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by pathartl 3039 days ago
And that's fine, I have some Dick Sequerra MET-11's that have been around for many years before I was born and I only had to repair the tweeters two years ago. However these were high quality expensive speakers when they came out. Cheap drivers were not used. Looking at the HomePod and the processing hardware and their margins, there's no way the drivers they are putting in this thing are any better than what you'd find in a cheapo HTIB system.

The way I see it, these speakers are great for somebody that wants to remain in the Apple ecosystem and has $350 to drop on something that's going to be obsolete and incompatible in a few years. So yeah maybe these drivers won't need to be replaced, but that's only because the software driving them has a shorter life expectancy.
1 comments
microtonal 3039 days ago
Indeed, as pointed out by the Accidental Tech podcast and others, even if the speakers hold up, what is going to kill it for longevity is the lack of a line-in. It is very unlikely that HomePod's version of AirPlay is going to be supported for more that 10 years. If the device had a line-in, it would still serve as a fine speaker beyond that. But now it is practically useless, even when you are in the Apple ecosystem, once Apple deprecates AirPlay 2.

In the meanwhile, I enjoyed the Altec Lansing speakers that my parents bought in the 70ies for quite some years.

(We were interested in the HomePod, but the lack of a line-in, and low-reparability has made the choice difficult. Added to that, I don't really like that it has so many Mics. 2025's Apple could be 2015's Lenovo, there is no guarantee that they will keep focusing on security & privacy, nor that they will resist government surveillance.)

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pram 3039 days ago
Why do you assume that? AirPlay has been around for more than 10 years. You can still use a 15 year old AirPort Express with AirTunes the same exact way as when you bought it.
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microtonal 3039 days ago
Except that you cannot configure it anymore unless you have an (insecure) Leopard or Snow Leopard machine on the same network [1]. Snow Leopard was released in 2009, the first generation Airport Express was sold 2004-2008 [2]. So Apple is not unwilling to axe support for a product rather quickly.

If they plan to support the latest AirPlay on the HomePod for 10 or 15 years, why not just state this? If you are not doing that, you want to keep the possibility to end support earlier.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201519 [2] I know that you could install the old Airport Utility unofficially for a while.

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ghostcluster 3039 days ago
The thing that's frustrating about it is that there's no way to use it as a speaker without multiple seconds of latency.

Getting rid of line in would be fine if you could still use it as a speaker with a modern wireless protocol, but this is just a regression in functionality.

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