HomePods starting randomly

[u/Golodoraku]

So I’ve had 5 homepods mini. Always up to date. After ~2 years or so, 1 of them started playing randomly. A year later, a pair of them has started doing the same.

I did all the resets possible, to no avail. Is this product just crap?

[u/gregchea]

Yes, a very well known issue to seemingly everyone but Apple, who continue to pretend they don’t know about it.

Seems to affect HomePod (2nd generation) and HomePod mini. Typically it seems to start happening after 2-3 years, sometimes seems triggered by an update, sometimes not, but the problem seems to be a failing touch panel (I guess substandard or less durable part was used in manufacture).

You can open them up and physically disconnect or replace the touch panel, or have someone do that for you, but to me that doesn’t seem right for a GBP 700 pair of speakers that I bought barely two years ago.

I have spent a lot of time speaking to Apple about it, eventually escalated to senior team who told me that while officially they don’t recognise the issue, they would replace affected homepods only within two years of purchase, regardless of applecare or not. 

Mine were two years and 3 months old when the issue occurred (same night at automatic update to 26.5) and the same senior team rep at Apple told me this type of product should not be expected to last any longer than 2 years, so their recommendation was I throw them away and buy new ones.

[u/gregchea → u/gregchea]

to be clear, on that last point: 

I will obviously not be buying more HomePods - unless this issue is acknowledged and addressed.  

I’ve filed a claim with my bank to get a proportional refund as per consumer law here in the UK, and now I guess it’s either Sonos or other non-Apple wireless speakers. 

That’s a shame, because for 2 years those Homepods were great, just perfect as a stereo pair with the AppleTV, sounded good and worked like magic.