Today is HomePod launch day in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, and as promised, the speaker is now on display and available to purchase at most of Apple's retail stores in each of those countries.
HomePod has already received rave reviews for its sound quality from both the media and early adopters, but customers who prefer their own listening demo can now visit one of Apple's stores to hear it for themselves. Of course, customers can also take advantage of Apple's 14-day return policy and try it at home.
Most if not all of Apple's retail locations currently have plentiful stock of the speaker in both Space Gray and White, but we recommend calling ahead before making the trip. To check availability in your area: go to the HomePod order page, click on the link under the "Pickup" section, and enter your ZIP or postal code.
HomePod orders placed online today are estimated for delivery by Tuesday or Wednesday of next week, so if you didn't pre-order the speaker, visiting an Apple Store is the only option to get one in your hands this weekend. Some resellers like Best Buy may also have limited in-store availability.
Meanwhile, deliveries are beginning to arrive to customers who did pre-order the HomePod a few weeks ago. If you've received yours already, be sure to share your thoughts in the MacRumors discussion forums.
Thursday January 23, 2025 6:41 am PST by Joe Rossignol
iOS 18.3 should be released to the public next week, following beta testing since mid-December. While the software update is a relatively minor one, it still includes a handful of new features, changes, and bug fixes for iPhones.
Below, we recap everything new in iOS 18.3.
Notification Summary Changes
Examples of inaccurate Apple Intelligence notification summaries
Apple Intelligence...
Friday January 24, 2025 1:55 am PST by Tim Hardwick
Apple is set to release iOS 18.3 next week, bringing further refinements to Apple Intelligence features, a couple of neat new capabilities to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 devices, and bug fixes.
While not quite as packed with new features as Apple's preceding iOS 18 point releases, iOS 18.3 still introduces capabilities that aim to make your iPhone smarter and more intuitive. Below, we've...
Friday January 24, 2025 8:16 am PST by Joe Rossignol
iOS 18.3 is expected to be widely released next week, and that means the first iOS 18.4 beta for iPhones should be just around the corner.
Apple has previously implied that iOS 18.4 will be released in April, as that is when it promised to make Apple Intelligence available in even more languages.
Below, we outline what to expect from iOS 18.4 so far.
Apple Intelligence for Siri
Siri ...
Thursday January 23, 2025 7:32 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Walmart still does not accept Apple Pay or other NFC payments at its more than 4,600 stores across the U.S., and it stood firm on its reasoning for that today.
A spokesperson for Walmart today informed MacRumors that its position on contactless payments has not changed since we last reached out about the matter in 2022. The big-box retailer said it remains focused on its own convenient...
Wednesday January 22, 2025 6:01 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
A new Apple TV is expected to be released later this year. In this article, we recap rumored features and changes for the device.
The next Apple TV will be equipped with Apple's own combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. He said the chip supports Wi-Fi 6E, which would be an upgrade over the current Apple TV's standard Wi-Fi 6 support. Wi-Fi 6E extends the...
Tuesday January 21, 2025 4:31 pm PST by Juli Clover
Apple provided developers and public beta testers with the release candidate version of iOS 18.3 today, and with it comes release notes confirming what's new. While we knew about several of the features that are in the update, there are some lesser known tweaks and bug fixes.
The update adds new Visual Intelligence features for iPhone 16 models, it tweaks Notification summaries on all...
Friday January 24, 2025 9:09 am PST by Juli Clover
The upcoming iPhone 17 models that Apple plans to release this year will not feature a smaller Dynamic Island, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said today.
On social media, he said that he is expecting the size of the Dynamic Island to remain "largely unchanged" across the iPhone 17 lineup. His statement is contrary to prior rumors that we've heard about planned changes for the iPhone 17 models.
...
Saturday January 25, 2025 5:07 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple's retail stores will be rolling out "merchandise/floor marketing updates" next week, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Gurman did not explicitly say if the store updates are related to any upcoming product announcements, but he did mention that next week is around the time that Apple rolls out its annual Black Unity watch band for the Apple Watch.
In each of the past four years, ...
Thursday January 23, 2025 2:48 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
It's also time for Apple's first product announcement of the year.
Last year, Apple said it would be launching Powerbeats Pro 2 in 2025, and the wireless earbuds are expected to launch very soon.
Powerbeats Pro 2 images found in iOS 18 code
In his Power On newsletter last weekend, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said the Powerbeats Pro 2 are "due imminently." In addition to Apple filing the...
I can't wait until Big Brown pulls up in front of my house and hands the HomePod to me later today!
In the meantime, in spite of the HomePod receiving rave reviews, I'm sure the haters that love to hang out in these front page articles will be lining up to make their comments...in fact, it has already begun!
I just picked up my pre-order unit at the Stanford Apple Store.
It was a pretty cool experience. Being close to Cupertino, they had the HomePod technical development staff at the store. As an engineer and being very interested in adaptive beamforming (I used to work in that area in another domain) I was able to find and talk to the engineer in charge of the beamforming aspect of HomePod for 15 minutes or so, and came away super impressed.
People make WAAAAAY to much of availability. It's a pointless metric by itself. It's so silly that people use it as a basis to claim a product is a hit or dud or being held back to gin up demand or whatever. No, you cannot infer anything by availability or unavailable alone a bubble. Sorry.
