TALKING TECH

Will Apple’s HomePod put it back on top in the audio game it dominated for years?

Duncan Bell offers an alternative viewpoint on Apple’s new kid on the block

Apple doesn’t even need to make an audio product sound great to conquer a market

When Apple announced HomePod, the general reaction to it was positive, if not ecstatic. An Amazon Echo rival that sounds better but costs more, and you have to use Siri… You can see plusses and minuses, right?

But there’s one group of people whose reaction I reckon was very different. If they have any sense, anyone who makes wireless speakers would have had this response: “Oh no. No. No! Nooooo!” Then probably a bit of keening and wailing, and rending of garments, while shaking their fist at the sky.

Apple makes very pleasing products, but it is also a bit like that dragon lady from Game of Thrones. Apple moves into new tech areas, lays waste to them and feasts on the delicious tears of its fallen foes, the old monarchs of that realm.

Making sweet music

Apple is now positioning HomePod very much as a music device, rather than a Google Home/Amazon Echo home assistant (though yes, it does do all that stuff too).

That makes sense, because Amazon is entrenched as the world’s personal AI purveyor of choice, even if Alexa does at times seem to be as thick as a bag of mince, and deaf. It also makes sense because music is a realm that Apple once ruled. For many years, it practically was an audio company, thanks to iPods, the iTunes Store and to a lesser extent, iTunes the app, and AirPlay.

In that time, Apple scored the implausible feat of appealing both to the mass market and to those who consider themselves aficionados of music and ‘hi-fi’, albeit more grudgingly.

Then the iPhone arrived, Apple became The

Biggest Brand In The WorldTM and music became just one more plate it spun. Audio was simply another iCommodity, alongside mobiles, apps, a reinvigorated premium laptop line, watches, TV, movies and I dunno, shoes? Lots of stuff.

Actually, in the fallow period between Peak iPod and the Dawn of the HomePod, Apple launched an excellent music streaming service and snapped up the world’s biggest headphone brand, so I am not going to claim it completely took its eye off the audio ball.

Judging by their ubiquity in the earholes of the world’s big cities, I think AirPods may have been what persuaded Apple to make a swing for the wireless speaker market. AirPods don’t sound amazing by any means, but they’re the first Apple music device (with AI extras) to truly capture imaginations since the iPod.

The HomePod does sound good. Everyone who went to its demo agreed that it sounded better than the Echo and the Sonos One – because of course it did; they’re much cheaper speakers – but also that it was a very fine-sounding thing in its own right.

And that is why all right-thinking makers of wireless speakers should be afraid. Very afraid. Because as AirPods demonstrated, Apple doesn’t even need to make an audio product sound great to conquer a market.

All wireless speakers are built on a foundation set down by Apple and, to a lesser extent, Android. The phones are where their music comes from. Up to now, third parties have had the market to themselves, apart from that weird Star Wars ghetto blaster thing Apple tried back in 2006.

For now, Apple is going after the top end of the wireless speaker market and there are several limitations to the HomePod – no Bluetooth, no multi-room at launch.

But we all know how this plays out. Next there’ll be a more affordable one, then a batterypowered portable one, a cheap one. The quirks will get ironed out. Then there’ll be Bluetooth updates and cheap bundle deals with Apple Music subscriptions, and ones that match the colours of the iPhone XI, and one with a screen and…

And then everyone currently making money from wireless speakers of all kinds will look upon the smoking ruins of their empires and say, “Oh bugger.”