Apple Announces $99 HomePod Mini Smart Speaker

Definitely call it a comeback. After two years of disappointing sales, Apple refreshed its HomePod smart speaker on Tuesday with the HomePod mini, a 3.3-inch tall spherical Siri-powered speaker shipping in November.

There's no word yet as to an exact release date, but the HomePod mini will come in space gray or white color options. Apple says the mini has the best sound quality of any small smart speaker, though we'll have to put it through its paces before we can verify that claim.

You can link two HomePod minis together as a stereo pair to double the sound. Multiple speakers placed across different rooms can work as a whole-home audio system or an intercom.

The HomePod mini's assortment of compatible music services is quite limited. It only works with Apple Music, iHeartRadio, radio.com, and TuneIn. Down the road, Apple expects to add support for Pandora and Amazon Music, but there's no word about Spotify, and certainly not about YouTube.

The HomePod mini signals Apple's desire to get back into the smart speaker fight. Cupertino definitely needed a reboot to compete in this market. Amazon, Google, and Baidu lead the smart speaker market by a long shot, according to recent estimates from Strategy Analytics. Previous reports from the market research firm indicate that Apple has captured less than 5 percent global market share.

At $99, the HomePod mini addresses one of the larger HomePod's major problems, which is that it cost $349 when its major competitors, the Amazon Echo and Google Home (now the Nest Audio), are safely below $200. The current Echo costs $99, as does Google's Nest Audio speaker.

But there's one other challenge. When I reviewed the HomePod in 2018, I called out Siri for being much weaker than Google Assistant and Alexa, and it still is in some ways. Siri is still oriented to being a virtual assistant on your phone, while Alexa is the queen of the smart home and Google Assistant's natural language processing is unmatched.

Apple says Siri will allow the HomePod mini to offer a personalized experience for every member of the home. It will be able to identify who is speaking, and offer suitable recommendations for that user. We'll see how well it has evolved into a smart home companion when we get a HomePod mini in for testing.

Posted in: Speaker