Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that’s taken over our lives.
Feel that distortion.
Apple/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNETOn Friday, I did something I’d never done before.
I ordered an Apple product in advance.
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You see, I need to test this HomePod smart-speaking music machine and see whether its sound really is as Apple promises.
In a remarkable coincidence — timed, I suspect, more for Sunday’s Grammys than my sudden ordering fit — Apple released four HomePod ads on Saturday.
They’re all about the sound.
Indeed, they don’t really say anything much at all, other than “Order Now.” They also have the look of having been put together at the last minute.
I confess I didn’t stay up until midnight on Thursday to order.
I sauntered over to my laptop on Friday morning at 8:00 and was told a HomePod would be mine on Feb. 9, its official launch day.
Unfortunately, my preferred color of space gray was sold out, so I had to settle for the white, which was still available for ordering on Saturday morning.
My colleague David Carnoy suggests I’m going to need more than one, in order to achieve the full effect of Apple’s claimed sound superiority.
In its YouTube postings, Apple claims HomePod is: “A breakthrough speaker. The ultimate music authority. An intelligent home assistant.”
There’s something peculiarly honest about the way it downplays Siri in all this. She’s merely intelligent, not ultimate or even breakthrough.
Perhaps that’s why Apple believes I need four ads to convince me to buy a HomePod.
Logical positivists might say, however, that at least this is eight ads fewer than Amazon emitted to try to sell people a Fire TV at Christmas.
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Technically Literate: Original works of short fiction with unique perspectives on tech, exclusively on CNET.
