Apple Unveils HomePod Mini 2 at $149 With Siri AI Upgrade Coming Later

Apple introduced the second-generation HomePod mini at a New York event Monday, pricing the compact smart speaker at $149 — a 50% increase over its predecessor — while promising a future software update that will bring the company’s reworked Siri assistant to the device.

The speaker, available for pre-order in five colors with in-store sales starting Oct. 30, looks nearly identical to the 2020 original. The changes are almost entirely internal: an S10 silicon chip replaces the S5, enabling computational audio features that adjust dynamic range, vocal clarity and spatial balance in real time. A new top-mounted lighting system called Sound Glow pulses in sync with playback and shifts color to match album art.

But the headline feature isn’t ready at launch. Apple says a future over-the-air update will add support for the redesigned Siri, which the company describes as “profoundly more capable” with personal context awareness and broader knowledge. The rollout will reach the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, Singapore and South Africa — notably excluding the European Union, where Apple Intelligence features remain delayed by regulatory scrutiny.

The timing underscores Apple’s broader smart home push. The HomePod mini 2 arrives alongside a new Apple TV 4K, a HomeView hub, and first-party cameras, locks and thermostats under the “Apple Home” branding. All run on Thread and Matter, the industry standards Apple helped develop, allowing the speakers to form a mesh network of up to four units for multi-room audio without a separate bridge.

Voice recognition now supports up to six household members, each able to access their own messages, calendars and timers when authorized. Paired with an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone or iPad, the speaker can pull a recipe from an email, add ingredients to a reminders list, or locate a song a friend recommended in Messages — all while music continues playing.

The price jump from $99 to $149 positions the mini above Amazon’s Echo Dot ($50) and Google’s Nest Audio ($100), but below the full-size HomePod ($299). Analysts say the increase reflects the S10 chip’s cost and Apple’s bet that on-device AI processing will become a key differentiator as assistants grow more capable.

Apple has not specified when the Siri update will arrive, saying only that it will come “in the future.” The original HomePod mini waited nearly a year for lossless audio and temperature/humidity sensing features that were announced at launch but disabled in hardware.