This is the review comparison between two speakers of well-known brands i.e. Sonos and Apple. The Sonos Move and Apple HomePod both are amazing speakers with great sound quality and great features. There are day and night differences in their price, almost about $100. Both have different styling and design. To clear your confusion that which is best and suitable for you, go through this detailed review comparison, which will make it easy for you to decide.

Sonos Move	Apple HomePod
BUY NOW	BUY NOW
PROS	PROS
Wireless connection is reliable. The sound is open and loud. Great sound on indoors and outdoors. Great charging base. Effective Auto-true play. Great compatibility of Amazon Alexa ad Google Assistant. Integrates with other Sonos apps. IP56 weatherproof build. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth do have their support. Microphones work well.	Looks attractive and nice. Best and 360 degrees sound quality. High accuracy of Siri’s voice. Stylish, solid, and compact. It has a sleek design. Apple Music works well. Doesn’t emphasize bass too much. Even with music playing microphone picks your voice.
CONS	CONS
Pricey. aptX Bluetooth support is missing. Too heavy speakers. It cannot be used as rear cinema speakers. The handle is weak, cannot carry the speaker for long distances. Too big to travel with. Battery life is shorter.	Bluetooth streaming is missing. Voice controls only work with Apple Music. Siri is limited and isn’t all that helpful. Hard to tell different voices apart. Subscription for Apple music needed for a worthwhile experience.

SPECIFICATIONS:

Detail Review:

INTRODUCTION:

Sonos Move

The Sonos Move sounds great it works with any music service, it works with any voice assistant and it has a battery. It gives a 10-hour battery life. You can take this speaker anywhere you want. Sonos is one of the most compatible speakers on the market and you won’t get locked into anyone’s ecosystem. You can ask Google assistant to play youtube music, Spotify, Pandora, iheartradio, or, Deezer. You can ask Alexa to play apple music, amazon music, Spotify, Pandora, tune-in, and, Deezer.

Apple HomePod

Homepod is a speaker built for apple music and there’s no getting around it. Homepod doesn’t work with android devices because it can only be set up with an iPhone. It uses Siri as the voice assistant but you’re limited to just five different streaming services.  Siri can control any home kit device like Philips Hue, Wemo, August, or, Ecobee and adding these devices and setting up automation is super easy all inside the apple home app. With Homepod you can teach it multiple voices so you’ll know who in your household is speaking to it, this is great for personal requests like music, texting, or, your calendar. 

DESIGN: 

Sonos Move

Sonos Move looks great and it’s well built. It’s meant to be a wi-fi speaker when you’re home but it has Bluetooth and a battery for when you leave your house. It also gives you the freedom to move it with you as you change rooms without being tied to a wall. Sonos move has a white and a black polycarbonate finish that looks amazing. It weighs 6.6 pounds and it’s 9.4 inches tall, for a reference point it’s still smaller than Sonos 5 but it’s about twice the size of Sonos one. It has convenient touch controls right on the top. Sonos raced the battery for 11 hours of playtime, in the test you will get 10 hours at 40% Vol, 7 hours at 60% Vol, and 4 and a half hours at 80% Vol.

Sonos move has a USB-C port on the back for charging but it also comes with a dock so that your Sonos move is always charged and ready to go. You can switch to Bluetooth mode by just pressing the button on the back and it switches seamlessly. It has an ip56 rating and according to Sonos, it’ll withstand falls, bumps, rain, and, moisture, dust, and dirt, UV, and, extreme temperatures. There’s only one annoyance that I find with the design and that’s that there’s no clear indicator if google or Alexa are listening to you and that’s why they created that annoying chime sound.

Apple HomePod

Homepod looks great and it’s the perfect size speaker but it requires constant power and wi-fi. Homepod comes in white and space gray and it’s made of a squishy mesh material. It’s 7 inches high, 6 inches around, and, about 5 and a half pounds. It has colored led lights on the top to let you know when it’s listening. It doesn’t really matter, but the power cord is made of the same mesh material that the Homepod is and it looks it feels great.

If I were to do best power cord rankings the Homepod would definitely rank first and due to the mesh material Homepod is harder to clean than most other speakers, you can’t easily wipe something off and dust can get inside of it. It doesn’t have Bluetooth but because it’s an indoor speaker wi-fi streaming is better anyway, so that’s not really an issue.

FEATURES:

Sonos Move

Sonos works well with android and ios. You get to pick your favorite music service and you get to pick between Alexa or google for your voice assistant. You can play most mainstream music services right inside the Sonos app but you usually can open up your preferred music app and play music right inside there and then send it to your speaker. IOS users can use airplay, all you need to do is use a regular streaming app to play music and then click on the triangle icon at the bottom of the screen and then send it to your Sonos speaker.

