My HomePod is now a very expensive doorstop

A little less than three years ago, we hired a contractor to finish our basement, turning it from a makeshift plywood-floored storage room into a multimedia room. As part of the transition, I was finally able to move my record collection and turntable out of the living room, where my wife had said they made her feel like she was living in a 22-year-old bohemian’s apartment, and into the basement, where I could play them as loud and as long as I wanted.

But I still like to listen to music during dinner and when I’m doing dishes and other chores upstairs. So, in November 2020, I dropped $299 on an Apple HomePod speaker to replace the records and turntable. I chose the HomePod because we’ve been an Apple family. We all have iPhones or iPads as our main personal devices, and my digital music has been locked up on an old iMac since 2010.

The HomePod sounded great, working equally well across lots of different types of music — jazz, rock, hip-hop, ’80s dance hits, ambient — you name it. The bass was loud and the midrange clean. It sounded much better than various inexpensive Bluetooth speakers I’ve used over the years, and superior to the Sonos systems I’ve heard.

But the software and overall user experience was always buggy. It never liked my eclectic mix of digital files from different sources — I have a lot of tunes from ripped CDs and vinyl, as well as a handful of iTunes downloads and subsequent songs I’ve added to my collection from Apple Music, where we have a family subscription. It would often choke on songs that weren’t available on Apple Music. I speculate it was trying to stream everything from the cloud instead of pulling it directly from my phone via Bluetooth, and while I found a couple workarounds, they sometimes stopped working and the music would just seize up in the middle of a song. It was a little annoying, but it sounded so good and looked cool, a mysterious black cylinder in the middle of our living room, so we didn’t replace it.

A few nights…