The HomePod mini could be Apple’s secret weapon to expand HomeKit

Apple is making another attempt to build a smart home speaker with the new HomePod mini, a smaller, less expensive version of its original HomePod.

The original HomePod was a product that focused more on being a great speaker than being a great intelligent speaker. The HomePod mini takes the opposite approach – it’s not just another avenue for Apple to put Apple Music or Siri in your home. It’s a way for Apple to massively expand its HomeKit ecosystem to a much wider audience than ever before.

Sure, the HomePod mini will probably sound good, given it’s a $ 99 speaker that compares to the new Nest Audio and fourth-gen Echo, it has to. And having more avenues to push its subscription services to customers is a nice benefit for Apple. But its true potential lies in serving as the cheapest gateway to date for Apple’s smart home setup.

HomeKit is not a new part of Apple’s software setup – the company has offered the smart home platform since 2014, and there is an extensive list of products that work with it today (even if it isn’t as popular with manufacturers. from devices like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant).

But to get the most out of HomeKit, you don’t just need the right smart bulb or Wi-Fi thermostat. You also need a HomePod, Apple TV, or iPad to serve as a “home hub.” Having a hub device greatly expands what HomeKit can do, allowing you to control your smart home devices when not directly connected to your Wi-Fi network, invite guests to use smart home accessories in your home, and most important of all, create automated routines.

And at $ 99, the HomePod mini has dramatically removed the barrier to entry to access those features, which previously required a $ 179 Apple TV 4K, a $ 299 HomePod, or a $ 329 iPad. Not only that, too It makes using those HomeKit features more accessible by adding an always-on mic that can respond to smart home requests, for a third the price of Apple’s previous option. For the price of a HomePod, you can cover most of your home with HomePod mini speakers (Apple’s main new feature, Intercom, is pretty much designed for that scenario).

And there are many compelling reasons for wanting to use Apple’s smart home setup instead of Google or Amazon’s options. If you’re already an Apple user, HomeKit accessories are built into iOS at a native level, allowing you to access your lights or air conditioning directly from the iPhone’s Control Center menu, similar to turning your Wi-Fi on and off. -Fi or Bluetooth.

Device manufacturers also necessary to integrate your products into the Home app. Whether you like it or hate it, the app serves as a consolidated place for all of your products and means you shouldn’t have to deal with a third-party app, meaning your hardware could, in theory at least, still work even if the company that makes it stops supporting its own application.

There’s also the security aspect: Apple is extremely rigorous when it comes to granting its HomeKit seal of approval, even after it removed the requirement for a physical hardware authenticator. It still reviews devices and requires them to go through a series of Apple-designed tests as part of the certification process before they are allowed to work with HomeKit.

That’s not to say that Apple is exempt from privacy concerns regarding its smart speakers, of course. The company was found to have problems with human contractors listening to Siri recordings last year (along with Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft). But since then, Apple has rectified those problems by instituting new, more secure policies and changing Siri’s default behavior to only save recordings unless specifically agreed to by a user.

HomeKit puts another large chunk of its day-to-day technology within the Apple ecosystem, which is a huge win for Apple. This is because Apple relies on how well all of its products work together as an important selling point: The company’s basic argument for years has been “the more Apple products have, the better they all work.” And by getting more users to join HomeKit, Apple can expand that ecosystem to not just your computer, phone, or tablet, but your entire home. It’s arguably stickier than even your phone – once your entire home is committed to a specific platform, switching to something else is burdensome, expensive, and time-consuming.

The HomePod mini is not as good a speaker as the HomePod. But it might just be the smart speaker Apple needs to turn HomeKit from hobby to hit.