Apple HomePod sales disappointing
When Apple’s HomePod smart speaker went on sale in January, it entered a market pioneered and dominated by Amazon’s Echo lineup of Alexa-powered devices. Apple has been touting the HomePod’s superior sound quality, but so far hasn’t enticed many consumers to part with $349.
By late March, Apple had lowered sales forecasts and cut some orders with Inventec Corp., one of the manufacturers that builds the HomePod for Apple, according to a person familiar with the matter.
At first, it looked like the HomePod might be a hit. Preorders 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.”
During the HomePod’s first 10 weeks of sales, it eked out 10 per cent of the smart speaker market, compared with 73 per cent for Amazon’s Echo devices and 14 per cent for the Google Home, according to Slice Intelligence. Three weeks after the launch, weekly HomePod sales slipped to about four per cent of the smart speaker category on average, the market research firm says. Inventory is piling up, according to Apple store workers. Apple declined to comment.
Apple had an opportunity to put the HomePod at the centre of a new ecosystem of smart home and other gadgets that aren’t glued to the iPhone. But the small, wireless speaker is not that product. Though the HomePod delivers market-leading audio quality, consumers have discovered it’s heavily dependent on the iPhone and is limited as a digital assistant.
Veteran Apple analyst Shannon Cross says consumers assumed the HomePod would be able to do many of the things the Echo and Google Home can do — answering questions, ordering pizzas and much more. Instead, the HomePod is mostly limited to playing tunes from Apple Music, controlling a limited number of Apple-optimized smart home appliances and sending messages through an iPhone. That’s a serious disincentive, Cross says, when the Apple speaker costs $200 more than most smart speakers.
Despite having all the ingredients to become a serious competitor to the Echo-including Siri and the App Store-Apple never saw the HomePod as anything more than an accessory, like the AirPods earphones, according to people who worked on the product. When the Echo debuted four years ago as Apple engineers were toiling away on early versions of the HomePod, their bosses continued to see the product as a high-quality speaker rather than a voice-controlled digital assistant for the home.
To make matters worse, the device missed its December release date, meaning the HomePod wasn’t available during the holiday shopping season when smart speakers were among the most sought-after products.
When the HomePod finally shipped, consumers found they couldn’t pair two speakers and create stereo sound or play music in multiple rooms. Apple has said these functions will be available this year, and the latest iPhone software update in beta with app developers suggests they are in advanced testing. Some HomePod buyers also complained that the device leaves marks on wood, a situation Apple is now working to rectify with a new material.
The HomePod will almost certainly improve. Not every Apple product was a hit out of the gate. The Apple Watch faced challenges when it launched, too, and is now widely recognized as the top performing smartwatch on the market.
Still, Amazon and Google will keep ratcheting up the competition, coming out with regular iterations of their own smart speakers that sound better and do more.