so super simple question do you go for the apple homepod mini or the google nest audio well i’ve tried both and i think i know the answer let’s get into it welcome back to marquez reviews thank you for subscribing if you already have just a very quick note i have created a private discord server and it’s going to be a place to talk about tech and this channel and anything you like basically it’s open at the moment i’m going to put a link in the description if you want to join it so now’s your chance to jump in get involved meet fellow geeks like me and get chatting so i’ve had the apple homepod mini for a while now and i’ve purposely left it a while to give you my full thoughts on it because i think these kind of things need a bit of time to bed in with your life you know they’re not just speakers they’re home assistants they do all sorts of clever stuff however my friend threw a bit of a spanner into the works recently and said have you tried the nest audio from google and i’ll be completely honest i hadn’t i have never owned a google home device i’ve used them in people’s offices
and other people’s homes but i’ve never had my own and yeah my mate got in touch and said look this is a really interesting product it’s cheaper than the home pod it sounds really good it’s got the google assistant built in which is better than siri i thought well let’s compare it against the home pod price wise they are incredibly close actually the homepod mini is 99 pounds the nest audio is at the moment it’s actually 79.99 but normally it is 89.99 however there’s a few things to bear in mind now the homepod mini at 99 pounds is i think shockingly good value from apple but that is taking into account the classic apple tax if you buy a phone from apple you pay more from it if you buy a laptop from apple you pay more for it and you can always get something better usually and cheaper elsewhere so apple tax is definitely a thing but they are one of the most successful companies in the world and they have a huge army of fans so 99 pounds for a smart speaker from apple is actually fantastic value just off the bat in that respect and actually if we look back at the history of the homepod and we go right back to the original great big home pod
which i’ve never owned i’ve heard it it sounds fantastic but i’ve never owned it because i could never justify spending what was once 319 pounds on a home speaker that included siri which was pretty terrible the homepod mini is following something which was largely regarded as a bit of a flop now the nest audio by comparison is yeah 10 pounds cheaper 20 pounds cheaper at the moment if you go and buy it now so i thought it best to look at the value that you get from these devices that’s the most important thing i’m going to look at four things i’m going to look at the design the sound the digital assistant which is obviously siri and the google assistant and then how it fits into your life design wise the homepod mini i love the design of it actually it’s this little kind of rugged ball it feels that strong you could throw it at the wall and not cause any damage to anything apart from the wall i wouldn’t suggest you try that but it does feel classic apple well made and just rugged and has this lovely kind of fabric mesh finish which is just again pleasing to hold if you pick it up on the rare occasion that you might do that and it just looks like a typical apple premium device there’s two options space gray and white again apple aren’t particularly adventurous with their colors these days but you know i think for a speaker that’s probably about as crazy as you want to get really and it has this kind of transparent surface on the top which the siri lights shine through whenever you bring siri into
action but basically it slots nicely into any room i’ve got it on my desk at the moment i’ve placed it in other areas of my house and it always looks good the nest audio by comparison is actually quite similar they’ve used the same kind of mesh fabric finish and it feels like a really tight device and that should be expected these are speakers they can’t have any flex in them otherwise they’ll vibrate and sound horrendous so it shouldn’t be of any surprise that both the nest audio and the homepod mini feel very tight and well made and yeah google has really done a good job i think with the nest audio i think what you like about the two in terms of the design is very much a personal press preference it’s an aesthetics thing it doesn’t have any impact really on the sound they both feel identically well made really only thing i’m going to say is the prevalence of these damn touch sensitive buttons that you get on devices like this these days so both the homepod mini and the nest audio they both have touch sensitive controls and you just have to brush your finger on them and they’ll either play pause or increase or decrease the volume that’s fine and it’s useful if you just need to tap it and get on with your life however if you pick up these devices which okay you won’t do that very often it’s very easy to accidentally press them i’m a much bigger fan of physical
