Six years is an absurdly long time to wait for a revision of a speaker the size of a grapefruit, and yet here we are, staring at a preorder button for the HomePod Mini 2, which is basically Apple admitting the original was a clever hinge in search of a door. We have opinions about this, and they start here: the HomePod Mini 2 is the most interesting smart speaker Apple has ever made, not because of the hardware, which is fine, but because of the chip inside it and the timeline Apple has drawn around it. The S10 chip, borrowed from the Watch Series 10, is doing the heavy lifting here, and it is the same kind of quiet, sideways engineering that makes us suspect John Ternus is making Apple weird again and twelve new designs prove it is not just a headline we wrote but a genuine signal.
The speaker itself costs $149, preorders are open now, and it ships on October 30th. That is straightforward. What is not straightforward is the promise of Siri AI arriving via a future update, which means you are buying a speaker today that will not fully do its job until some unspecified tomorrow. This is the razor clam in the spec sheet. Everyone else will tell you about the four-speaker surround system with the new Apple TV 4K or the ability to serve as a Mac computer speaker over Wi-Fi 6E, and those are genuinely useful things, especially if you have already started building a smart display setup like the one in Apple finally has a smart display you can actually preorder for $299. But the real question is whether the S10 chip can actually deliver on the AI promise, or whether this is another case of hardware shipping before the software is ready to justify its existence.
We are cautiously optimistic because the S10 chip is not a toy. It debuted in a wrist computer that does fall detection and ECG readings, so it has some genuine processing chops for its size. But the HomePod Mini 2 is not a watch. It is a stationary speaker that needs to hear you from across a room, filter out the dishwasher, and not hallucinate your grocery list. If the Siri AI update arrives and works well, this becomes the most compelling smart speaker at this price point. If it arrives and is merely fine, you have spent $149 on a very nice Wi-Fi 6E endpoint that will play music and occasionally misunderstand you. That is not a disaster, but it is not the revolution the launch video wants you to believe in.
One concrete thing to watch: the surround sound integration with the new Apple TV 4K. Apple has never made a serious play for home theater audio with its smart speakers, and a four-speaker HomePod Mini 2 setup would be genuinely interesting if the software can handle spatial audio without a wired subwoofer. That is the detail we will be circling back on. That is the detail that will tell us whether this is a refined product or just a chip looking for a home. Stay spooty.