Apple HomePod review: Minimal, sleek design; produces the best sound you can find in a smart speaker

Get it for: Rs 19,990
Key highlight: Superior sound output
It has been a pretty low-key launch but Apple’s smart speaker, the HomePod, has finally arrived on Indian shores, two years after its global debut. While the launch and availability — owing to current circumstances — may have been a subdued affair, the HomePod is anything but low-key or mellow when it comes to performance.

For starters, it is an absolute breeze to set up the smart speaker compared with Amazon Echo devices or Google Nest. If you are — and you have to be — in the Apple ecosystem, then it takes less than a minute to set it up. We connected our iPhone 11 Pro with the HomePod and it synced all the details — Wi-Fi, iCloud, Apple Music — in a jiffy.

The design of the HomePod is very Apple-like — minimal and sleek. Available in black and space grey, HomePod has a fabric mesh wrap-around design with no buttons. On top of the HomePod is a touch display that can be used to increase or decrease the volume. Play or pause music by simply tapping on it.

“Hey Siri” wakes up HomePod. The smart speaker is a testament to how far Apple’s digital voice assistant has come from its initial days. Siri is your new best friend if you get a HomePod as it performs all the tasks, from setting alarms to playing music, quite comfortably.

The HomePod has seven tweeters, each one with an amplifier and a transducer. There are six microphones and a woofer as well. All these are managed by Apple’s A8 chip that combine to deliver stellar sound — one of the best you will find in a smart speaker at least.

HomePod has a feature called spatial awareness, which detects the location where the speaker is kept and produces sound accordingly. It sounds a bit far-fetched but it actually works. We tried it in a bedroom, inside a bookshelf and in the kitchen — and the audio was different in each location.

It is quite a delight to listen to music on the HomePod. Ed Sheeran’s annoyingly catchy Shape of You gave a glimpse of how well vocals were separated from instruments. Enya’s Orinoco Flow on the HomePod captured the highs, mids and lows perfectly.

At Rs 19,990, the HomePod is the ideal speaker for the inhabitants of the Apple ecosystem. For others? You are not allowed, Apple seems to be saying, as it doesn’t work with Android or Windows devices. If you are an Apple fan, go for it. As there isn’t another device for you to swoon over. For everyone else, there is always Amazon Echo or Google Nest.