With less than 72 hours until its release, the first HomePod reviews are in from a hand-picked group of media outlets, and they’re very positive—as long as you’re buying Apple’s $349 smart speaker for sound quality. The Homepod’s “smarts,” though, leave much to be desired.
That’s not a total surprise, since Siri is woefully inadequate on other devices and Apple hadn’t given us any indication that it has enhanced Siri for HomePod. But in action it’s even worse than we expected. Brian X. Chen of The New York Times laments Siri’s capabilities on the new speaker and concludes that “Siri doesn’t even work as well on HomePod as it does on the iPhone.”
