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Why Apple's HomePod Is Three Years Behind Amazon's Echo (bloomberg.com)
Apple unveiled the HomePod, its first smart speaker to take on market-leading Amazon's Echo lineup of speakers, in June this year. Despite being three years late to the party, the HomePod has largely been pitched more as a speaker that sounds great instead of a device that sounds great but more importantly can also help you with daily chores. On top of this, Apple said last week it was delaying the shipment of HomePod from December this year to "early 2018." So why does a company, the market valuation of which is quickly reaching a trillion dollar, so behind its competitors? Bloomberg reports on Tuesday: Apple audio engineers had been working on an early version of the HomePod speaker for about two years in 2014 when they were blindsided by the Echo, a smart speaker from Amazon with a voice-activated assistant named Alexa. The Apple engineers jokingly accused one another of leaking details of their project to Amazon, then bought Echos so they could take them apart and see how they were put together. They quickly deemed the Echo's sound quality inferior and got back to work building a better speaker. More than two years passed. In that time Amazon's Echo became a hit with consumers impressed by Alexa's ability to answer questions, order pizzas and turn lights on and off. Meanwhile, Apple dithered over its own speaker, according to people familiar with the situation. The project was cancelled and revived several times, they said, and the device went through multiple permutations (at one point it stood 3 feet tall) as executives struggled to figure out how it would fit into the home and Apple's ecosystem of products and services. In the end, the company plowed ahead, figuring that creating a speaker would give customers another reason to stay loyal. Yet despite having all the ingredients for 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.
Apple's entire schtick is letting the market find great ideas, and then making those ideas appealing.
Literally everything Apple offers stems from this business model.
And charge quadruple for it.
Sure it was just a hobby.
In the end, the company plowed ahead, figuring that creating a speaker would give customers another reason to stay loyal.
Ugh.
I don't understand why this product category exists. What can echo do that I can't do better on my smartphone or tablet (or should be able to do technically). I already use my phone to stream music via a dedicated sound system. There are apps for voice queries, home automation integration, etc.
fwiw, I interviewed for the home pod group, a few months ago.
I am a seasoned audio designer (circuits, firmware) and I would have been happy to work for them.
they blew me off. of course, in today's employment world, you never get a reason, so I can't really know what they were looking for in an employee for that group.
but suffice to say, I was -very- skilled and eager to work for them, and they passed.
so, it does not surprise me that they're behind the curve. they asked me all kinds of questions about how to design and test such a thing and I had answers for them, but they still declined to 'move forward' with the job, as they say.
and fwiw, the people I spoke with, there, were not really serious audio people, either. just regular software and hardware engineers, just doing a 9-5 job (I could tell, NO one was really enthusiastic about audio, overall; when I talked about audio and doing test measurement, they mostly didn't really care).
oh well. its not a product I'd buy, anyway; my own self-designed spkrs and amp and preamp (and dac and all that) are in a different level of performance than a 'single self-calibrating spkr with too much beamforming for its own good' ;)
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Who in their right mind would even walk into a house with one
This is how telescreens start. For convenience. You can't avoid them because everyone is willingly buying them on purpose for some reason!
Apple make so much money from the iPhone that they don't really have a strong incentive to execute any new or innovative products. This makes it easy to waste money on side efforts like this, because, well, why bother?
And they also get caught up in wanting it to seem "special" and not another me-too product, when, actually it really is a me-too product. Sure they can make it with Beats(tm) bass or some kind of super-duper audio which might make it seem more interesting, but that's not really particularly compelling when their customer base is already using headphones.
Until iPhone sales start slipping badly, I don't see Apple having the motivation to do much more than bounce their profits among tax havens. Any *real* risk-taking might actually fail and thus royally piss off shareholders when it becomes a $20 billion write-off. Pissing away a half-billion or so noodling with projects like this seems like all they really need to do at this point.
One has to wonder how much apple's new corp headquarters will go for on the auction block when they have to downsize if they keep up at this. Maybe Steve Wozniak will rent out that garage they started in
People are weary of allowing some kind of spybot in their home. If it's marketed as an Audiophile device from the makers of iPod and Beats By Dre then people will buy it and get used to using the siri like functionality and they can suck consumers deeper into the apple ecosystem. So it's not a robot that listens to everything you say, it's a perfectly harmless speaker that you can control with your voice.
I literally had the idea for an mp3 player that had a phone on it. Now you're telling me it's reasonable to assume that Apple stole my idea?
