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.

Comments

Uhhh...

[DigitAl56K]

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.

Re:Amazing

[grub]

If you want a smart speaker and are concerned about privacy and spying, Apple is the only way to go.

For Siri, voice recordings are saved for six months on Apple's voice recognition servers to understand a user better. After that, they're deleted automatically and another copy -- without any identifiers -- helps improve Siri for up to two years. With anonymized IDs, Apple's speakers have a much more compelling argument for not handing over data: They can't find it. In the game of hide and seek with your voice data, the advantage -- for now -- goes to Apple.

Local iTunes Server?

[crow]

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.

Wow

[Ol Olsoc]

And the crowd goes mild.

Too cheap. (Today's joke)

[Futurepower(R)]

Sorry, I only buy Apple products that cost more than $1,000.