Gadgetory

hello welcome to home pod I am stupid expensive an to use me properly you need to pay for Apple music by special smart home devices that are home kick compatible and want to use the best virtual assistant in the world Siri hey that's me that's not gonna work for me let's change it your Apple fans and sometimes apologists talk about the ecosystem how it's the best thing since the last time the Lakers want a championship and a lot of ways that's true the ecosystem is incredible if you are all in inside of it if you get a phone call on your iPhone a little ring through on your iPad and your Mac Apple pay works across devices earpods sync across devices you've got iCloud Drive there's a huge list of ways Apple's ecosystem just works together if you have all those products and if you spend the money for all of those products but if you're missing a key component of that the ecosystem can feel broken so when everything works with Apple's ecosystem it's awesome I mean as I'm sitting here I've got an Apple watch on of God and iPhone sitting next to me I've got an iPad with some notes on it and if my phone rings while I'm filming this I'm going to have three devices that are going to ring and give me options answer it on whatever one is most convenient to me so there are a lot of reasons I think why Apple's relationship between hardware and software is so special and probably unique and the biggest one is its vertically oriented which means they make the hardware and they make the software they're in charge of the production for all of it and development of all of it so they have a better control over top to bottom that gives you the functionality that you just don't get with other manufacturers but and here's the big but if you love an iPhone and you love an iPad but you really want to have a PC laptop there's a big gap and what the ecosystem can do and a lot of people want to branch out maybe they like having an iPad but they don't want an iPhone one or maybe they really like you know the razor laptop or the surface line of laptops they don't want to get a MacBook Pro or spending the money then you're losing out on a lot of those awesome features that Apple can offer you and like traditionally it's been really tough to impossible sort of crack a hole Kinetico system you know to jailbreak so to speak your way in but occasionally and just sometimes get away in where you don't have to spend the money to get inside of Apple's walled garden but you still get a plant dance and do a little twirl and enjoy the best of apples ecosystem without paying the prices for apples charging to get into it so if there's one Apple product that's like the most Apple II of all the products it's gotta be the home pot if you like Siri and you subscribe to Apple music you've got a bunch of home capable devices you're going to absolutely love the home pod but if you use Spotify you don't like Siri then it becomes a really expensive speaker and that's about it all right so this is clearly like not a TLD dream desk but everything that's here is for a reason I am gonna do my best dr. Frankenstein oppression and I'm going to kind of hack a new brain into the home pod with the help of a Raspberry Pi essentially we're gonna get rid of the or at least add to the Siri functionality let us use an Amazon echo dot or even a Google home and while we're at it we're gonna make Spotify work hands-free with the home button so we've got a Raspberry Pi 3 here you don't need the most powerful Raspberry Pi most then we'll actually will work for this so we've got a couple of things plugged in but perhaps most important one we've got a dongle it's gonna give us a 3.5 millimeter headset jack we've loaded up some special software on here and willing to it down below how we did it it was really easy it probably took it about 10 minutes just loading some software on it very simple to follow on what this is gonna let us do is anything that we plug into the 3.5 millimeter headset jack is going to be airplay compatible so that'll let us use the echo dot instead of the hey this lady's name or any other assistant that we wanted to plug in like a Google home ID so now we're gonna interface with the Raspberry Pi and this is either going to look crazy simple or incredibly complicated but whatever camp you're in I promise anybody can do this this is just the UI for raspberry products hook a monitor up to it start left-hand corner there's gonna be a little icon it looks like a terminal and it's appropriately called terminal you got to put in a few codes so do CD space babble pod enter and then we'll do node space index dot JSON turn alright so now we are gonna go to the browser it's a little globe thing chromium-based in case you're wondering and we're gonna go to the IP address for the raspberry pi so in this case so it's pretty simple here so the top is the source so I've got USB audio cuz I've got that little dongle plugged in and then where I want to airplay to so this one here is called airplay office I can adjust volume here and pretty much good to go alright so as promised Alexa play music by Jo Barksdale on Spotify playing songs by Jo Barksdale from Spotify coming through on the home pod you guys can't be able to tell where you are but it is coming throughout the home pod look I can adjust the volume just louder all on the home pod rocking out to my boy Joe Barksdale so these are just like some examples you can really do anything that you can plug into a 3.5 headphone jack so if you got an old record player and you want to be able to airplay that you can do it sort of anything that again has a headphone jack you can make work a few caveats though keep it music only there's about a three-second delay so it's not gonna work if you want to airplay something with video so you would look like it was dubbed over the mouth wouldn't match the audio so music only this is an awesome solution that works well which is a minimal amount of of computer know-how so obviously this hack works there are some caveats of functionality but it's frustrating you have to go through these steps to change your default streaming music player to play on your home pod speaker and sort of that typify is Apple what works really well is all the Apple first-party services and every now and then the some grant access to something that's not made by them and that's really the beauty of what Android has been and I wish there was a happy middle ground where you have the functionality to use what you want and still get the best from Apple's experiences there are a lot of upsides with the Apple ecosystem now I talked about this in previous videos I love the default Photos app my 90 year old grandparents use an iPhone I can share pictures to a shared gallery they see it it shows up on their phone they could leave comments and they know how to use it that's a huge plus for me iMessage certainly something a lot of us in the u.s. love I know people outside of the US and we're whatsapp focused but that's a big deal it's nice to have it makes things easier for group chats it's a luxury that I've gotten myself used to so I obviously like what Apple is offering but there's a lot of areas for improvement giving away extra storage space on iCloud would be really nice to have or upping what the standard free tiers would be nice and I know this is probably pro competition but I would love Apple to offer their services on other OSS be able to have iMessage on Android would be awesome even though I know that's never gonna happen I'm sort of holding out hope I was to see little bits where Apple is becoming a bit more open select the Apple TV plus experiment is interesting to see Apple playing nice with other manufacturers and seeing airplay show up from other manufacturers is very interesting and I'm I'm wondering and maybe I'm hopeful that was kind of using it as a use case if we give up control of the hardware that our services are going to be used on that experience still going to be the same as if Apple made it themselves and I hope the answer is yes and I hope people are enjoying and going to enjoy using you know airplay and watching Apple TV plus content on non Apple devices so perhaps they will start doing that for other services and that's what I think we'll see a new direction for Apple when hacks like this won't be necessary when you sort of take your services with you no matter what platform you are using and still have access to those awesome things that Apple does give you so what Apple's gonna do next is kind of anybody's guess they're walled garden I mentioned that is incredible if you are all in if you're missing a product or you don't want to pay the money for a particular piece of that walled garden you're left with a degraded experience and my hope is that Apple fixes that lets you sort of experience that missing part with another manufacturer sort of make a solution yourself like we tried here and I'm hoping the next decade for Apple is a more open decade and I'm hoping that they let us get access to some of their awesome services without having to buy Apple products and maybe it's a pipe dream maybe it's us pie-in-the-sky wish but I'm hopeful I'm optimistic it's gonna be a very good next few years for Apple I hopefully play nice with other companies