The HomePod mini 2 Steps Into the Living Room with Quad Surround Sound
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Apple’s “Welcome Home” event this morning was an encouraging sign that the company is finally taking the living room more seriously. It’s the first really home-focused presentation we’ve seen in years, but even more so because it wasn’t just a segment of a Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote or iPhone event, but a separate boutique presentation that focused exclusively on new Apple products to be used around the house.
Of course, the big news was the HomeView — Apple’s new Siri AI-powered smart home display — but the company also had some other important updates to show off, including a new Apple TV 4K that brings the set-top box into the modern AI era.
However, the third product Apple announced in today’s trifecta may be the least exciting — but also arguably the most overdue. The HomePod mini 2 has finally arrived, and in a synergistic twist, it comes six years to the day after the original.
The HomePod mini we’ve all known and loved for years was announced on October 13, 2020, although in those days Apple’s home ecosystem wasn’t nearly special enough to get its own event. Instead, the HomePod mini served as a sort of opening act for the iPhone 12 lineup at Apple’s “Hi, Speed” iPhone 12 event, which was late that year thanks to pandemic-related production delays.
Whether it was a deliberate choice on Apple’s part or not, it makes the timing of this year’s “Welcome Home” event somewhat whimsical. The HomePod mini launched in an era when the first-generation Apple TV 4K had already been on the market for over three years, but it was also on the eve of some pretty big and awkward changes in Apple’s home lineup.
Within eight months, the full-sized HomePod would be discontinued, leaving the HomePod mini as Apple’s only smart speaker, and then the second-generation Apple TV 4K would show up with Home Theater and eARC support for the full-sized speaker that had been discontinued only weeks earlier.
Apple reintroduced the HomePod in early 2023 as a second-generation model, coming only weeks after a new Apple TV 4K had landed, but it’s fair to say that Apple’s home ecosystem still felt a bit fragmented. Until today, that is.
Enter the HomePod mini 2
The HomeView may feel like the device that ties it all together, but the Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini 2 have some nice tricks up their sleeves.
The diminutive smart speaker doesn’t look all that different from its predecessor on the outside. Apple has added some fun new colors — white and midnight have been joined by pink, green, and blue — but it’s what’s inside that counts.
As expected, the HomePod mini 2 gets Apple’s S10 chip. That may sound like a step up from the S9 that’s been rumored for the past two years, but it’s not really. The S9 and S10 are just two different packages for the exact same silicon. The S9 was used in the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2, while the S10 was found in the Apple Watch Series 10, Series 11, and Ultra 3.
What’s significant about the S9/S10 chip is that these were the first Apple Watch chips to get their own Neural Engine. Apple used this to introduce on-device Siri for the Apple Watch Series 9, and it’s telling that this is now the minimum supported model for watchOS 27, which brings Siri AI onto the wrist.
So, Apple is also leveraging this to bring Siri AI to the HomePod mini. It’s not going to be there out of the box, as today’s announcement notes that it’s coming “in a future software update.” It will also initially be limited to the usual list of English-speaking countries: the US, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, and the UK.
Apple appears to be doing something similar to bring Siri AI to older Apple TV 4K models — the second- and third-generation set-top boxes will also be getting the more powerful voice assistant in some form. The secret sauce here appears to be relying more on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure. While the S10 chip will support some on-device processing, Apple comes right out and says that the HomePod mini 2 will also use Private Cloud Compute, “which extends the privacy of the device to the cloud.”
The more powerful chips in this year’s HomePod mini 2 and Apple TV 4K also allow the smaller smart speaker to be used as part of a quad-speaker Home Theater setup for the first time ever.
“HomePod mini 2 brings together Siri AI, gorgeous new colors, and incredible audio,” said Kaiann Drance, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Home Product Marketing. “With Siri AI, it understands you better than ever, drawing on personal context and broad world knowledge to make music discovery even richer. It fills a room with sound on its own, which gets even bigger in a stereo pair or with multiroom audio, and when paired with the new Apple TV 4K, it delivers our most immersive home theater setup yet. And with just your voice, HomePod mini makes it easy to securely control your accessories and run automations across the connected home.”
It appears that you’ll need four HomePod mini 2 speakers to get the surround sound experience. Two will likely still provide a stereo soundstage, similar to what Apple added with tvOS 15 in 2021. However, it will also be possible to mix two HomePod mini 2 speakers with two full-sized HomePods (second generation only) for a hybrid setup, where the larger speakers do the heavier lifting for the primary front channels while the smaller ones provide the backdrop.
The HomePod mini is also adding a new “Sound Glow” feature that will transform the top of the HomePod mini into “a visual canvas that glows and pulses in sync with the music, reacting in real time to bass and treble.” The lighting will be color-matched to the song’s album artwork, and users can even have bespoke atmospheric animations for soundscapes like rain.
The HomePod mini 2 gets a price bump to $149, putting it $20 above where its predecessor ended up after Apple’s spring price hike, and 50% more than the original 2020 launch price. It’s available for preorder today and expected to arrive in stores and in customers’ hands on October 30.
