More reveals from WWDC17
11 changes coming to your iPhone, and why music lovers will love HomePod,
Apple has set its sights on the living room with a voiceactivated $349 speaker called the HomePod that leverages personal digital-assistant Siri and stresses its functionality with core Apple services such as Apple Music.
The iPhone maker was expected to announce a smart speaker, a market that Amazon — with its sleeper hit, the Echo — and then later Google Home, powered by Assistant — now dominate, giving them an integral place in users’ lives. Such a speaker was missing from Apple’s line-up, allowing rivals Amazon and Google to siphon off some of its loyal user base.
But while comparisons with Amazon Echo and Google Home are inevitable, Apple is positioning HomePod more as an alternative to connected music-systems from Sonos and Bose, says Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies.
HomePod “is one of the bestsounding speakers I’ve ever heard,” says Bajarin, who was given a private demo by Apple. “I was blown away.”
With Siri most widely used on iPhone, which has limited voice range, Apple risked losing out on the daily, at-home tasks consumers increasingly talk to Echo or Home for — reminders, calendars, music, reservations. This activity, in turn, gives Amazon and Google rich veins of information about consumer behavior. This year, 35.6 million Americans will use a voice-activated assistant device at least once a month, according to research firm eMarketer.
But Apple clearly sees a different scenario for the speaker, its first “pod” product since the days of the iPod music player, than Amazon and Google. Indeed, at $349 it’s priced substantially higher than the $175 Echo and $129 Google Home. Apple says it’s looking to “reinvent” the way we listen to music in the home. In its demo at the Worldwide Developers Conference here, Apple focused less on the novelty of using the speaker to answer queries about the weather and calendar appointments and more on using the speaker as a multiroom wireless sound system — exactly what Sonos and Bose do — as well as home-automation functions.
The speaker “can rock most any room with distortion-free music and be a helpful assistant around your home,” Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller said.
Ovum analyst Ronan de Renesse said it was smart for Apple to ignore the low end of the market.
“Amazon Echo and Google Home users for the most part don’t care enough about audio quality to pay an extra $150-$200, and it is just not in Apple’s interest to make smart speakers at lower price points.”
However, the analyst expects Apple to still lag far behind Amazon and Google in sales.
The HomePod is positioned to be a companion for Apple Music, its subscription service, while Echo and Home work with rivals Spotify, Pandora and others.