Apple’s HomePod is your best-sounding wireless speaker available, and you’ll be able to control it by voice using Apple’s virtual helper, Siri. However, the HomePod is well worth considering only if you are an iPhone owner and a contributor to Apple Music (or are willing to be)–don’t buy it if you want to keep streaming Spotify. It does lots of stuff right, but because it also has an extensive list of flaws, we don’t believe it’s the best smart speaker for the majority of people.

In its present condition, the HomePod is not the apparatus that Apple originally declared in 2017. Specifically it is missing a couple of marquee features, such as the capability to connect multiple speakers in a number of rooms. All in all, the HomePod is as versatile nor as cheap as most of its rivals, and it is not compatible with as many non-Apple devices. The HomePod is likely to be upgraded with more features and more compatibility, but Apple isn’t offering a timeline or roadmap for updates, so anyone purchasing a HomePod now is taking a gamble. Meanwhile, you should first understand specifically what the HomePod isn’t able to do. Anyone with experience using Alexa or Google Assistant will quickly find that many of their preferences and customs and rituals–listening into an online radio station, or Spotify, or Pandora, or even interacting with certain types of smart-home devices–may be radically different and so finally unsatisfactory. 1 additional thing: We quickly discovered through testing that the HomePod leaves outstanding white rings on unprotected timber, a potentially devastating problem for owners of good furniture. Although Apple insists that these marks are easily wiped away, it’s still something to take into account.