mechanical buttons because you have much more control over when when you do when you don’t press them it’s a small gripe really and obviously these are designed to be used with your voice but it’s just worth mentioning so sound now sound is really important to me i love sound i love a good pair of headphones i love a good selling hi-fi and i love my 5.1 home cinema system however i am realistic with sound and if i buy a device that is as small as the homepod mini or as the nest audio i don’t have huge expectations for it now if we look on apple’s website they fascinate me so they waffle on about boundary pushing computational audio and 360 degree audio i understand what the 360 degree audio thing means it means it can you can put it in the room and it doesn’t matter where you put it in the room it’s going to sound good basically because it bounces things off walls and does clever stuff with the speakers that are in that little thing the nest audio interestingly by comparison uh just says that it has a woofer tweeter and tuning software now that’s exactly what the homepod has but google are less apple about it the net result for both of these devices is that they just sound pretty good you know i didn’t turn the homepod mini on for example like some reviewers have and sort of step back in amazement and kind of
shake my head about this incredible sound that was coming from it because it’s not that experience at all i have purchased something recently which is like that stay tuned make sure you subscribe i’ll be doing a little review of that in the new year but both the nest and the homepod mini sound pretty good they haven’t got deep bass they haven’t really got piercing highs you know they’re just fairly well balanced overall and they just sound like they should sound given their size now out of the two the homepod mini just pips it for me sound wise it’s a bit more refined the nest audio sounds a little bit boxy by that i mean it just sounds a bit a bit like it needs a bit of eq’ing out of the box whereas the homepod really doesn’t it sounds pretty good straight away google does give you plenty of options for eq that the nested audio and how to play with it and you can get it to sound pretty good actually but for me that’s a step you shouldn’t have to take what i do like about apple’s audio capabilities these days whether it be the home pod or their laptops or their ipads or iphones they always sound pretty good out of the box they they seem to get the eq pretty much spot on so again if you if you’re not fussed about that and you don’t care too much about what it sounds like or you don’t mind fiddling around with the eq both of these devices are going to give you the sound that you expect from such a small device there’s no noticeable distortion on both of them i’ve cranked them both up pretty loud and yeah it’s it’s a nice pleasing sound actually at high volumes however it’s not a high volume that’s gonna
allow you to rock your house during a house party you know you’re still gonna need something bigger for that if you want to create something more impressive but yeah they both sound as you’d expect them to sound they’re pretty good you know and i just think the homepod just pips it if you’re if you’re really into sound quality and this is very important to you the homepod is just just beyond the nest audio in that respect now the assistant the big thing about these speakers is the fact that they include assistance now this is a completely subjective thing i know people who love siri i know people who love alexa i know people who love the google assistant however just to give you some of my experience i still think personally that alexa is streets ahead i think if i ever had to choose between any of these assistants i would choose alexa alexa just seems to give me the responses i want she doesn’t tend to go too often to google to get what she needs i lose count the number of times i asked siri something and the response you get back is hmm here’s what i found on google that to me is just a failure immediately now just a quick thing on the capabilities these speakers have in terms of recognizing your voice they’re both fantastic the nest audio and the homepod mini will pick your voice up even when they’re playing music loud they will pick you up in a very noisy environment i’ve tested it pretty extensively and you’ve got nowhere is that they’re both on a level playing
field so it really does come down to the assistant you prefer and if you are in apple’s ecosystem siri makes sense however if you’re on the fence i’ll be honest i think the google assistant is slightly better when apple launched the homepod mini they had this massive play on the family capabilities and that included two things which i think are quite interesting one of them was the fact that it can recognize multiple voices so if you’re in a big family or just a couple of you in the house for example it will know which one you are when you start talking to it that’s useful from privacy’s perspective i know that it can read out text messages and that kind of thing i think that’s interesting i like the fact that it can be a device for everyone i think that’s far more interesting than something which is just uniquely tuned to your own voice the other thing the homepod mini offers is a thing called intercom and intercom is basically a feature where from any other apple device you can send a message to your homepod and it works brilliantly actually you can do it from your car and carplay you can do it obviously from your phone from your ipad anything you want that is apple made obviously and it’s yeah it’s genuinely a useful feature it’s one of those things that you think might be gimmicky at first but actually it’s genuinely handy and the nest audio by comparison doesn’t have those kind of features really so if the intercom