You can cast the Sonos from amazon music or pandora by just tapping on the cast button. If you’re a Spotify user the combination of Spotify and Sonos is just too good to pass up, the stream is flawless, but the best part is that the stream isn’t dependent on your phone being close to the speaker, you can go wherever you want and the music will keep playing. If you just want to stay in the Sonos app that’s great too. My friends and I have been loading up the universal queue for six years now it gives everyone on your network, controls the queue, and, controls the music it’s a lot of fun.

With Sonos during the setup, you get to pick between Alexa or google as your voice assistant but you can change it at any time and the assistants work almost as well as a native google or amazon device. The downside is that the mics and hearing aren’t as strong as Homepod and you’ll lose out on a lot of tight apple ecosystem integration. Sonos has other issues with the smart assistants too, the setup isn’t flawless and you’ll have to use the Sonos app alongside the google home app or the Alexa app. You can’t make phone calls or access your texts. The mics aren’t bad but they have nothing on Homepod. Sonos plays an irritating chime sound whenever you initiate the wake word and this chime interrupts you as you’re trying to ask a command. You can disable the chime in the Sonos app but then you don’t have a clear indicator if the smart assistant heard you or not because there’s only a tiny white led light on the top.

The final downside is that google and Alexa both have voice match technology but only google works on Sonos. This means you can set up voices for multiple people in your household so that their music will play when they’re talking. The Alexa integration with Sonos is a lot better than it was when it was first released but the Alexa wake word is still overly sensitive and it can’t be changed to something else like you can with a native echo device. If I wanted to use a voice assistant on Sonos’s move I would definitely choose google assistant because the wake word is a lot less sensitive.

Apple HomePod

 You can airplay any music service from your iPhone but airplay brings occasional music cutouts a lag when skipping songs and just overall Siri confusion. There are just two ways to listen to music on homepod you can ask Siri to control apple music, podcast, iheartradio, radio.com, and, tune in. You can airplay any music service to your Homepod. You can use airplay on Homepod all the time with Spotify and youtube but the connection is just not as strong as we expect it to be. Because Siri has access to your phone you can send receive and read i-messages right on Homepod.

Homepod’s voice recognition and understanding are unparalleled. Siri can understand your commands while speaking in a normal voice with the music on a hundred percent volume and if you’re not listening to music you can whisper and it’ll still hear you. Siri will perform any apple music task flawlessly and it usually does well with home kit smart home tasks but if you’re trying to do anything else it’s rough and the most annoying part is that Siri knows exactly what you’re asking but it doesn’t know what to do with the information that you provided. 

The issues that Siri has is it isn’t good enough, don’t bother asking any question that you would ever ask a search engine because it won’t know Siri frequently says, sorry, I can’t do that task on Homepod which is fine but it will never hands off that task to your watch or your phone, so you will be just left empty-handed and the worst part about Siri is that it’s gotten worse over the two years that I’ve owned it, two years ago you could control your smart lock, your thermostat, and, your lights with 99 accuracies but now there are times when you will ask to turn off a set of lights and Siri responds sorry, I don’t see that device set up in the Home app and I don’t have any answers of why it does that I’ve asked the same exact command thousands of times without issues but now sometimes it just doesn’t work.

Lastly, Siri becomes a mess when you add extra home pods, at one point I had three home pods in the house and it became chaos for example when I had a timer going off in the kitchen and I asked the kitchen home pod to turn off the timer the Homepod in the bedroom picked it up and tried to turn off the timer in the bedroom well there was no timer in the bedroom, so my timer in the kitchen just keeps going off that’s not efficient. Homepod is definitely not the answer for those who’ve already bought smart home gear that’s not home kit compatible.

SOUND QUALITY:

Sonos Move

Sonos Move is outdone by Homepod’s cleaner base but when it’s not sided by side with Homepod I don’t think you’ll ever be disappointed by the sound that comes out of Sonos move. Sonos move has two class-D amplifiers and one mid-woofer and one down-firing tweeter. Sonos Move has auto true play, which means that the sound will adjust to its surroundings. When you move the speaker and then set it back down you can actually hear the sound adjusting in real-time, it takes about a full minute for the sound to fully calibrate and adjust properly.

