Upgrade Alert: HomePod Mini 2 and HomePod 2 Set to Become Default Mac Speakers

One of the more subtle points that came out during this week’s “Welcome Home” event is that Apple’s new HomePod mini 2 speakers are leveling up for Mac users — and the full-sized second-generation HomePod is coming along for the ride.

While it’s been possible for years to use virtually any HomePod as a speaker for your Mac via AirPlay, that was a cumbersome process that had more than a few limitations.

For one thing, macOS has never natively supported AirPlay 2 the way an iPhone or iPad does. As a result, streaming system audio to a HomePod (or any other AirPlay speaker) could be unbelievably laggy (certain key apps, like Apple Music and Apple TV, offer their own direct AirPlay 2 support, but the Core Audio level still only runs the original AirPlay protocol).

Secondly, even though Apple worked out a way to use stereo HomePod pairs in macOS 11.3, that was also a kludgy workaround — and it was still AirPlay under the hood. When the feature first arrived in early 2021, a lot of folks were saying you could use a pair of HomePods as “default” audio outputs, but that was only true in the sense that you could route all system audio to them. They otherwise still behave like AirPlay speakers, which means you end up needing to reconnect them every time you restart your Mac or wake it up from sleep.

What’s Changing?

Apple’s set-top box used to be in the same boat that the Mac is today. You could send audio from an Apple TV to a set of HomePods using AirPlay in 2018, but you had to deal with all the fun latency and manual reconnection issues that went along with that. Most folks didn’t bother.

However, when Apple rolled out HomePod Software 14.2, it finally allowed a pair of full-sized HomePods to act as default audio outputs for an Apple TV — and even provide an immersive virtual surround sound experience. The original HomePod mini gained that ability the following year in tvOS 15 and HomePod Software 15, although the smaller speakers could only be used as a stereo pair.

Now, with the release of the HomePod mini 2, Apple is finally taking a page out of that six-year-old Apple TV playbook and allowing a modern HomePod — or a stereo pair — to be used as actual default speakers for your Mac.

This suggests you’ll be able to configure your Mac to wirelessly send audio to modern HomePods as seamlessly as you would be able to do with a physically wired speaker. That means low latency and an effectively permanent connection.

Apple hasn’t said when this will roll out, but our best guess is that it will come along in macOS 27.2 and HomePod Software 27.2, which will likely arrive by the end of this month. The HomePod mini 2 is expected to ship with 27.2, and it will also undoubtedly be available as an upgrade for the rest of the HomePod family — even the original.

However, only the 2023 HomePod (2nd generation) and the HomePod mini 2 are getting the default speaker treatment. You’ll also need a compatible Mac to pull this off. That implies the proper version of macOS, but it’s also hardware-dependent.

We probably won’t see a support document for this until the software updates are released to the public, but Apple already gave it away in a footnote on the HomePod mini 2 product page:

Apple published a complete list in its support article titled Use Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 networks with Apple devices. In practical terms, that’s most Macs released in 2023 or later, with the notable exception of the 15-inch M2 MacBook Air.

Although there’s no word on why Wi-Fi 6E is a requirement, it could be due to the need to maintain a separate high-bandwidth Wi-Fi channel to communicate with the speakers. Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 support a higher-frequency 6 GHz channel that’s both cleaner and faster, but that notion is also kind of subverted by the fact that the full-sized 2023 HomePod only supports Wi-Fi 4.

If this works anything like it does with the Apple TV (which seems likely), your Mac will effectively be setting up an independent Wi-Fi “mesh” network with the pair of HomePods, which will disappear as independent AirPlay targets on your home network.

However, there’s also never been an Apple TV set-top box with Wi-Fi 6E, and home theater audio works even on the 2017 Apple TV 4K that only supported Wi-Fi 5 (and the new Apple TV 4K skips right past Wi-Fi 6E to Wi-Fi 7) — so the Mac implementation might be doing something a bit differently.

Either way, it doesn’t appear to have landed in the macOS 27.2 or HomePod Software 27.2 betas just yet, so we’ll have to wait and see how it actually works once it does show up. Still, it sounds quite promising for anyone who has ever been frustrated trying to set up a HomePod to work with their Mac.

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