Will Apple’s late-to-market Home Pod be a game-changer?

Once again, Apple has shown up fashionably late to the party. This time it’s the party for smart home speakers.

But can Apple use the same recipe it has used before to conquer a market when its key competitors are giants such as Google and Amazon?

“Apple is behind, but the company rarely is first yet still won in music players, smartphones and tablets,” wrote UBS analyst Steve Milunovich in a note to investors after the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference. “Apple appears to be playing defense but needed to enter this category with a twist.”

With iPhone sales sagging and fans clamoring for the company’s legendary innovation, the company last week introduced HomePod, its first new product in two years. HomePod is a high-end smart home speaker that capitalizes on Apple’s success with digital music by offering acoustics that are superior to its competitors, the Amazon Echo and Google Home. It takes voice commands from Siri and can also control HomeKit-enabled accessories such as smart lights, locks and thermostats.

But at $349, nearly twice the price of the Echo and three times more expensive than Google’s device, HomePod will come out of the gate in December facing a price disadvantage in a fast-growing market. Amazon Echo and Google Home already make up nearly 94 percent of the market, which has more than 35 million U.S. users, according to a May 2017 report from eMarketer.