Whether as a result of compelling evidence or collective thinking, the normally contentious and controversial Apple rumor mill occasionally tends to suddenly speak with one voice. And right now that voice is saying four words: HomePod with a screen.
In the space of a week, insiders have spotted references to HomeAccessory17,1 in backend code and a touchscreen interface hidden in a beta version of tvOS that seem to point to the same thing. Whether this will result in a commercialized product remains to be seen, but it’s becoming harder to deny that Apple is working on at least some kind of smart speaker with a screen.
Is this the right decision? I’m not convinced. Not because of any “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” nonsense – satisfactory products can still be improved, and the HomePod has plenty of problems in any case. I just don’t see how this particular approach will help.
I have four HomePods: a pair of full-size units in the living room, and a HomePod mini in the kitchen and den respectively. I have a love/hate relationship with all of them, and I struggle to see how a screen can make a difference. My problem isn’t that I can’t see what song is playing, or that I can’t play videos or see a readout of local weather conditions. It’s that the HomePod doesn’t do what it’s told because Siri is rubbish.
Design within your reach
One complicating factor is that unlike the iPhone and iPad, which are typically about a foot from our faces, the position of the HomePod relative to the user varies widely from case to case. The HomePods in my living room are on either side of the TV, so I’m often facing them; but when I’m actually playing music on them, I’m much more likely to be at the dining room table, either with my back to the speakers or far enough away that I couldn’t see anything on the screens if they had them. The HomePod mini in the kitchen is to my right while I’m cooking, tucked behind spaghetti and a couple of cacti, so a screen would be convenient to see but not to use as a touchscreen. And the HomePod in the den is directly behind me while I’m working. If it had a screen, I’d almost never see it…though I could move around and touch it fairly easily.
The current HomePod display isn’t all that useful, and a full touchscreen probably wouldn’t be either.
The current HomePod display isn’t all that useful, and a full touchscreen probably wouldn’t be either.
Foundry
The current HomePod display isn’t all that useful, and a full touchscreen probably wouldn’t be either.
Foundry
Foundry
With that variety of use cases to contend with, the HomePod is a challenge for the designer. If you rely on a touchscreen, just as if you rely on buttons, you’re forcing remote workers to get up from their office chairs every time a song or album ends. If you insist on communicating information to the user through a visual display, you’re making them, at the very least, turn around to look at the HomePod, and since the distance between a user and the HomePod is unpredictable, the text size of your interface will likely need to be so large that it can barely display any information.
There are two methods of control and information that make sense for a speaker: either via a reliable wireless connection through your smartphone (which, in my experience, is very spotty with the iPhone and HomePod) or via audio. You know, since it’s an audio-based device. Voice control is a very obvious method to use, since in any context where you can hear the speaker, it can hear you. Voice fits into all of the many use cases that HomePod owners can adopt.
That’s the approach Apple tried to take early on, and the problem wasn’t the approach, but the execution. Giving the HomePod a screen isn’t entirely unwelcome (and it’s a format that’s worked well for Amazon and Google), but it doesn’t address the underlying problems that have held back the HomePod’s growth. It’s actually a cop-out, as it’s creating an entirely new product (which might well succeed) while ignoring the problems plaguing one Apple already has.
What would help would be a complete overhaul of Siri: if that can be fixed, then we can really have a screen along with a voice control system that actually works. How fortunate, then, that Apple is currently working on Siri as part of the Apple Intelligence project. How fortunate for us poor, long-suffering HomePod owners.
Except Apple Intelligence won’t be affecting Siri on our HomePods — not in the initial wave of releases, which will come to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but any other Apple devices, and probably not ever because it requires a certain level of processing power. The HomePod with a display may have a class-A chip powerful enough to run Apple Intelligence at some point, but the HomePods we spent $300 on won’t. This is frustrating, to say the least, and reinforces the sense that Apple would rather force customers to buy something new than make what they’ve already bought work well.
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