The new smart speaker from Apple has arrived, but you have to travel to Japan or Europe to feed your nostalgia for music players from the eighties.

Apple hopes revamped HomePod can better compete with competitor smart speakers

Apple revealed a second generation HomePod last week. The price, $399 CAN, is the same as the original model that was released in 2018, but that was a difficult time to be pushing into the smart speaker market with a premium-priced device.

That was right when smart speakers were becoming popular, and there were multiple version of Amazon and Google’s lower-priced devices available in the following years.

Even if the HomePod sounded better, it was handcuffed by the higher price tag and a digital assistant in Siri that wasn’t as effective as Alexa or Google’s.

But neither Amazon nor Google have been as successful staying in hardware, and this may be a good time for Apple to plant a flag.

The new HomePod from Apple will be on shelves February 3, and is available to preorder now.

If you’re looking for a new music player Sony’s still making Walkmans

You can’t buy a Walkman in North America – yet – but if you’re traveling to Japan or Europe, Sony’s got slick dedicated music players that honour the eighties in the best possible way.

There are two of these Android devices available, the NW-A306 (46,000 yen, 399 euro), and the higher-end NW-ZX707 (104,500 yen, 745 euro) which has an amplifier built in and adds a quarter inch output in addition to the standard 3.5 mm headphone jack.