Apple today announced that HomePod pre-orders would being this Friday (January 26th) and would be available starting two week later on February 9th. Although, it appears not all of the features Apple mention at its keynote earlier this year will be ready for use when the HomePod launches.
If you were planning on buying more than one of Apple’s smart home speaker you’re going to have to wait a little longer to gain multi-room audio, one of HomePod’s highlighted features. A footnote reads on the HomePod’s webpage that “Coming this year in a free software update, users will be able to play music throughout the house with multi-room audio”.
HomePod is available in both a black and a white color and will be sold exclusively in the US, UK and Australia at launch, with Apple confirming that the device will rollout to France and Germany ‘in the spring’. – HomePod will be configured through the Home app on an iOS device running iOS 11.2.5 which is yet to be publicly released.