WTimberman

mike1 said:

sflagel said:

kiowawa said:

foregoneconclusion said:

sflagel said:

Did the old one have this:

Yes, the original HomePod had Bluetooth 5.0. 

I had the impression the Mini version did not have Bluetooth, which made it hard to use for me as I travel a lot and wanted to bring it along without hooking to Hoel wifi.  

Although apparently the large HomePod did have Bluetooth 5.0, you could not use it to play music…. So if someone came to your house with a phone that is not from Apple, they could not share their music. The biggest reason not to get one.

Why would that matter? If they wanted me to hear something, they could just tell the HomePod to play it.

Not really concerned with how my home interacts with visitor's devices.

My understanding is that its limited bandwidth makes bluetooth inferior to wi-fi as a music transmission protocol. Apple apparently had do do some pretty impressive voodoo to make AirPods sound as good as they do, and even they can’t handle lossless audio at present. So I think Mike1 is right. Have your Android friends tell the HomePods what to play, ask you to play it for them, or keep a cheap bluetooth boombox around for them. (I mean that seriously. May daughter used to keep a JBL pill around just for that purpose.)

This stuff is insanely complicated, and there are now so many products from so many different manufacturers on the market that testing anything like all possible scenarios is simply unthinkable. And that’s not even to mention the nightmare of troubleshooting systems actually installed in the real world. I run a strictly HomeKit-powered smart home, but the more stuff I add to my network, the more peculiar failures I get. Even though I’m rocking a very recent mesh router setup and have been scrupulous about keeping all the verkakte software and firmware up-to-date, there are only a few of my attached devices that I can rely on to stay functioning as advertised for anywhere near 100% if the time. If I had a nickel for every failed geofencing routine on a device that was working perfectly fine four hours ago, or had Siri tell me randomly that  “You can only make one request at a time,” or “I’m having trouble connecting to the Internet,” or settled down on the couch to watch something on HBO only to have the HomePods linked to my TV suddenly decide not to play any sound, I’d already be richer than Tim Cook.

maccaguy said:

I’ve updated my HomePod to 13.2.1, but it refuses to recognize my wife’s voice. It keeps saying to turn on “Recognize my voice” in the Home app, but it’s on on both of our iPhones. I’ve power cycled all three devices. 

Was just listening to Myke Hurley on the latest episode of the Upgrade podcast with Jason Snell. He and his wife had the same problem. After a half-hour of growing frustration, he reported, and trying everything they could think of, activating SIri on the HomePod by holding a finger on top of one of the Pods somehow allowed it to recognize his wife's voice as that of a separate person. He said he wasn't really sure after the fact what the sequence of events was, or what exactly did the trick, but he thought that physically activating Siri was the key move. FYI....

My 3.2 update for two stereo-paired HomePods finished successfully, although the Home App hung on installing. (I let the app run for an hour without interrupting it, long past the time when the update-in-progress lights went out on the two HomePods. When I finally did give up, and resorted to force quitting and restarting the Home app on my iPhone, it did indicate that the 3.2 update had in fact been completed.)

The problem now is that AirPlay is COMPLETELY borked. The only way my two HomePods will play as a stereo pair is if I start an Apple Music stream directly from them. AirPlay results in one speaker only playing, although both show the lit-up plus and minus signs. If I tap on the dead one to try to encourage it to play, the plus and minus lights go out. If I tap it again, it starts paying something else from my library, and the other speaker shuts off. Meanwhile, the AirPlay source, whether it's a Mac or iOS device, keeps playing the original selection. THEN a message pops up on the source warning that I'm streaming to two devices, and asks if I'd like to upgrade to a family plan!

Tell you what. AirPlay 2 has NEVER worked right for me, and all my Apple devices -- iMac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch -- are the latest versions, and have been running the latest software updates throughout this agonizing Catalina/iOS 13/iPadOS 13 putz-with-it-till-it-sort-of-works update cycle. This latest screw-up, though, is absolutely crazy-making. It seems as though every time Apple issues a software update these days, more stuff that WAS working quits working, and it's half a year and several updates more before things go back to working -- sometimes -- as well as they were working before the update. At this point, I feel like mailing both my HomePods back to Tim Cook, and telling him where to stick them (And no, that wouldn't be on the ever growing pile of refurb candidates.)

True what you say. HomeKit is very much an adventure still, and not a cheap one. After several years of cautious, yet ever deeper wading into the HomeKit morass, I've now got got HomeKit locks, tunable lights, a thermostat, multi-room audio (HomePods, and one magnificently ancient iPod Hi-Fi/AirPort Express combo) and several different brands of security cameras. You'd think that by this time, I'd have had enough, but no. I keep checking my bank account and dreaming of garage door openers, ceiling fan and window blind controls, and God knows what else to come. Intrigued me. Addicted me. Silly, bankrupt me. Pity would be the charitable response. Still, I live alone, so I don't have to worry about misguided family members trying to use actual light switches, or screwing up my genius lists with HomePod requests for Merle Haggard tunes. Even better, in the wake of Phillips' latest software updates. my lights no longer come back on in shades of orange or purple rather than white after a summer power failure, or fail to come back on at all. Yippee! As you've so carefully put it, we're ALMOST there. Really. Honestly. If we've got the do-re-mi....