Apple has in a new breakthrough in sound and intelligence announced a new $299 HomePod smart speaker that has similar form factor to that of the original HomePod the company released in 2018.
The upgrade will have in its purview new features that would include support for the smart home standard Matter that gives the speaker the leverage to control compatible accessories, together with an upgraded S7 chip that first appeared in the Apple Watch Series 7. This second-generation Watch model will be able for purchase together with the HomePod Mini, a more miniature version of the speaker introduced in 2020. Beginning from today, the 18th of January 2023, the new HomePod will be available for order, with the shipping set to start by February 3, 2023.
Some of the features of the second-generation HomePod include a single woofer that is paired with five tweeters, a reduction of two from the seven the original model has. Apple  in a statement said the speaker can sense how it’s positioned in a room, and then adjust its sound and this would be dependent on whether it’s placed up against a wall or out in the middle of a space.  The new HomePod, just like the original has the capacity to have two speakers arranged into a stereo pair or even have them used as speakers for the Apple TV 4K.
The original HomePod started on a not so good footing as it unusually has a short lifespan for an Apple product. With the first generation speaker initially announced in 2017 with a planned December Ship date, the $349 smart speaker was later delayed to February 2018.  Even upon its 2018 release, Siri, the voice assistant of the HomePod could not keep up with the standards of Alexa and Google Assistant, with many reviewers criticizing how locked into Apple’s ecosystem the smart speaker was.  Due to bad reviews and criticisms, the HomePod was to later in 2019 have a $50 price cut, but this was not enough to increase its acceptability as it was eventually discontinued in 2021.
The cheaper HomePod Mini in its features has a support for a smart home protocol known as Thread, a very integral part of the Matter spec. The HomePod Mini just like the new HomePod can also function as a Matter smart home controller and Thread border route for the management of Matter devices across Thread, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet networks.
Apple says the second-generation HomePod will be available for purchase in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and 11 other markets.