The smart speaker industry debuted in 2014 with Amazon’s Echo. Essentially a speaker and a digital assistant in one device, the smart speaker uses Wi-Fi to connect to the internet. With a smart speaker, users can play streaming music, hear the weather, get the latest news reports, find out if their home teams won yesterday, control their smart home appliances, and much more. And these devices are now offered in a variety of styles and prices allowing just about every one to own one or more smart speakers in their home.
The HomePod mini gets an important new feature that Apple didn’t bother to mention with the latest update
Amazon and Google have been the top two manufacturers of smart speakers with Apple an afterthought. Pricing, of course, is a major reason why this is the case. Apple did eventually drop the price to $299 but that failed to light a spark under buyers. So this year Apple tried a different tactic. It launched the HomePod mini, a smaller and less ambitious smart speaker priced at a much more reasonable $99. Shipping started last month and while the timing wasn’t perfect, the device might have been found under many Christmas trees this year.
We don’t want to be accused of nagging, but we should remind you that before you can run your HomePod mini on 18W, you do need to install the 14.3 update first. To do that, make sure that your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Mac are updated to their latest version. Open the Home app. Go to Home Settings > Software Update. If an update is available, click on Install.
