LATEST ADDITIONS

PRICE $349

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Superb sonics with extraordinary bass
Great build quality
AirPlay capable
Easy setup
Minus
Integrated music streaming restricted to Apple Music
No bluetooth
More limited smarts versus competition
No wired input for TV viewing

THE VERDICT
Apple has created the best-sounding small speaker we’ve heard to date, but its Apple-centricity and immaturity as a smart device may deter some buyers.

From conception through launch, the Apple HomePod speaker was six years in development. That’s a long time to bring to fruition something as ubiquitous and seemingly simplistic as a wireless tabletop speaker. If we account for the many poor examples of the breed, we can acknowledge that a truly excellent wireless speaker might require some extra time to create...but six years? The HomePod was so long in coming that the “smart speaker” with builtin voice assistant that it eventually became hadn’t yet been invented (by rival Amazon) when the project was begun. Which, I’m certain, delayed it even further.

Gayle Sanders, renowned speaker designer and cofounder of MartinLogan, today announced the launch of a new speaker company, Gayle Sanders Eikon.

The recent departure of Oppo from the new disc player landscape* has produced a flurry of “packaged media is dead” vs. “I want my video discs” chatter on the Web. It has also prompted me to ponder once again both sides of the question.

I don’t believe that Oppo’s decision has much to do with any sign that packaged media is likely to imminently disappear. Check the release schedules shown on a number of disc review sites (such as thedigitalbits.com) and you’ll see that dozens of titles are released each week. Some are new, some are re-releases, and many are unreleased movie titles dumped directly to video...

New research from Dallas-based Parks Associates reveals that the number of U.S. pay-TV households that subscribe to online video services through their pay-TV provider has more than doubled over the past year, going from 10 percent to 21 percent.