Design and Materials
The Google Home Speaker features a tensioned 3D-knit enclosure fabric made from recycled polyester and spandex, wrapped over a plastic housing without adhesive.
Compared to the Nest Mini, which uses significant adhesive to bond fabric to the speaker, and the Nest Audio, the new Home Speaker uses approximately 63% less material and 99% less adhesive.
The design allows for manufacturing rework: if a defect is found in either the fabric or plastic housing, the other part can still be used, reducing waste and cost.
The speaker is made of at least 37% recycled materials by weight, including metal, rare earth materials, and plastic. Packaging uses bamboo, molded fiber, and recycled newsprint.
Internal Components
The fabric is stretched over the plastic body, which has three cutouts likely for far-field microphones. The speaker includes a 58 mm full-range driver.
The mainboard contains a quad-core A55 processor (2.0 GHz), NPU, 1 GB of LPDDR4 RAM, and 4 GB of eMMC storage.
The included 30W USB-C adapter is a miniaturized version of Google’s 45W adapter and meets DOE Level VI, the highest available efficiency rating for power adapters.
Repairability
The USB-C cable is permanently attached to the Home Speaker, which may affect repairability.