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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 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.
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.
The difference this time is the competitor got it right.
The iPod wouldn't have been a success if all the other MP3 players of the day didn't suck. My first 2 iPods were amazing devices. Firewire booting, I could carry a second hard drive to boot from.
Amazon got it 'right' to consumers and Apple is playing catch up. Which is hard to do given Amazon's demographic spread compared to Apple's.
Apple isn't interested in high-end audio. That's why they bought Beats.