeKit devices and to test them with Matter-certified smart-home devices as those roll out.

Apple has added Sound Recognition to the HomePod, allowing it to alert you when it recognizes a smoke or carbon monoxide alarm going off in your home. We plan to test this feature and will update this guide with our notes.

One concern we and several others had about the 1st-generation HomePod was that its base leaves white rings on wood furniture. We’re long-term testing the 2nd-generation model on wooden surfaces to see if this issue occurs again.

This article was edited by Adrienne Maxwell, Jon Chase, and Grant Clauser.

Meet your guides

Nena Farrell

Updates Writer

Nena Farrell was an updates writer covering smart speakers, wireless TV headphones, tabletop radios, and digital photo frames, among other things. She was previously an associate editor at Sunset, and is currently a writer and reviewer at Wired.

Brent Butterworth

Brent Butterworth is a senior staff writer covering audio and musical instruments at Wirecutter. Since 1989, he has served as an editor or writer on audio-focused websites and magazines such as Home Theater, Sound & Vision, and SoundStage. He regularly gigs on double bass with various jazz groups, and his self-produced album Take2 rose as high as number three on the Roots Music Report jazz album chart.

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