While Apple itself never sells current-gen products at reduced prices (not even on Christmas or Black Friday), third-party US retailers do sometimes offer substantial discounts on a variety of “iDevices” ranging from iPads to AirPods and Watches. That hardly ever includes HomePods, though, and on the rare occasions it does, your savings are generally pretty humble.
With that in mind, it’s certainly nice to see the second-gen “regular” HomePod priced at $269.99 right now at Best Buy in both white and “midnight” (read black) color options. That’s down from the $299.99 you’d normally have to pay for this Siri-powered bad boy, which doesn’t really equate to a colossal discount… by Google Nest or Amazon Echo standards.
For a 1-year-old Apple smart speaker with premium audio capabilities, that’s clearly a solid deal unlikely to last very long. Compared to a similarly high-end Echo Studio, for instance, the HomePod 2 is still pretty expensive, but if you’re a hardcore Apple fan, you’re probably used to paying a premium for the company’s latest and greatest gadgets.
At its core, a HomePod largely does the same things as an Echo or Nest Audio, just with Siri in control of your voice commands instead of Alexa or Google Assistant. You can use this device to play music in your living room (duh!), as well as manage your smart home, set reminders, alarms, and timers, search the web for answers to your most burning questions, and even control the temperature and humidity around you, all without ever lifting a finger.
With a high-excursion woofer, five beamforming tweeters, and Spatial Audio support, the Apple HomePod (2nd Gen) promises to get your heart pumping by playing the tunes you love in the best possible quality. It’s of course debatable if the audio performance is really superior to what you can get from, say, a Sonos Move 2, but what’s crystal clear is that you don’t have a lot of time to claim a discounted HomePod 2.
If you think this is the best smart speaker for you, now’s definitely the time to pull the trigger, and while we can’t really offer any guarantees, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll end up regretting your purchase.