Apple’s $149 HomePod Mini 2 brings a faster processor, quieter Siri responses and a well-received green finish, but a promised Mac speaker feature failed to work in early hands-on testing. The smart speaker, announced at Apple’s Welcome Home event last month and released six years after the original, raises the entry price from the first generation’s $99 without upgrading its sound system.
The Mini 2 runs on Apple’s S10 chip, up from the S5, and adds Wi-Fi 6E support in place of Wi-Fi 4. In testing, Siri answered common requests in under three seconds, including playing a Taylor Swift song, reporting the World Series winner and controlling lights and shades, compared with waits of up to 10 seconds on the first-gen Mini. Harder questions still prompt Siri to offer web results on an iPhone, and Apple says the full Siri AI upgrade is coming later in a software update.
Siri also performs smart home actions with far less spoken confirmation than the first-gen model, which often replies with acknowledgments before carrying out a command. A new setting in the Home app lets users lock the top controls on all HomePods, old and new, addressing accidental touches. A Sound Glow feature matches the LEDs to album art, though it works only with Apple Music and Podcasts and is backward compatible with the first-gen Mini and second-gen HomePod.
The green color drew particular praise as the best of the new options, alongside pink, blue, black and white. The speaker’s audio hardware is unchanged, but two units paired in stereo delivered room-filling sound in an office setup.
The disappointment centered on the Mini 2’s ability to serve as a Mac’s default speaker through what Apple calls a responsive and persistent AirPlay connection. Despite using a Mac Mini M4 supporting Wi-Fi 6E, macOS 27.2 and HomePods on HomePod Software 27.2, the Sound pane offered no option to set a HomePod as the default output. The Minis connected only as regular AirPlay speakers, with occasional artifacting, drop-offs and lag on notification sounds, and the Mac reverted to its built-in speakers after restarts or when Siri was activated on a HomePod. A full reset did not resolve the issue, and Apple had not responded to requests for comment.
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