Apple Homepod vs Google Home Mini

This article is all about the Apple Homepod vs Google Home mini. So, in other words, this is a comparison of the Apple Homepod and the Google Home Mini. Now this comparison is going to have four different categories: the first is general inquiries, then smart-home capabilities, then sound quality and finally pricing and overall value.

If you want to learn more about using your Google Home to the fullest, you can visit my other articles about Tips on Using Google Home To Its Full Potential.

Apple Homepod vs Google Home Mini: General Inquiries

We’re going to start with general inquiries. These are the questions that you’re going to ask your smart speaker pretty much daily. They include weather calendar general questions and definitions and of course music.

So in terms of general inquiries, I started asking both the Apple Homepod and the Google Home Mini about what’s the weather today in order to test how they respond.

Google Home vs Apple Homepod

Questions About Weather

Now after questioning these two smart speakers about the weather today, I just have to point out that I really enjoy Siri’s voice. It sounds a lot more natural a lot more human-like than Google’s but that’s not that big of a deal. One thing I have noticed is that Google tends to give a lot of information and their answers take a lot longer. Siri likes to be concise and quick which I enjoy.

Apple Homepod vs Google Home Mini: Questions About Calendar

Apple Homepod (Siri)

After weather, one of the most common things I like to ask my smart speakers is what’s on my calendar today or to add things to my calendar as things come up throughout the day. This unfortunately is an area where currently the Apple Homepod has almost no standing. You can’t ask it any questions about your calendar. It will simply tell you it can’t do.

To give you an example, I tried asking Siri about what’s on my calendar for today, but Siri answered “I wish I could, but I can’t access your calendar here”. With Siri’s Response, I don’t see any use for this. You know, Apple Homepod (Siri) can access your text messages, your notes, your music library. So why on earth can it see your calendar.

Homepod Features

Google Home Mini

Google Home, on the other hand, is a lot better when it comes to calendar questions. I tried asking Google Home Mini about what’s on my calendar for today. And Google Home responded like this “alright Richard, today there’s only one thing on your calendar. It starts at 11:00 pm and the title is Blog Posting”.

The way Google Home Mini Responded to me is really awesome. So as you can see that’s really simple and that’s something that I do like to do a lot with my Google home speaker that’s I can’t do it all with my Apple Homepod right now which is unfortunate.

Google Home mini

Another Interesting Feature of Google Home

Another thing I’d like to mention for the Google Home is that you can ask it for a rundown of your day by simply asking it like, “hey Google tell me about my day” and it will tell you the daily rundown of your day which is basically the time of day, the weather, what’s on your calendar and then it will even read you news from sources that you can pick within the Google Home App.

And I think that’s really useful and that’s something that I like to do every morning as I wake up. I just say tell me about my day and it will tell me pretty much everything I need to know in a short clip. Then as I’m getting ready for work, it will tell me all the latest news that’s happening.

The Apple Homepod has no such feature. Although you can’t ask it questions like what time of day it is, what’s the weather like and you can even get it to read you the news from select sources, it can’t do that all at once and can’t tell you about your calendar.

Homepod vs Google Home Mini: Music Features

Homepod vs Google Home Mini: Music Features

As far as music goes, these two smart speakers can both play just about any song you want. The Google Home plays music from either YouTube music or google play music or Spotify which is useful. But if you have an Apple music subscription you can’t do that here.

The Apple Homepod, on the other hand of course, does work with Apple music but unfortunately that’s all that it works with. You can’t use this with Spotify or YouTube music or google play music or anything you can think of.

It’s strictly Apple music here. Which if you use Apple music, that’s fine; but if you don’t use Apple music and you use anything else, you’re going to have to stream over airplay to play it on the speaker which kind of sucks.

Homepod vs Google Home Mini: Smart Home Capabilities

The next category I’d like to talk about is smart home capabilities. Both of these do a lot in terms of smart home and both of them are really useful. They can do simple things like turning on and off your lights, changing the color if your light bulbs are compatible with that and of course change the temperature in your room by just having a thermostat that allows that.

One of the things I really like about the Apple Homepod is that it can be used as a hub for all of your smart devices. The thing is though everything will have to be compatible with home kit. Luckily most things are, but if it’s not compatible at home kit, it’s not compatible with the Homepod.

The Google home, on the other hand, is compatible with just about everything as long as it can be used with either Google assistant or IFTTT which is really useful. One thing I do have to give to the Homepod again here is speed.

