Apple's Stumbling HomePod Isn't the Hot Seller It Wanted (bloomberg.com)

The recently-released Apple HomePod smart speaker is not selling very well. According to Bloomberg, "By late March, