TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Apple HomePod – a missed opportunity

40 pointsby jhataxover 7 years ago

11 comments

LeoPantheraover 7 years ago
&gt; The HomePod will be mostly limited to playing tunes from Apple Music, controlling Apple-optimized smart home appliances and sending messages through an iPhone.<p>I have an Alexa and this is literally all I do with it - music, smart home stuff, and maybe the occasional timer - except for sending messages, which it can&#x27;t do.<p>I briefly tried some of the &quot;skills&quot; but they&#x27;re awkward as hell. You have to say something along the lines of &quot;Tell &lt;app name&gt; to &lt;command&gt;&quot;. Yikes.<p>So I&#x27;m pretty excited about the HomePod. Improved audio quality for music playback is genuinely enough to convince me. The assistant parts are just software, Apple can improve that in the future.
评论 #15757058 未加载
评论 #15755689 未加载
评论 #15758433 未加载
评论 #15756863 未加载
评论 #15755966 未加载
Juliateover 7 years ago
Doesn&#x27;t it look like the very same playbook for every new Apple product?<p>Every single new product is behind the existing competition in so many ways (or going in such a different direction) at launch. Industry experts &quot;don&#x27;t understand&quot; why.<p>But for a set of properties that are&#x2F;become their distinctive anchors into people&#x27;s mindset. So people can&#x27;t really compare side-by-side: it looks&#x2F;feels like a different thing.<p>Then Apple builds from that while the competition tries to copy&#x2F;adjust their course.
评论 #15757721 未加载
chrisvalleybayover 7 years ago
I really hope Apple is working on those glasses, and hard. This product category, the speaker, is a hard one for Apple, much because the Apple Watch basically is a wearable Siri. What however worries me, is that Apple has yet to be able to make Siri an attractive product. I mostly just use it to set timers.. Doing something with a virtual assistant seldomly will include only voice, except basic tasks such as setting reminders, timers etc. one-off commands, basically. Other things, more complex tasks, mostly require multiple actions, and a screen, like on the Apple Watch or iPhone will let you browse and select those tasks.<p>We have hailed the voice interface as “the next big thing”, but think about it; what are you actually doing through voice today? Not much. What have we historically been doing through voice? Getting information, browsing information, that might for instance lead to a purchase or other actions, mostly have been done either in person (in a shop), through some sort of purchasing form in a catalog, or more recently on a screen. Why? Because the voice is a low-bandwidth interface. One-off commands are fine, because they aren’t limited (as much) by the bandwidth of this interface, but anything more complex doesn’t really work.<p>Think about voice as an interface over a phone call, it’s not really good enough. It’s always better to meet someone in person, than just talking on the phone. Why? Because we get to use our eyes, and we get to express emotions. The interface has higher bandwidth. The screen is not the same thing, but it has much higher bandwidth than the voice alone. When you think about the phone or the watch, you can have both voice and the screen, whereas on a speaker you can not.<p>I’m not sure what I am trying to say, just thinking aloud, I guess.<p>Edit: Formatting
评论 #15756245 未加载
评论 #15756004 未加载
评论 #15755960 未加载
评论 #15755821 未加载
Jhstoover 7 years ago
It will be interesting to see how well the HomePod will integrate with other devices. I have fiddled some with home automation and unfortunately, working with Apple products has been a miserable experience. I see no role of Apple devices in my or anyone else&#x27;s setup unless they will open up their devices a bit.<p>For example, as far as I know, if I want to use Alexa to play something on an Apple TV, I need to use libraries which have reverse engineered the IR remote. Why can&#x27;t I stream video to a specific URL and be done with it?<p>If it takes Apple this long to ship a smart speaker, how do they think to keep up with integrating (or producing their own proprietary) building blocks for the smart home vertical? If their devices on the smart home vertical continue to be as closed as the Apple TV, people will be completely locked-in Apple&#x27;s ability to produce new devices, which certainly hasn&#x27;t seem to be in their recent past interest.<p>Chinese companies like Xiaomi have shown far better judgment for the future by implementing MQTT protocols for their devices.<p>I just think Apple&#x27;s take as of now is a lost cause if they seek to dominate the space with the same sort of walled-garden approach as they did with apps. Applying gardens to physical devices space as wide as a smart home will take much more effort than it does for software.
评论 #15757637 未加载
queseraover 7 years ago
If the HomePod is able to play audio from local (Home sharing) iTunes libraries, I&#x27;ll buy two.<p>Unfortunately and inexplicably, the marketing so far says it will only play songs from Apple Music. If true, I will buy none.
oflannabhraover 7 years ago
I&#x27;ve long thought that the end-game for voice control is an omnipresent interaction. For example, using Siri across my watch, phone, computer, or speaker seamlessly and with shared context. Whether that is achieved through device-to-device communication (most likely Apple&#x27;s approach) or device-cloud-device interaction is pretty irrelevant to the end game of voice control.<p>I actually agree with Phil Schiller&#x27;s comment that most of the use cases for voice control aren&#x27;t facilitated by a device without a screen. [1] Apple&#x27;s advantage is that the design of a HomePod can basically assume that a nearby iPhone or iPad is available without having to launch an app.<p>Somewhat ironically, Nest actually seems to have one of the best approaches I&#x27;ve seen to architecting a platform for such omnipresent interactions to take place on, with Nest OpenWeave[2].<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gadgets.ndtv.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;features&#x2F;phil-schiller-upgrade-pricing-google-home-amazon-echo-swift-1690180" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gadgets.ndtv.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;features&#x2F;phil-schiller-upgrade...</a> [2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openweave&#x2F;openweave-core" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openweave&#x2F;openweave-core</a>
Helloworldboyover 7 years ago
Personally I wish they&#x27;d just combine the HomePod and the Apple TV into a single product. Throw in wireless router capabilities and you have the ultimate home device.
评论 #15757168 未加载
thisisitover 7 years ago
&gt; Amazon offers thousands of “skills” (voice-activated apps) that let users do a range of things (including buy stuff from Amazon). <i>The Google Home Mini, which debuted earlier this year, is similarly endowed.</i><p>Is there a store for Google Home apps? I have been trying for last couple of days with no luck.
评论 #15756438 未加载
Yizahiover 7 years ago
Beamforming in a device of HomePod size is a joke. Yamaha builds sound projectors (as they brand them) for years and &quot;smaller&quot; models still can&#x27;t do this. Their first model in lineup that actually has beamforming capabilities that works is a bigass soundbar more than a meter long with 20+ speakers of all sizes and fancy algos to calculate spatial configuration. And it requires that it should be put in a specific room size and plan, in a specific position. Next model has like 50 speakers and is even bigger. This HomePod is just another small wireless speaker, I don&#x27;t think it is possible to do any high quality music with it or beamforming.
评论 #15755724 未加载
评论 #15755781 未加载
评论 #15757673 未加载
jhataxover 7 years ago
Edit: Fixed a typo in the title.
zythonover 7 years ago
Why anyone would have such a device in their home is still beyond me. I can turn on my lights, play music and manage my calendar just fine without the direct line to the NSA in my living room.
评论 #15756111 未加载