Apple Homepod is fast, especially with all the smart home features that it has. When I ask it to change my lights, it happens almost immediately but when I ask the Google home to do those things, it usually takes a second or two. Of course it’ll get it done; but Homepod is fast.

Apple Homepod vs Google Home Mini: Sound Quality

Apple Homepod Sound Quality

Homepod Sound Quality

Now I’m going to discuss about sound quality and I’ll just tell you from personal experience. When I walked into the Apple store, I can tell you that the Homepod blew me away. Even in the crowd of people that were there at the Apple Store that are always at the Apple store.

Apple Homepod was set at a pretty low volume and it punched. The bases sounded amazing and even the high mids, all that stuff sounded great. It’s always really crisp and especially in a small room like mine it sounds amazing.

A cool thing about the Homepod as well is that, it can actually sense the room that you’re in and bounce sound off walls or objects so that it fills the entire room as opposed to just being around where the speaker is.

I can’t really measure how well that works but I know that it sounds amazing and it fills the entire room. I don’t really have anything to compare it to and you can’t turn the feature off so I don’t know what it’ll sound like without it, but it sounds amazing and that’s all I can really say.

Google Home Mini Sound Quality

Google Home Mini Sound Quality

The Google Home Mini on the other hand sounds terrible, but you have to look at it like this, Google Home Mini is tiny and Apple Homepod is huge, so it really just depends on what you’re looking for. But if you’re looking for sound quality out of the box, with the Google Home Mini, it’s just not there.

A few pluses that the Google Home Mini does have is support for multi-room audio which means, if you buy more than one of these, you can play music throughout your entire house. The Apple Homepod is adding that feature in the future but we don’t really know when and it doesn’t work now.

Another plus for the Google Home Mini is extensibility. Not only can you do multi-room audio and fill your entire house with sound, but if you already have a pretty good speaker system then you can just plug in a Google Chromecast Audio which plugs into the auxiliary port on your speaker system and you can set the Google Home Mini to always use that speaker as its main speaker, whether that be when it’s talking to you or of course music.

So really if you already have a good speaker system, this is definitely more bang for you, but if you don’t, the Homepod is where it’s at.

Overall Value

The last category I’m going to discuss here is pricing and overall value. Homepod and Google Home Mini vary in price extremely. But the thing is Apple only makes one smart speaker at the moment. Google Home has a lot of options for you.

So if you like the way that Google Home works, you don’t have to stick with a crappy speaker, you can upgrade to the regular Google Home which is a little bit more expensive, but has a much better speaker. Or if you’re looking for amazing sound quality similar to what you have on the Apple Homepod, you can upgrade to the Google Home Max.

Final Thought

I’ve already kind of mentioned it above but operating support between these two smart speakers are very different. The Google home can be used with either an Android phone or an iPhone and you’re not really losing all that many features if you do have an iPhone. You can still even make calls even if you don’t have an iPhone using this Google Home.

The Apple homepod, on the other hand, of course only works with Apple products. Homepod works only with iPhones, only with apple music, only with Apple calendars. One thing to keep in mind when thinking about value of both of these smart speakers is that hardware may stay the same but the software can change entirely. These smart speakers could have brand new features or support different things that they don’t do right now.

All that Apple has to do to add multi room support is just push the software update and all of a sudden the Apple homepod can do that. That’s the same thing for pretty much everything that I like more about the Google home. All of that stuff could come to Apple homepod if Apple wants it to. We just don’t know when or what they’re going to add.

If you’ve got mostly Apple products in your home right now, the Apple homepod may be a better value for you as you can use it with all of those products. And because things can be added in a simple software update the things that I like most about Google Home Mini could be added to Apple Homepod.

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Conclusion

So to sum up, the Google Home Mini is probably for you if you’re looking for something to use with Android or just a cheap little smart speaker to do simple things around your home without really thinking about sound quality or streaming a whole ton of music. But if you’re deep within the Apple ecosystem, so deep that you’re willing to expand it, the Apple Homepod is a great buy.

I have loved every minute of using Apple Homepod but there are some things that annoy me about it and those things could all change with a simple software update.

All right that’s everything about my thought on comparing Apple Homepod with Google Home Mini. If you like this article and would like to receive more of this directly in your inbox, don’t forget to subscribe to out free newsletter.

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