HomePod: How indecisiveness during development put Apple behind the eight ball

[Shawn Knight]

HomePod, Apple’s entry in the emerging smart home speaker market, was announced at WWDC 2017 and scheduled to arrive in time for the lucrative holiday buying season. That timeline, as you may have heard, is no longer accurate as Apple recently pushed the launch back to early 2018.

As it turns out, delays aren’t anything new for the project.

Bloomberg recounts in a recent write-up that Apple engineers had been working on a version of the HomePod speaker as a side project for about two years when Amazon surprised everyone with the introduction of its Echo smart speaker in 2014.

The original HomePod was conceived by a group of Mac audio engineers that wanted to create a product that audiophiles would approve of. Several of the early participants had work experience with big-name speaker makers and had a desire to perfect a technology called beam forming. Unsurprisingly, audio quality was a major focus on the product early on and is even touted as a differentiator in the final consumer version.

Over the next two years, Amazon’s Echo fell into favor with consumers that were impressed by its Alexa voice capabilities. Apple, meanwhile, struggled mightily with its own project, internally canceling and reviving HomePod several times while tinkering with its form factor (at one point, the speaker stood three feet tall).

Apple ultimately pressed forward with the project and settled on the design that was shown off at its developer conference in June. Years of indecisiveness, however, will soon be felt. In addition to the recent delay, HomePod won’t be nearly as versatile as Echo in terms of voice commands. According to at least one unnamed Apple insider, this is a huge missed opportunity.

HomePod will sell for $349 when it launches in the US, the UK and Australia early next year.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/71982-homepod-how-indecisiveness-during-development-put-apple-behind.html

 

[dispo]

Disclaimer: I'm pretty entrenched in the Apple ecosystem. Having said that, it doesn't take an insider to recognize that Apple has already missed a huge opportunity, and whatever the quality of the Homepod when it arrives, it will be difficult to justify the price. A few things at play here:

1) Siri cannot compete with Alexa or Google Assistant in terms of reliability/quality of results. Siri is (and was if it had come out sooner) gonna handicap this thing from the get go.
2) Siri aside, what about high quality music reproduction? Sonos is already integrating Alexa with plans for future inclusion of Google Assistant last I heard. And using the word "audiophile" to describe any of the boxes is a joke. This is like people thinking Bose is "audiophile"-grade. That's not to say that they can't sound really nice. Both Bose and Sonos make some nice audio stuff.
3) Unless something has changed, it would seem Alexa (and possibly Google Assistant?) has already won the integration-with-other-products war. Apple Home Kit is far more walled off--no surprise there I guess--and is less likely to work with so many products right out of the box.

I'm not particularly into these home assistant things, so I don't really have a horse in the race, but I'd love to hear from anyone who is genuinely excited about the HomePod for reasons other than it's a new Apple gadget.