Hands-on with the brand new, extra colourful HomePod Minis

Three colourful HomePod Minis have been introduced final month and went on sale this week, including yellow, orange, and blue choices to our good speaker dwelling decor choices. I acquired to check out the trio of brilliant audio system, and must say I fairly like including a pop of colour to my good dwelling.

Apple is a bit behind the ball right here; each Google and Amazon have had colour decisions for his or her good audio system for some time now. The Nest Minis are available in coral and light-weight blue colours, and Amazon’s Echo audio system have blue, tiger orange, and Billie Eilish-beige choices. But as regular, Apple has gone the additional mile with its design right here, creating one thing fairly genuinely pleasant.

Each $99 HomePod Mini comes with an identical coloured field and a special shimmering, shimmying Mini brand, presumably mimicking the sounds your HomePod will ship courtesy of that Apple Music Voice subscription you’re planning to make use of it with (proper?).

The braided USB-C energy cable (which nonetheless can’t be eliminated) is color-coordinated with the speaker and is a pastel model of the principle occasion. The quantity up and down buttons on the white management plate completely match the Mini’s colour. Also — and that is very Apple — if you arrange the Mini utilizing your iPhone, the graphic that pops up matches the colour of the Mini you’re pairing (truly helpful when you’re establishing three completely different colours without delay).

Speaking of these colours, they’re much more spectacular in individual. When they have been first introduced at Apple’s fall {hardware} occasion, my preliminary thought was they have been a bit underwhelming. Orange and yellow aren’t prime of thoughts with regards to inside design colour decisions, though they’re nice for the odd “pop” of colour. And the blue appeared so darkish as to not be that dissimilar to the prevailing darkish gray possibility. Also, the place have been the inexperienced and pink, Apple?

Once I acquired my palms on the audio system, although, and tried them out in a number of completely different conditions round the home, I discovered I had loads of spots the place they may match proper in. Although, admittedly, it was primarily in my kids’s rooms.

The yellow could be very brilliant, undoubtedly lemon on the colour wheel, and the orange has a way more blood orange, reddish hue — nearer to coral than the fruit Florida is legendary for. However, subsequent to a coral-colored Nest Mini, it pops a bit extra and there’s no trace of pink.

The blue is my favourite (probably as a result of I simply redid my kitchen and selected darkish blue cupboards, so it’s the good match there). It’s a deeply wealthy, nearly royal blue and actually fairly. The blue additionally doesn’t present as a lot shadow by the mesh, one thing that offers the brighter colours a little bit of a muddy look if you stand up shut.

One benefit of those colours, and the darkish gray possibility, over the white Mini, is they’re much less more likely to begin greying as they gather mud and grime, one thing that’s been noticeable on the white model in my testing. Clearly, we want a particular Apple cleansing material for our HomePods.

The new HomePod Minis are an identical in operate to the prevailing fashions. They work with Siri, can use your iPhone to make calls and ship messages, act as a hub on your HomeKit dwelling, and set alarms and timers. We might be testing them out shortly although, to discover a few of the options added since our first evaluation. They ship with software program model 15.0, so you will want to improve to fifteen.1.1 out of the field to benefit from new options corresponding to spatial audio and lossless music with Apple Music.

Photography by Jennifer Tuohy / The Verge