Bose Announces AirPlay 2-Equipped Portable Home Speaker

Thursday August 22, 2019 1:59 pm PDT by Juli Clover

Bose today announced the launch of a new speaker, the Bose Portable Home Speaker, which is designed to work with Apple's AirPlay 2 protocol.

The Bluetooth-enabled Portable Home Speaker is designed to be compact, and it's got a rather HomePod-like design with a cylindrical body that features speaker mesh at the bottom and an aluminum shell at the top to deliver 360 degree sound. It measures in at 7.5 inches high and 4 inches across.

bose1
The Portable Home Speaker has a handle so you can move it from room to room, and it weighs just 2.3 pounds. There's also a built-in battery with 12 hours of battery life, so it can go where you go. It has an IPX4 water resistance rating, so it can survive minor spills and splashes of rain.

Bose says that the Portable Home Speaker delivers deeper bass than any other portable speaker in its size. With Bluetooth, you can stream music from your phone or tablet while on the go, and while at home, you can use ‌AirPlay‌ 2, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa.

With ‌AirPlay‌ 2 support, you can play any music you like from an iOS device, and it can be paired up with other ‌AirPlay‌ 2-enabled speakers for a whole home audio experience. You can also pair it up with other Bose products using the Bose Music app.

Buttons on the top of the Portable Home Speaker allow manual control over power, volume, play/pause, and skipping tracks, plus there is a proprietary privacy-focused "mic-off" feature that disables power to the microphone so you can make sure you're not being recorded.

Inside, the speaker features three passive radiators, a high-excursion driver, and what Bose says is a proprietary deflector to distribute "clear, lifelike sound evenly in every direction."

Bose's new Portable Home Speaker is priced at $349, which is what Apple used to charge for the HomePod before dropping the price down to $299 earlier this year. It will be available for purchase starting on September 19.

Popular Stories

Here's When iOS 27 Rolls Out in Every Time Zone

Sunday September 13, 2026 3:00 am PDT by Eric Slivka

Apple is about to release iOS 27, which will finally deliver more advanced Siri AI capabilities as well as a variety of other refinements, improvements, and new features to iPhones. It's Apple's biggest software update of the year, and Apple announced at Wednesday's iPhone event that it will be releasing iOS 27 sometime tomorrow – Monday, September 14. iOS 27 won't be the only release on...

• 92 comments

T-Mobile to Charge $5 a Month for iOS 27 iPhone Handoff

Thursday September 10, 2026 3:58 pm PDT by Juli Clover

T-Mobile will charge customers $5 per month to use iPhone Handoff, an e-SIM feature that allows the same phone number to be used on two separate iPhones. iPhone Handoff requires carrier support, and at launch, only T-Mobile users in the U.S. and Deutsche Telekom users in Germany will be able to use it. T-Mobile says customers can use their number across two compatible iPhone models and...

• 154 comments

Apple Says iPhone 18 Pro Max Sold in U.S. Differs in One Way

Saturday September 12, 2026 3:27 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol

As noted by Nicolas Lellouche, who writes for the French tech website Numerama, Apple has updated its tech specs pages for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max to clarify which models are equipped with its new C2 cellular modem and where. Apple now says the iPhone 18 Pro has a C2 modem worldwide, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max uses the chip in every country except for the U.S. According...

• 121 comments

Top Rated Comments

Will.O.Bie

92 months ago

Yeah, they really thought about this when they designed this. Someone's gonna come up to the speaker and try to pour out some coffee only to find out that it's playing music instead. Brilliant!!

Score: 26 Votes (Like | Disagree)

LiveM

92 months ago

Just because it’s small (portable) doesn’t mean it has to have a handle. It looks like a bucket! :rolleyes:

Jony Ive would sack these designers.

Ive would’ve put the handle on the bottom.

Score: 14 Votes (Like | Disagree)

69Mustang

92 months ago

@jclo
Juli you kinda sorta skipped over the key features of this speaker. This is a WiFi portable speaker that happens to have BT capabilities. This quote is only partially right:

With Bluetooth, you can stream music from your phone or tablet while on the go, and while at home, you can use AirPlay 2, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa.

The ability to use Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are a function of the speaker's WiFi capabilities, not BT. The WiFi capabilities also allow users to stream music without the use of a phone or tablet.

Bose even describes the speaker as their first ever WiFi portable(rechargeable) speaker. BT is an ancillary function, not the primary.

Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)