What is the most rickety / fragile part of your setup?

That’s impressive! I salute you! (And I hope it all doesn’t collapse!)

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The most fragile part is the person typing the message, me. So much is reliant on me alone.

Genuinely the Homepod Mini, which is possibly the worst gadget I’ve purchased in almost two decades and easily has a success rate of under 50%, whether we airplay music to it, ask it to set a timer, or turn on lights. Words cannot express our disdain for it.

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We have one in the bedroom along with two Philips Hue Color bulbs… “Hey Siri set the lights to red” One lamp changes, the other doesn’t. “Hey Siri turn off the lights” “I’m sorry, I can’t handle combined requests.” Asks again the exact same way and it works.

The worse is I think two times the Homepod has started blaring music in the middle of the night.

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The keyboard on my c. 2017 MacBook is the most ricket/fragile part of my setup.

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All of this is bad. Another undocumented issue is that the HomePod doesn’t like multiple networks in the house with different ghz bands. If, like us, you have a 5ghz and a 6ghz network with the same name, the HomePod regularly gets tripped up by this and refuses to connect — especially if the iPhone it wants to talk to is on a different “network.”

Siri is not good, and the HomePod’s wireless communication protocols are not up to snuff. Those two things combined make for a terrible product.

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I’ve had two HomePod minis. The first, which was controlling my lights, was bricked by an Apple update. Its replacement was doing a fair job until all my devices/setup in Apple Home disappeared.

I still play music through my original (big) HomePod. I don’t even try to use Siri with it or the mini anymore.

I have a couple

#1

Last year I tried using a pair of Homepods in stereo mode for my macbook’s default speakers. Every time my Macbook woke from sleep , the audio switched back to builtin speakers ,

I tried using Keyboard Maestro to automate switching the output on wake, but that only worked until the next OS update and hasn’t worked since.

#2
The second one is my system to load PS2 game images from HDD. To get it working , I use a combination of Parallels, Windows 11 Arm, my Playstation 2 console, and several Window 3.1-looking applications to create the images from game discs, get them onto the HDD in a format the Playstation can read, and the load and play the games.

If anything in that chain stops working, I’m in a bad place, lol.