thing excites you the homepod mini is the one to go for now the other thing to bear in mind is handoff i thought this would be a bit gimmicky with the homepod mini however it really isn’t so basically what you can do with the homepod mini if you’re playing music on your phone or something on your phone you can basically motion your phone towards the home part it doesn’t really have to touch it i don’t think you just put it nearby and it will magically transfer whatever it is that’s playing on your home on your iphone to the home pod and when you first do it it’s one of those things that you think that is magic you know it’s classic apple magic and then it becomes increasingly useful and the way i use it for example there’s certain things again that the homepod doesn’t do so i can’t play in the uk bbc radio by asking hear me to do that instead i play it on my phone and this very quickly hand the phone over to the homepod and it transfers the audio to the speaker it’s genuinely useful really handy now you can do something similar with the nest audio but it relies on chromecast which is built into it so there’s a bit more fiddling around involved in that you need to use the app if you’re using an iphone you don’t invent with the with an android phone but it’s just a it’s a few
extra steps and i think the way that apple have implemented this handoff between the iphone and the homepod mini it’s just so intuitive it’s the most obvious way to do it it feels natural so yeah i was really impressed by that so the big question which one should you buy the homepod mini or the nest audio i think this comes down to two things i think the first one is the obvious thing which is the platform you prefer and the second thing is whether or not you use spotify so the first one platform are you an apple person yep get the homepod mini simple if you’re a google person get the nest audio if you use spotify something really important to bear in mind which is the fact that the homepod mini does not have spotify natively built in so by that i mean you can’t say hey play whatever and it will play whatever it is on spotify it doesn’t do that because well we don’t know why i won’t pontificate as to why that’s the case but basically you cannot have spotify playing natively on the homepod mini the way around that is as i mentioned earlier with the handoff feature is to play something on your phone and then on spotify and then hand it over by touching the phone near the homepod mini which again is a great feature but it would be a shame to keep doing that if you’re a spotify user it’s far easier to ask the device to play it for you now by comparison the nest audio has spotify compatibility straight out of the box so you just
connect it up to your spotify account and away you go so if you’re a spotify user i would get the nest audio depending which platform you use pick the speaker that best fits that platform it’s that simple because there’s no defining feature between these two in terms of design audio capabilities or if i’m honest even the the assistant you know as much as google assistant is is admittedly better than siri it’s not a huge amount in it if i’m completely honest it won’t make a massive difference to your everyday life it does seem to suggest that we’ve reached a point with a lot of these devices where the differentiating factors between the two brands are getting smaller and smaller it really does come down to which platform you prefer i’d love to be able to sit here and say the nest audio has got stonking sound of the homepod mini or the homepod mini is just so much better built than the nest audio or it has this feature which the nest audio does not have that just isn’t the case i think a little bit like smartphones these days we’ve kind of reached this precipice of
functionality and design and you know the people behind this these devices are so smart but they’re all so smart you know they’re all doing amazing things and they all copy each other and that’s what’s what happens i suppose we are down to the point now where it is the platform that matters and it’s little things like spotify integration that are going to swing your decision but yeah in summary they both sound like they should sound they will not blow you away but they sound perfectly good price wise the nest audio does pip it in fairness if you’re gonna buy lots of these then a nest audio setup is gonna cost you less overall however if you prefer alexa and you want a bigger speaker i would recommend hanging around and watching my review of the echo studio in the meantime as always thank you for watching thank you for subscribing remember to join me on discord and i will see you next time you
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