So you could run it to a proper DAC and not be stuck using the 25 cent DAC chip they put in the Echo and the Echo Dot. The audio quality when running out the 3.5mm port in the back to my Marantz amp is less than ideal. The signal level is just so low I have to run the amp fully -10db higher to get the same volume I'm used to out of a "real" DAC. I'm not an audiophile snob who needs a $2000 DAC but you can hear the lack of jitter control and refinement and the noise introduced by having to run everything -10db higher due to the ultra low budget DAC Amazon uses. If Apple or Google give me a digital out I'll drop Alexa. But right now none of them are doing that so I'll stick with Alexa because despite the drop in sound quality the voice controls make it a better streamer than anything else on the market including any audiophile grade network streamer.
Siri is very primitive compared to the competing virtual assistants. Don't get me wrong, I use Siri all the time, but mostly for things like starting timers or asking basic information. Both in terms of information retrieval capabilities and in terms of integrations with other services, Alexa is way ahead.
The problem with the HomePod is that there are already good speakers with virtual assistants built in. The Echo may not have ideal sound quality, but Sonos also makes speakers with Alexa and Google built-in. As such, simply having good sound quality won't be enough for the HomePod to compete. Siri needs to get a *lot* better if they're going to have any chance.
If Siri were designed as generic assistant technology, then it could be added to any new device with relatively minor tweaks. Maybe they overly hard-wired Siri's design to phones and tablets.
Table-ized A.I.
Inertia is the reason. Apple still benefits from these years of innovation, creative design, flawless programs etc... (Btw that should convince the unbelievers how amazing the work of Jobs was). But Apple has already started to lose some inertia ; will take some time until Apple fans change their mind, though.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
because they can use it to push their store front. Apple doesn't have that so it's a tougher sell. Also they'll have a hard time competing with Echo when Amazon can give the things away and make it up from store purchases & prime membership fees.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
A smart speaker might encourage users to subscribe to the Apple music service. it is not going to sell Apps, it is not going to sell storage, it is not going to sell phone.
The delay does mean most of us who adopted this technology adopted Amazon over Google. Google has play catchup as most people are not going to buy a Google product to supplement Alexa.
People will buy the Apple product if it is a good speaker. One hole in the apple line up, BTW, now that they no longer do routers, is a cheap way to network speakers.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Apple, just freaking buy them already. You'd have an instant 10+ million consumers, ecosystem with much better audio than Amazon, Google, or Microsoft - and can build up as you want. Crack open the checkbook, Tim, and write out a $3 billion check. And it's yours.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
They quickly deemed the Echo's sound quality inferior and got back to work building a better speaker
Good grief, engineers. Sad that Apple completely missed the point on this, it seems like the home assistant space is ripe for an iPod style re-definition.
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I think a lot of people forget that these huge faceless companies have humans running things, and more importantly, producing products. I see this a lot in the company I work for...they're desperately trying to speed up software deployment/adopt DevOps, and I think a lot of it is just fear-driven. "Thought leaders" go to these conferences and then wonder why we aren't doing 200 deployments a day in a fully containerized environment using the latest JavaScript framework that came out last week. It's fear of missing out, and the media only covers the coolest companies, leaving out the vast majority. Going fast is great, but crash programs to get there without changing the entire culture is just fear.
Large companies, even if they're faster than most, are resource-constrained. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft are about the only ones who can actually print money these days, wave a wand and make things happen. Even then, it takes effort to form a team to work on a problem, pull people from project to project, etc. At a startup, 10 people working around a cafeteria table can just decide to work on something...and as long as they have VC money in the bank they can make it happen a lot faster than a company with thousands of developers.
Most likely, it just got shelved in favor of improving existing products. When the Echo came out, that was basically the benchmark and Apple even waited for Google before putting the effort into creating a product. You can bet that it's going to have all the Echo and Home features in addition to others, and it'll most likely be a rounded-edge cylinder with softly pulsing white LEDs. It'll be available in white, black, gold, rose gold and space grey. And people will line up at the Apple store to buy one...I'll bet this was another reason why they didn't feel too much pressure.
"Apple audio engineers...quickly deemed the Echo's sound quality inferior and got back to work building a better speaker."
Inferior?
I take it Apple audio engineers have not actually used a pair of their own shitty earbuds...
Is there a Apple product that aren't 2 years behind any other product ?
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
You want customers to stay loyal?
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
You fucking, clueless idiots.
Start by putting back a few USB 3.0 type-A ports on your computers. USB C may be the future but USB-A is still in wide use today.
Put back user-accessible RAM slots in your computers. We're not all made of money and can't afford to pay your over-inflated RAM price at the same time we buy your expensive computers.
Put back user-accessible SATA ports (or M.2, whatever) so we can upgrade our storage drives ourselves in a few years.
Stop trying to make your laptops thinner at the price of making 0.2mm thinner yet much inferior keyboards that jam all the time and have a defect rate much higher than the older models.
You want people to stay loyal to Apple? Upgrade the Macbook Air display to 1080p. Put a 7th or 8th generation intel CPU in it. Upgrade the max RAM to 16GB (it's a thin laptop and AFAIK there's no LPDDR3 SODIMMs, so no slots is a given). Don't mess with the keyboard or the ports. Don't increase the price. Done, you'll sell millions of them.
#DeleteFacebook
Aren't you doing it wrong in some way when your "daily chores" involve talking (swearing?) to some gadget sitting on a nearby table?
"Important"? The mind boggles ...
...takes quite a while. Both products are just worse versions of what most cell phones can do. But that won't stop Apple from charging three times what its competitors do.
I feel I might as well complain that Amazon and Apple both picked names for their search assistants that are people's names. Google's, however, is triggered by "Okay, Google" which is probably safe.
Why are these kinds of products a thing? I'm just stunned that one of them is even capable of being "behind" or "ahead" of another. Do people really pay for these?
I'm buying the first home assistant that can load the dishwasher.
So why does an article writer so behind in grammar?
(I honestly don't even know what they intended to write.)
An anti-Apple post by msmash? It must be a day of the week that ends with 'day'.
None of the Echos I have heard have "good speakers". From the size of things the larger Google speaker unit seems like it might be good, but Google will absolutely strip-mine data from you in a way Apple will not (even Amazon I trust more). The Sonos speakers I have considered, but have not heard them yet so I'm not sure.
I was looking forward to the Apple units as it sounded like they had a lot of interesting technology to actually be good speakers.
I find it interesting you think Alexa is ahead of Siri since Alexa is a lot like using a command line in comparison to Apple/Google approach of a true assistant that tries to understand anything you say, not a limited set or structure of phrasing.
However what Echo is right now is way more popular than Google or Apple devices which are both just getting off the ground, and that may well be enough to hold off both companies forever in terms of market leader for smart speakers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In most countries you can't buy Alexa or Google Home, so I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's HomePod will be the first smart speaker people will come in contact with, so for them it will automatically be the best. Siri can speak 25+ languages including Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin and Japanese.
Apple assessed the market and while voice assistants gaining ground they want the experience and margins to warrant the effort vs a me too dud. Second mouse vs early bird. The Apple watch doing ok better than others. The hands free use case is nice if hands full, dirty etc... So look forward to advances but given privacy concerns And modest utility for home use I am waiting for more so in the second mouse camp. I have a 1st gen Apple Watch since had features I desired at a reasonable price so was an early bird on the wATch.
This is the same problem Microsoft had with its stuff back in the day: forcing something to fit into the ecosystem.
Not everything has to run iOS or a variant, guys. Not everything has to leverage your own dog food. Not everything has to be a billion dollar hit.
Apple is forgetting how to launch a product because Apple doesn't do it often enough anymore. Apple is forgetting how to make decisions because they don't know how to anymore. This is an unfortunate trend that will only get worse.
I mean, Cook had to bring in a retiree to shut down the self-driving car division. Didn't Cook have the brainpower and balls to do that himself?
Yeah. Save your money on the overpriced Dot and buy the twice as expensive tablet.
This illustrates the problem perfectly.
Amazon have a business model of selling lots of inexpensive products and services (including a music service geared to streaming). Alexa makes this easier. Amazon don't care if it's not perfect. It doesn't even need to be all that profitable in itself. It just needs to sell these other srervices.
Apple sell to people who care about quality (or at least think they do). They will only sell one item every year or two, but that's their core business. iTunes is a sideline that promotes hardware sales. They need to make the device itself profitable. They need to persuade iPad and iPhone users to buy one of these in addition to an iPad and iPhone, Why would you do that rather than get a docking station?
Apple's market cap is going up up up because the Federal Reserve keeps printing printing printing. Fortunately Trump is going to end the Fed before the end of the year, then we get to see which suits have actual talent. Dance, motherfuckers!
3 years behind doesn't mean it will take 3 year to catch up. Just throw enough engineer at the problem and follow the mantra embrace, extend, and extinguish