Review: HomePod mini
Price: £99 from fave.co/39aysmW
Apple’s HomePod smart speaker is widely admired – for its attractive design and exceptional audio quality, if not for the sophistication of its smart features – but many potential buyers are put off by its price tag. At £279 the 2018 HomePod is a serious purchase. This year Apple has come up with a solution: a smaller and cheaper mini edition of the HomePod, which costs a vastly more budget-friendly £99. But is this a compromise too far? What corners have been cut to hit that price point?
We’ve been trying out a pair of minis for around a week, and our HomePod mini review reports on their design and portability, audio quality, ease of use and smart features. We’ll help you decide if this is the best option for your home.
DESIGN
The HomePod mini lives up to its suffix with a petite design. It weighs just 345g – the full-size HomePod is 2.5kg, about seven times as much – and is 84.3mm tall with a diameter of 97.9mm. (The big HomePod is 172mm high with a diameter of 142mm.)
That’s small, then – but it can be hard to grasp exactly how small unless you’ve got the thing in front of you.
In size terms the comparators are all fruit or balls. It’s
