Apple’s HomePod Mini comes in three colors, here’s what they look like

Three colourful HomePod Minis have been introduced final month and went on sale this week, including yellow, orange, and blue choices to our good speaker house decor alternatives. I obtained to check out the trio of brilliant audio system, and should say I fairly like including a pop of shade to my good house.

Apple is a bit behind the ball right here; each Google and Amazon have had shade decisions for his or her good audio system for some time now. The Nest Minis are available coral and light-weight blue colours, and Amazon’s Echo audio system have blue, tiger orange, and Billie Eilish-beige choices. However as normal, Apple has gone the additional mile with its design right here, creating one thing fairly genuinely pleasant.

Every $99 HomePod Mini comes with an identical coloured field and a distinct shimmering, shimmying Mini brand, presumably mimicking the sounds your HomePod will ship courtesy of that Apple Music Voice subscription you’re planning to make use of it with (proper?).

The braided USB-C energy cable (which nonetheless can’t be eliminated) is color-coordinated with the speaker and is a pastel model of the primary occasion. The quantity up and down buttons on the white management plate completely match the Mini’s shade. Additionally — and that is very Apple — while you arrange the Mini utilizing your iPhone, the graphic that pops up matches the colour of the Mini you’re pairing (truly helpful when you find yourself establishing three completely different colours directly).

Talking of these colours, they’re much more spectacular in individual. Once they have been first introduced at Apple’s fall {hardware} occasion, my preliminary thought was they have been a bit underwhelming. Orange and yellow aren’t prime of thoughts in terms of inside design shade decisions, though they’re nice for the odd “pop” of shade. And the blue appeared so darkish as to not be that dissimilar to the prevailing darkish gray possibility. Additionally, the place have been the inexperienced and purple, Apple?

As soon as I obtained my palms on the audio system, although, and tried them out in a couple of completely different conditions round the home, I discovered I had loads of spots the place they might match proper in. Though, admittedly, it was primarily in my youngsters’s rooms.

The yellow may be very brilliant, positively lemon on the colour wheel, and the orange has a way more blood orange, reddish hue — nearer to coral than the fruit Florida is legendary for. Nonetheless, subsequent to a coral-colored Nest Mini, it pops a bit extra and there’s no trace of pink.

The blue is my favourite (doubtless as a result of I simply redid my kitchen and selected darkish blue cupboards, so it’s the excellent match there). It’s a deeply wealthy, nearly royal blue and actually fairly. The blue additionally doesn’t present as a lot shadow by way of the mesh, one thing that offers the brighter colours a little bit of a muddy look while you rise up shut.

One benefit of those colours, and the darkish gray possibility, over the white Mini, is they’re much less prone to begin greying as they accumulate mud and filth, one thing that’s been noticeable on the white model in my testing. Clearly, we want a particular Apple cleansing fabric for our HomePods.

The brand new HomePod Minis are similar in perform to the prevailing fashions. They work with Siri, can use your iPhone to make calls and ship messages, act as a hub in your HomeKit house, and set alarms and timers. We will probably be testing them out shortly although, to discover among the options added since our first assessment. They ship with software program model 15.0, so you will have to improve to fifteen.1.1 out of the field to benefit from new options equivalent to spatial audio and lossless music with Apple Music.

Pictures by Jennifer Tuohy / The Verge