My final original HomePod has died 🫡

I ended up with three OG HomePods and the one that was used the most (as it was in the kitchen) has died, joining its two siblings in the great beyond. All 3 got replaced with HomePod minis, which are pretty great.

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My deepest condolences for your loss.

Long live the HomePod minis.

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Your stories along with Marco’s served as strong warnings for every time I was tempted to buy one of the big ones :smiley:

I consider myself lucky I guess. I have two original HomePods that are still going strong. As @ismh said, the one in our kitchen is the workhorse. I moved the second one from the family room into the garage a couple of years ago and it’s doing fine. I have four other minis (also as @ismh said) that are doing great. When my originals go I plan to replace them with the new homepods. I am sorry to hear your last original died. :frowning:

Three working originals here, and two minis as well. I’m surprised and dismayed by your experience. Did they all break in the same way? Do you live in a smoggy area, or maybe smoke? Or maybe you have frequent brown-outs?

I’m struggling to imagine what would have gone wrong. We don’t smoke, but we heat with wood, and live on a dusty dirt road in an old farmhouse with two very shed-y cats, and have fairly frequent electricity problems – but even with all that, I’d still be quite upset if all of my HomePods stopped working.

My condolences…

Yeah, FWIW both of my OG HomePods are working just fine as a stereo pair. Impressive sounding to this day.

I never had confidence in the HomePods.
It was always a bad sign that even the power users were having trouble with it.
It’s crazy that a “premium” speaker stops working so soon.

On the other hand, I have an 11 year-old Sonos speaker that’s still going strong.
I can still stream music from all services, sound quality is great and Sonos even gave me a discount to upgrade to new speakers while keeping the old one (no trade-in).

The icing on the cake is that the speaker has a regular line-in jack and an ethernet port.
Even if the software stopped working today, I would still be able to play music from a direct attached device or a local network drive.
Now this is caring for the environment!

Apple usually is the best with hardware. The HomePod is an exception to this rule.

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We have three OG homepods, two as stereo pair in the living room and one in my office. Heavily used and have never had an issue with them.

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Likewise for me. No problems at all. I also have 8 HomePod Minis. If or when the OG HomePods stop working, I’ll probably replace them with new large ones. I like the better sound of the large HomePods in my living room. In fact, I’m listening to them as I write this. :notes:

I’m not much of a country music fan (I like some of it), but I was writing a blog article for Thanksgiving based on the song I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.

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I was thinking the same. If these ever go, I’ll need to replace them. Nothing sounds as good aside from the home theatre, and those speakers are otherwise occupied. :slight_smile:

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I also have an OG. Never a problem, still pounds.

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Condolences, man. I have one OG left. The hardware issues really caught me off guard; besides those, they were such a great set of speakers for the size and cost.

My lovely OG Home Pod has been great until about 4 months ago and literally overnight Siri started to have trouble both hearing and understanding what I was saying. It takes about 4 attempts to do anything.

I don’t mind technology coming to end of life as things like operating systems require more grunt, but this has p*ssed me off a bit, as I don’t see the reason why - has the the OS perhaps developed in size under the hood so much that the original A8 processor can’t deliver anymore? Or have the microphones just degraded, which isn’t something I am used to from Apple?

Only Apple is allowed to know this, that information is not meant for mere customers. :wink:

Sometimes it’s an update. That’s what killed my HomePod mini

Does it affect all owners?

The update? I could never get the HomePod mini to start up again. It was my home hub so I had to purchase a replacement.

No. Many, many users (myself included) have minis working just fine with the current audioOS.

My first gen HomePod is still going strong. Surprise you are having issues.

I use it mostly for musics and movies only.