First things first, take a look at this Bloomberg article, which started a wave of discussion about alleged stumbling HomePod sales:
At first, it looked like the HomePod might be a hit. Pre-orders were strong, and in the last week of January the device grabbed about a third of the U.S. smart speaker market in unit sales, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence. But by the time HomePods arrived in stores, sales were tanking, says Slice principal analyst Ken Cassar. “Even when people had the ability to hear these things,” he says, “it still didn’t give Apple another spike.”
Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac, responds in this linked op-ed:
HomePod is a much more expensive speaker than its rivals, and is only useful for a particular slice of the market: those who own an iPhone and either have an Apple Music subscription or have all their music in iTunes and subscribe to iTunes Match. It’s not reasonable to expect sales of a $350 speaker with a limited market to rival those of a $50 device aimed at the mass-market.
Ben’s piece goes into much more detail, addressing the gloom and doom of the Bloomberg piece. Well reasoned, worth reading both.
I do think it is way too early to judge this market. Apple is in the premium space, Google Home and Amazon Echo are based in the commodity space. To me, the key to HomePod growth is Apple’s R&D investment in improving Siri intelligence. If Apple improves the Siri experience, they’ll automatically make HomePod more appealing.
I can’t imagine a more important Apple technology to invest in than Siri. Siri impacts every aspect of the Apple ecosystem and is immensely leverage-able. Siri is the rising tide that lifts all boats.
Seems to me that neither “optimism” nor “gloom and doom” are warranted for this product, considering how little time it’s been on sale.
I can say for a fact that HomePod sales in Canada are zero.
Ben is quite wrong — you don’t need AM or Match to use the HomePod. You can use it as a normal AirPlay endpoint, ie a wifi speaker, in exactly the same way people beam music to BT speakers. Beam your local music, spotify, pandora, whatever you want.
Why are people so dumb?
Got fed up with the reviews and went to the Apple Store to listen to the HomePod
It is certainly not worth the money.
Oh, and I see you linked to a Gurmana article. He’s the guy who makes a living reporting the leaks you abhor.
I’d like to think any judgement should be questioned until (potentially) the other shoe drops: perhaps an updated version of Siri at WWDC, which – even in beta – would alter the value proposition of the speaker considerably. There’s also been a delay in Dolby DTS decoding on the speakers, presumably for Airplay 2 so it can do proper 2-speaker stereo. I’d expect some kind of airplay endpoint that could make them a home cinema system for an AppleTV. Airplay 2 should be discussed at the dev meeting in some detail.
I think after WWDC, only then can we begin to judge.
Better Siri plus Spotify integration would sell this to me.
Ha. And they’ll be at least one if they ever go on sale…
Your use of AM here confused me so much for a second. 🙂 I’M DUMB TOO!