My verdict, then, is that a pair of HomePods makes a very decent speaker system consistent with the $700 investment. It’s not up there with high-end HiFi, but as someone who’s reasonably fussy about audio quality, it’s good enough that I’m going to relocate the B&O speakers to the living room and stick with these for the winter garden.
Though a two-HomePod setup gives you a wider, more dimensional sound than you’d get from a single speaker, it doesn’t create a magical experience that’s far greater than the sum of the parts. In smaller rooms, especially, having two HomePods might even be overkill. Add to this the fact that HomePods are $349 apiece, with no price break if you buy two, and I doubt that these new features will do much to move more of the speakers off store shelves.
Chances are, you've heard of the headline features of AirPlay 2, namely multi-room audio and stereo pairing on the HomePod. That doesn't begin to scratch the surface of the true benefits of this impressive update.
Notably, there is now a substantially bigger streaming buffer. This helps reduce interruptions due to network issues. In our testing, this was very noticeable. Audio drops were down significantly from the original AirPlay.
Apple has launched a new internal division dedicated to music publishing and music publishers, MBW understands, led by respected exec Elena Segal.
[...]
MBW hears that the new music publishing team at Apple Music will contain sub-divisions including Operations, Commercial, Publisher Relations and A&R. (The latter refers to assisting the music industry with the development of key songwriters, rather than signing talent directly.)
A publishing deal may be a way for Apple to enter a sort of incubation arrangement with an artist. And there’s no reason such a relationship with Apple couldn’t lead to other artist development and promotional functions that are typically the domain of a record label.
New Export for Web features are designed to allow users to prepare and optimize images for the web with advanced compression techniques in just a few clicks. The Pixelmator team says these tools compress images to the smallest size possible without a loss of quality.
The idea is you may use Plex for iPad to catch up on videos and view photos with the big screen, and use Plex for iPhone to control music and podcasts. Now Plex can be organized specifically for each use.
The new macOS utility lets you sync Hue smart light colors and effects to games, video, and music playing from Mac.
Productivity is a curiously-named economic measure that essentially boils down to “amount of money you generate for your employer over time.” And because the promise of most technology is to enable people to do work faster, we should expect technology’s useful impact to be measurable, even with an (oversimplified) equation like Labor + Technology = Productivity.
But, something has clearly gone wrong. If we work backwards, we already know productivity is flat. And we are equally certain that technology has improved over the last twenty years. That leaves one possibility most people are reticent to ponder: maybe we’re literally getting less done every day. Reflecting on my own experience, I’d go a step further and ask, what if recent technological advances are actually decreasing our productivity?
The other day, I did 20,000 steps in a day. Well, it is just a nonsensical number, nothing really to do with healthy living or anything like that. But nevertheless, I felt just a little proud.
Then I read David Sedaris.
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Thanks for reading.