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Comment by travbrack | Hacker News Reader

Homepod and Siri are like the Zune and Windows phone when compared to Alexa/Echo.

From what I've heard the Homepod had an amazing speaker but it was paired with a second-rate assistant (Siri) while most people that buy Alexa products care more about the assistant than it's included speaker.

You can buy better speakers than any of them at your local goodwill or pawn shop. The speaker isn't the product.

Wrong on both counts. No, you can't beat HomePod with just random speakers, and yes, the speaker emphatically IS the product with HomePod.

What? At $350 the Homepod offers nothing compelling. If you're in the market for a great speaker and have around $350 to spend, you aren't going to buy the Homepod. The Google Home Max is only $50 more and greatly superior in sound quality. The Sonos One is $150 less and about equal quality. Both also have much better assistants built in as an added bonus. If you don't care about the smart features, then you could go for some very high quality mid range speakers for that money. Hell, a set of dedicated 2.1 Logitech PC speakers like the z623 will blow the Homepod out of the water in terms of quality and they're doing that at $118 on Amazon. Throw in an Echo Dot or a Home Mini and you have better sound better smarts for less than two thirds the Homepod price.

Original poster was claiming that any "pawn shop" speakers will beat HomePod; that's what I was replying to.

Why is this downvoted? Seems obviously true. For the vast majority of people, for any product with speakers in it, even literally music systems, the least of their concerns is the quality of the actual speakers.

There might be a quality line below which people would notice and care but once you've passed it, they stop caring. Usually the top concern is looks, in this case it's probably the functionality of the assistant.

Siri is a much better assistant then Alexa. It’s a hands down better product with much better tech. Things I say to alexa have to be in an exact phrase, whereas Siri can pick up on multiple different phrases containing the same meaning

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