HomePod as a Personal Apple Hub ⇥ macstories.net

Thoughtful article by Ryan Christoffel at MacStories:

HomePod succeeds as a music speaker, but it’s not the device we expected – at least not yet. Due to its arrival date more than three years after the birth of Alexa, we expected a smarter, more capable product. We expected the kind of product the HomePod should be: a smart speaker that’s heavy on the smarts. Apple nailed certain aspects with its 1.0: the design, sound quality, and setup are all excellent. But that’s not enough.

HomePod isn’t a bad product today, but it could become a great one.

How?

By becoming a true hub for all our Apple-centric needs.

I love the idea of the HomePod becoming a sort of “source of truth” in the home. It could know a lot more about each family member’s devices, and perhaps use the voice “fingerprint” created for “Hey Siri” to figure out which family member is using it. Due to Apple’s unique stance on user privacy, I would even feel comfortable with keeping my tailored Siri profile, if you will — my Siri history, things I usually request, knowledge about my particular music library, and so on — in iCloud, and synced between all my devices and a HomePod or two. That’s a big ask, but something like that would make it feel more complete — more of an Only Apple can do this kind of a product.