Big ambitions, big stakes Page B7
Apple’s voice-activated HomePod wants to be prominent at your house.
Apple replaced record collections with the iPod and earned front pocket real estate with the iPhone.
Now it’s going after a bigger target: your home.
The company announced Monday at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose the HomePod, a home speaker with Apple’s digital assistant Siri built into it.
Similar to Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home — voice-activated, internet-connected speakers that play music, answer questions and provide information such as the news, weather, sports updates and metric conversions — the HomePod listens and responds to voice commands.
Starting at $349, the device, which ships in December, is nearly double the cost of the Amazon Echo ($179.99) and more than three times the price of the Google Home ($109).
And while its competition has had a head start — the Amazon Echo launched in 2014 for Amazon Prime members and the Google Home was released last year — experts in voice and visual search said instead of being late to the party, Apple could raise the bar like it did for digital music players when it launched the iPod, or smartphones, as it did with the iPhone.
The HomePod is Apple’s first new line of products since the Apple Watch in 2015.
The lack of a recent breakthrough device has periodically raised concerns that Apple has become too dependent on the iPhone and supported the theory that the company lost its knack for innovation when co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011.
During Monday’s event Apple also introduced updates and improvements to its professional line of Mac laptops and desktops, and iPads.
The company announced the new iMac Pro, Apple’s most powerful computer to date with a 27-inch Retina 5K display, which will go on sale in December starting at $4,999. It also announced a new 10.5-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro that’s faster and more powerful than existing models with more memory and storage, which will go on sale next week and start at $649.