HomePod mini

The little speaker with a big, big sound

- Rob Mead-Green

£99 FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES S5 chip, AirPlay 2, full-range drive with dual passive radiators, 360° sound, 4x microphones for far-field Siri, stereo pair capable, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, Thread network tech, Ultra-wideband chip, 97.9x84.3mm

They say a week is a long time in politics. If so, then three years is a lifetime in tech, something that feels particularly true for Apple’s HomePod. The £279 smart speaker was announced in 2017, arrived in 2018 to a flurry of positive reviews about its incredible sound quality and then more or less sank without a trace, overwhelmed by a tsunami of cheaper, inferior-sounding speakers featuring Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant.

While the HomePod clearly sounded better than most of its rivals, its weak spots were its price and its Siri/Apple Music integration – Siri (still) has a lot of catching up to do before it can truly rival Alexa and Google Assistant, while the walled garden Apple erected around the HomePod meant music services that weren’t Apple Music rather got left out, limiting the speaker’s appeal.

Now Apple is having a second go, this time with the HomePod mini. Smaller, semi-spherical and with a price tag of just £99, it promises to address some of the original HomePod’s shortcomings, while also being much more keenly priced.