[microtonal]

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.)

[pram]

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.

[microtonal]

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.

[ghostcluster]

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.