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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.
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.
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.
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I imagine it's supposed to compete with the similarly priced Google Home Max. However, the Max exists in an ecosystem, not as an island. So I can have a Google Home Mini in rooms where a voice assistant is useful, but I don't need music. I can have a Google Home for $100 in rooms where I'd like music, but it doesn't need to be loud. And I can put a Max in rooms where I might host a party.
And, if I already have a hifi, I can use a Chromecast Audio and a Google Home Mini to get excellent quality sound with voice control for under $100. Google also has the advantage of by far the best voice recognition and natural language parsing of all the available assistants.
Apple have a long way to go if they want to catch up. Unless those already inside their walled garden buy these things by the lorry load, I'm not sure they ever will.
Steve Jobs had the perfect sense of exactly how to package something at exactly the right price point for the consumer.
In most instances, yes. However, this isn't the first time Apple has decided to get into the speaker business; the last time was on Job's watch, and it failed pretty hard in the marketplace: the Apple iPod Hi-Fi.
Like the Apple iPod Hi-Fi, it looks like they're going to try to position this as an audiophile speaker. I have little doubt from that perspective it's probably a better music device than its competitors; the thing to watch for is to see if people are going to care enough about that this time around (they didn't seem to last time around). Most people don't seem to care if their speakers are crappy, so long as they can hear their tunes.
Yaz
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.
The iPod Hi-Fi retailed at the Apple Store for $349 in 2006. Hopefully Apple nails it on their second crack.
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.