HomePod vs Alexa

Back in October I yielded to my materialistic self and bought an Apple HomePod mini, with money coming from my second (ever!) paycheck.
Until a couple of days ago I was not entirely satisfied with it; it felt slower than my Alexa (Echo Dot 3rd gen), even though I put it closer to my wifi router ^[1]. I was even considering going back to the Apple Store and see whether they would take it back in exchange for money/credit/something else.

A little context: in September I started working in a little city south of Rome, and I now live alone in a rather small house. I have an Alexa in my kitchen / living room (it's all one space). When I say "I have" what I mean is "I stole"... from my father, but he never used it! I use it every day! Mainly to listen to music, but it is also useful to set timers while I'm cooking, or to look for recipes on the fly.
When I'm in my bedroom I can't hear the music unless I turn the volume "really" high, but this possibly means being a nuisance to my neighbours, and I can't stand it — the keyword here is "possibly": I don't know if the volume is really that high, nobody ever complained, but I still feel guilty nonetheless; that's how timid I am.
Also... I have to shout for Alexa to hear my commands from my bed, and I quickly grew tired of it.

It's a "rich" people's problem, I know, but I can't live without music. I simply can't, especially now that I live by myself! It's all so quiet...

Anyway, you can see why I decided a second smart speaker was necessary: one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom. To buy another another Alexa would've been the obvious and smart choice. However, as you might guess, I am not smart.
I decided to buy an HomePod because I was thinking about switching to Apple Music, and, let's face it, the latter works best — no, it only works well — with other Apple devices.

Apple Music vs Spotify

Now, as I said, I was disappointed by the HomePod. It felt slower and I had problems with AirPlay. Alexa, on the other hand, is always super fast, and Spotify is great at handling multiple devices: I can start playback on my phone and send it to the speaker, then open the computer app and change track or adjust the volume from there. It's seamless and it's great.
This all changed a couple of days ago, when I finally switched to Apple Music. Alexa is now almost useless because it doesn't find some of my playlists, and can't play any artist I saved. If I say "play Adele from my library" she starts playing it in the Amazon Music catalogue, instead of Apple Music ^[2].

This is a big issue. The library is the main reason why I prefer Apple Music over Spotify, and I need to be able to play from it exactly how I want.

The library

It's no secret that the main difference between the two services is this: Apple Music is all about artists and albums, Spotify is playlist oriented.

I have many playlist on Spotify, although there's only 3 I find myself still listening to: one contains films soundtracks, one is a giant pool of Italian songs, and the last one is the shared playlist I created with my girlfriend (... ex).
For years I've been feeding off the algorithm and the personal curated playlist that Spotify kept offering me, and I discovered a ton of great music. When I catch a song that I like, I put it into one of the playlist I have, so that I can listen to it again in the future. It makes sense. Problem is, I almost never explore the rest of the artist's work, thus I end up discovering new... content to consume, not "actual" music.
One notable exception to this rule is Emily King: Spotify suggested her once many years ago and now I'm a big fan. In 10 years of usage, she's the only one that broke trough! All the other artists I follow, I either already knew them, or I discovered them on the radio, or by talking to friends and family; never thanks to Spotify!

Now, at 25 years of age, I find myself having little patience to actively look for new music. I have my list of 20-30 favourite (more or less) artists, and I am content.

Have you ever tried listening to an artist on Spotify? It's a great example of horrible UX. Either you go for the "This is Adele" playlist, which only has the 50 most famous songs; or you press play on that big green button under the artist's name, which still ends up playing mostly only the famous songs, especially if shuffle is disabled.
That's not what I want! I want a random queue of ALL of Adele's songs...

Also, the artist page is always full of crap I'm not interested to (this is also true for Apple Music): remixes, re-releases, music videos, compilations... that's not for me.

Let's picture another, even worse scenario: I want to listen to Adele, same as before, but I really really don't like her debut album; how can I tell Spotify that? I can't.

I found a "solution" but it's ugly and doesn't work well with smart speakers: I create a playlist dedicated to Adele, and I add in it all of her albums/EPs/songs that I like.
Imagine having to do that for every single artist. It's a mess, and requires maintenance. Also, Alexa doesn't always understand that I want to play my Adele playlist, and gives me the "This is Adele" one instead.

On Apple Music I don't have any of these problems. I have my library. I can choose which albums to add, I can even select only specific songs from each album! And then, I can simply go into that artist's page and press Shuffle-Play to have a random queue of all the Adele's songs I want to listen to. It's great!
I almost never have to go on that artist's profile page, and scroll through all the music videos, interviews, remixes and re-releases... I have everything I need in my library.

Devices

The fact that my personal pc runs Linux is definitely a problem. There's no chance in hell it will ever support an Apple Music app like it does with Spotify.
This is not a tragedy, though. Since I started working, I only use this pc at home, and when at home I have both the iPhone and the HomePod at hand.
When I go back to my parents' house for the holidays I won't have the HomePod, but at the same time I wouldn't feel the need to listen to music from a speaker. I could always resort to the web player, if I happen not to have the phone with me.

UI

It shouldn't matter but... Spotify's UI sucks compared to Apple's. We can all agree on this.
Apple Music is cleaner, lighter, and more in tune with the rest of iOS (obviously).

Queue system

By the way, the only reason I never switched to Apple Music before was because of how badly they handled the "playing next" queue. With iOS 18 they finally fixed it, and it works just like Spotify now. There's nothing holding me back anymore.

In the end

I got side-tracked. This post turned into a comparison between music services when it was actually a rant about how slow my new (expensive!) smart speaker felt.

It was only slow when I tried listening to music; for every other request (alarms, reminders, weather), it always felt smooth.
Problem was, instead of asking Siri to play something, I used Shortcuts, so that I would have to utter less words to get the music started. For example, I have a shortcut named "Adele" which selects all songs where the artist's name is Adele and plays them shuffled. This means I can say "Hey Siri, Adele", and it would do just that, instead of having to say "Hey Siri, play Adele from my library" every time.

I don't know why, but shortcut queries are slower. Possibly because it has to fetch all songs and then creates the playing queue? Boh.

I measured the response times. It took him ~9 seconds to play the music I wanted with these shortcuts, and only ~5 with a regular query. But these numbers also include the time it takes me to utter the question:

In the end, even if it seems slower because I talk longer, a regular "play this music from the library" query gets the job done faster.
I decided to keep the speaker, it's not that slow tbf. Also, they probably wouldn't have taken it back at the store anyway.

The only reason I tried with Shortcuts is because that's how I use Alexa: I have Routines thanks to which I can say "Alexa, Adele" and it would play my Spotify playlist called "Adele" (where I collected every song I like from her) in random order.

Alexa is super fast, much faster than Siri. But it works like shit with Apple Music.
As an Apple user, this is just one of many moments where I encounter a "minor" inconvenience and end up sacrificing some ease of use to stick with their products. All I can do is shrug and think "Oh well, what a pity... but it's Apple, you know? What can I do?". I mean, sure, the infamous ecosystem is fantastic, but I’m bound to follow the path they have laid out — I can only use it the way they want me to.
There's not much freedom. And yet, I fear I'm locked in their ecosystem. I'm already thinking about getting another HomePod to replace Alexa in the kitchen, so that I will be able to play music simultaneously on both speakers and hear it comfortably in the entire house.
What have I become...

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1. Maybe too close, and that might the problem. ↩︎

2. I don't have an Amazon Music subscription so... I don't really know how that's possible. ↩︎