Dan Moren, Macworld:
Late last year, Apple announced that it would delay the promised release of its HomePod smart speaker to early 2018. It was a disappointment for those customers hoping to score one for the holiday season, but in an interview with Dutch site Bright.nl, Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller said Apple needed “more time to make it right.”
And:
A new report from Canalys says that the smart speaker market is forecast to spike this year, outpacing other technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality. In a rare moment of (for it) transparency, Amazon said it had sold tens of millions of Echo devices during the holidays. (Though many of those sales are likely for the low-cost devices that Apple won’t compete with.)
And:
By all accounts, the version of the HomePod shown to press during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last year was far from a fully functional prototype. Those to whom Apple gave access reportedly got a demonstration of the device’s audio quality, but not much beyond that.
Add to this mix, is a new survey (reported by CNBC) on the impact of smart speakers on people’s smartphone habits:
Two thirds of people who use digital voice assistants like the Amazon Echo or Google Home use their smartphones less often, according to a new survey published by tech consultancy Accenture.
The results suggest that the next big wave of consumer technology will be centered around these digital assistants, and may spell trouble for smartphone makers like Apple and Samsung— who lag behind Amazon and Google in this emerging space.
Here’s a link to that survey. Be sure to click Key Finding #1.
No matter what Apple ships as HomePod 1.0, I suspect there is already a team hard at work on HomePod 2.0, and perhaps on HomePod satellite products. I wouldn’t waste a second worrying about the impact of the smart speaker market on iPhone sales, nor about the first HomePod being the be-all and end-all of smart speakers.
Just as they did with Apple Watch, Apple will revise and tune, learning from every sale, with HomePod eventually landing in a sweet spot that makes money and extends the ecosystem for iPhone, Apple Watch, Apple Music, and Siri.