Sonos move adjusts to its surroundings well but not quite as well as Homepod because it’s not omnidirectional the speaker’s face forward, rather than all around you. Sonos Move stays well balanced, has crisp vocals and, has plenty of basses. The sound starts to degrade at like 85 percent volume but that’s still louder than Homepod at its max. And for comparison Sonos 5 beats Sonos move and a landslide because it just gets way better with volume. Sonos 1 will give you the same sound clarity as Sonos Move just with less volume and less bass.

Apple HomePod

There is no better sounding speaker of this size than Homepod. It automatically calibrates the sound based on the surroundings of the room. It has deep bass with crisp vocals and it can handle any type of music that you throw at it and the best part is that Homepod’s signature sound is preserved at any volume level. Homepod has a 7 tweeter array and a 6 microphone array. Homepod is basically a computer because of the AA processing chip, the same one that you’ll find in the iPhone 6. Homepod takes the data that it gets from its microphones and makes a real-time model of your room and after a few minutes of playing music Homepod will calibrate your speaker perfectly. Usually audio distorts on speakers when you go past a certain level of volume but Homepod sounds lifelike and excellent at every volume level.

Interestingly HomePod has a really unique sound at low volume levels, you still get bass and it still sounds great even at just 10% volume. With the volume at a high level and your eyes closed, it can be tough to tell where Homepod is playing because it does such a good job at calibrating. Compared to Sonos Move, Homepod’s defining sound difference is its bass, Sonos Move has a lot of basses but Homepod is so much cleaner.

WHICH ONE IS WORTH BUYING?

Get Sonos Move if you don’t want to be locked into apple’s ecosystem or you just want to bring a speaker with you when you leave the house. Sono’s move doesn’t sound as good as Homepod but it still sounds great especially when it’s not right next to Homepod. Get Homepod, if you want the best apple music experience and you’re fine with keeping your speaker inside. You can listen to any music service that you want with airplay but it’s not perfect, Siri struggles but it still works great with apple music and any home kit task. The Homepod is the better sounding speaker overall because it has a smoother base plus it has better apple integration but I only recommend it to apple music users.

The Sonos Move is worth $399, while Apple HomePod is worth $299. So, Sonos Move is expensive than HomePod. If Your budget is low and you are an android user, go for Sonos Move. If your budget is high and you are an Apple user, go for Apple HomePod.

Expert Reviews of Sonos Move:

By theguardian 
The Sonos Move is an excellent, smart, great-sounding speaker that is truly wireless. Packing wifi and Bluetooth, a 10-hour battery, easy charging, a durable case, weather resistance and loud, punchy sound, you could take this portable powerhouse…

By CGM 
With the Move, Sonos has built one of the best portable speaker systems I have ever used, and while it is pricey, it is well worth the cost for anyone that demands quality…

By techgearlab
The Sonos Move maintains the company’s reputation for great sound and seamless multi-speaker management, while adding the portability of battery power and the simplicity of a Bluetooth connection. If you ever wished you could move one of your Sonos…

By TheStraitsTimes
It sounds almost unbelievable that the Sonos Move is the audio firm’s first portable speaker. It is also Sonos’ first Bluetooth speaker, though it still supports Sonos’ Wi-Fi-based system, which lets users group and control multiple speakers at the same…

By techguide
The versatile Sonos Move speaker offers the best of both worlds – an elegant wi-fi speaker that fit seamlessly into the Sonos ecosystem and a powerful companion when you want to take your music with you.Related PostsBose announces new Portable Home…

Expert Reviews of Apple HomePod:

By TechRadar
With the Apple HomePod, we’re really reviewing two things at once: a premium speaker and a smart home hub. In the former category, the HomePod is excellent, with amazing sound and incredibly intuitive set-up. But in the latter Siri is only middling in its implementation, and the fact that you’re not able to break out of the Apple ecosystem for many key functions also rankles…

By techadvisor
The HomePod is Apple’s smart speaker that’s controlled using Siri and is designed primarily for high-quality music playback. It launched back in February 2018 with the promise of mutiroom and stereo playback in a future iOS update. That has now arrived…

By Expert Reviews
That doesn’t mean the Apple HomePod is a terrible product. Far from it. It’s a stunning example of how engineering and technology can be put to use in new and exciting ways, to improve the way small speakers sound, no matter where you put them.In fact,…

By CNET Australia 
Apple’s HomePod doesn’t match the features offered on Alexa and Google Assistant speakers. But if you’re an iPhone user who prizes sound quality above all, you should seriously consider this…

By cnet
Apple’s HomePod doesn’t match the features offered on Alexa and Google Assistant speakers. But if you’re an iPhone user who prizes sound quality above all, you should seriously consider this…