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Become a Six Colors member to read exclusive posts, get our weekly podcast, join our community, and more!By Dan Moren for Macworld
The HomePod’s growing pains
Nearly six months into having a HomePod, I made a decision to have it stop listening to me.
If you’re thinking to yourself “Well, that sounds like a fairly central feature of the device?” you’d be right. I now essentially have a very nice but rather expensive AirPlay 2 speaker. But this decision came after a steady and measured observation of how I used Apple’s smart speaker, what it does right, and what it does…less than right.
A month or so after I made the decision to disable the “Hey Siri” feature, I flirted with turning it back on, but ended up doing so for only a few days before I switched it off again. The juice, as they say, simply wasn’t worth the squeeze.
Overall, my experience of the HomePod, more than half a year after its debut, has reminded me largely of the early days of the Apple Watch where the company didn’t seem to have a clear idea of what the device actually was.