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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.
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.
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.