HomePod Gaining Handoff Support, AirPods Get Audio Sharing Feature

Fantastic! I can’t count the times I’ve been enjoying a playlist on my HomePod but have to go out and the only way to take it with me is to save the playlist, then open Music on my phone and find my place in the playlist.

Not only does handover fix this, the physical act of “picking up” or ‘dropping off” what’s playing by putting your iPhone near the HomePod is ingenious. This is pure Apple on display.

Now, where are all the sky is falling people who insisted that Apple was going to abandon and discontinue the HomePod just because they we’re putting Apple Music on other speakers?

As expected, Apple can strategically make Apple Music available everywhere to compete with Spotify while also offering their own premium, native solution to listening to music in an Apple type experience.

I’m fact, putting Apple Music on Amazon Echo will actually help sell HomePods. A lot of people have Echos already. Making Apple Music available there, keeps them on Apple Music rather than moving to Spotify if it were the only option. Eventually, those people will build brand loyalty to Apple Music and will want better sound and a native Apple Music experience.

I'm coming at from the perspective of my wife who also has her phone containing all of her music. If she has to go into the settings and select the homepod as an output device for airplay and then hit the play button she'll just blow a fuse. That makes the homepod just become an expensive and more cumbersome BlueTooth speaker.

That’s not how AirPlay works. That’s not at all how it works. You don’t have to go into settings to select your HomePod as a speaker.

Whenever you’re playing music, hit the AirPlay button in the playback controls and choose your HomePod. It’s also in Control Centre.

As for playing your own music, that requires iTunes Match. It’s a service to get your music into the cloud. If you purchase Match, you can convert your own library to listen to it anywhere like Apple Music, even if it’s not downloaded to your device.

To add on... I have a large music collection from years of ripping, collecting... just pony up the $15 MRC for a family subscription and let your music and choices curate new music into your rotation you wouldn’t have otherwise discovered.

You can’t just put one leg into this ecosystem - jump on in it’s worth it!

HomePods throughout the house to AirPods, Apple Watch out the door is amazing.

If he doesn’t care about any music other than the music he has, then Match is just $25 bucks per year. That’ll give him access to all of his own music anywhere, on all devices, including his HomePod that he’s complaining about.

It is a pointless battle because you don’t understand how things work. I mean, you thought that you had to go to Settings to change the speaker.

And you’ve made clear that you don’t know how iTunes Match works either. It first tries to match with a song in the existing iTunes library and if there isn’t a match, it uploads it to the cloud. I have songs that I recorded at concerts myself that I listen to on my HomePod.

What’s worse than not understanding something is being too stubborn to realize that you’re out of your depth and won’t listen to others trying to explain it to you.

To add on... I have a large music collection from years of ripping, collecting... just pony up the $15 MRC for a family subscription and let your music and choices curate new music into your rotation you wouldn’t have otherwise discovered.

You can’t just put one leg into this ecosystem - jump on in it’s worth it!

HomePods throughout the house to AirPods, Apple Watch out the door is amazing.