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Apple Will Release Its $349 HomePod Speaker On February 9th (theverge.com)
After it was delayed in mid-December, Apple finally announced the availability of its new smart speaker. The company announced it will release the HomePod on February 9th and that preorders for the device will start this Friday, January 26th. The smart speaker will initially go on sale in the U.S., UK, and Australia. It'll then arrive in France and Germany sometime this spring. The Verge reports: The company's first smart speaker was originally supposed to go on sale before the end of the 2017, but it was delayed in mid-December. That meant Apple missed a holiday season where millions of smart speakers were sold -- but the market for voice-activated speakers is clearly just getting started. And at $349, Apple's speaker is playing in a very different market than Amazon's and Google's primarily cheap and tiny speakers. The HomePod is being positioned more as a competitor to Sonos' high-end wireless speakers than as a competitor to the plethora of inexpensive smart speakers flooding the market. Despite the delay, Apple doesn't appear to have made any changes to the HomePod -- the smart speaker appears to be exactly what was announced back in June, at WWDC. The focus here continues to be on music and sound quality, rather than the speaker's intelligence, which is the core focus of many competitors' products. The speaker will still have an always-on voice assistant, but Apple's implementation of Siri here will be more limited than what's present on other devices.
You can't buy real friends.
But lobotomized Siri's
a close substitute.
It's truly amazing that people are willing to pay to have a bug planted in their home.
And at $349, Apple's speaker is playing in a very different market than Amazon's and Google's primarily cheap and tiny speakers.
The Google Home Max is a direct competitor and so far very well reviewed.
That's the 4-6 Billion dollar fraud question being asked internally.
Seriously? I can buy 4 ecos for that with the current promo. Not that I want to, but still. I get the sense they're only doing this because their investors insist they do, cause it feels like they're setting themselves up for failure.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
$350 for Apple's version of Google Home? It better be a grand slam.
Which it won't be.
Steve Jobs had the perfect sense of exactly how to package something at exactly the right price point for the consumer. But I think even he would consider $350 to be ridiculous. If he could find a way to create an Apple-esque combination of a portable bluetooth speaker with a wi-fi connected Siri-backed search tool, he'd price it around $200, not too low that it looks cheaper than Apple's "standards", but not too high that it's out of reach of the people that want one.
This is already late to market. It's already $220 more than the competition from Google. Unless it's amazing in every way, it's going to be a fail.
The hardware cant be upgraded later in the same way Siri performance could.
That being said I don't see myself buying a smart speaker in the foreseeable future.
You just need to solder some wire on it.
The one thing that the Echo and Google Home both fail at is playing the music I already own from my own server. Both want to sell you a subscription to their music service. Sure, I can use them as dumb bluetooth speakers, but then I don't have the voice control, defeating the purpose. I was hoping that Apple would make their Home Pod work with your local iTunes server, which would be a compelling feature for me, but from the page at apple.com, it doesn't indicate that this is allowed. Instead, they're focusing on their music service.
It works as an Airplay2 speaker--anything you can play on any Apple device can be redirected to any airplay device.
I get a far better response from my dog.
Lol the Apple fanboys are extra butt hurt today. Lol $350 speaker. I hope you have to stand in line to get it. Fucking posers.
I would conceivably be interested in a pair of homepods (if the sound is good enough) to replace my good but bulky floorstanding speakers. I do like the streaming concept.
However, unless I overlooked it, it has no external input. That is a dealbreaker for me; because I would like to use it as a speaker for everything, including tv, dvd/bluray/cd, a console when the kids grow up, etc. Hence ideally I could go with a line out from my audio amp to these speakers so they would be truly universal.
It looks like this is not possible, or is there a workaround?
And the crowd goes mild.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sorry, I only buy Apple products that cost more than $1,000.
I mean, $349 is a joke, right?
Im sure we will all have to hear about how this speaker will revolutionise sound waves; because of apple physics and other bullshit.
Sound waves will reverberate inside a butthole, producing an unparalleled sensation, albeit marginally beating that of Tim Cock's personal titanium dildo.
Home, Open the Pod Bay Doors!
Given how Google's core market is the analytics on your data, your data is their "coke classic recipe". If you want to ensure your data is protected and not shared with 3rd parties you wouldn't give it to any company which doesn't focus on your data as their sole core business.
That includes Apple, but is most specifically focused on Amazon. The former has only reputational reasons to protect your data, the latter has no reason at all.
Will it be placed in the cellar? Will it make an alien copy of me while I sleep?
E Proelio Veritas.
Looks like another half baked gimmick from apple.
APPLE Bravely Sells Overpriced Crap You Can Buy Better And Cheaper Elsewhere! #drunkonthierownkoolaide. All Are ONE In APPLE! (Apple might as well file the paperwork to the IRS and apply for a religious exemption on their taxes. I mean, its already a cult, right?)
That I will never allow into my home.
It's about time. Now I have another product I'll never buy. Fuck Apple
Apple will pay me $350 to put one of their always-on spying devices in my home? I'm in! Wait, what...I have to pay them?!
No apple logo that i could see. How will people know you have an ithing if the logo is not prominently displayed?
do not care. There I said it.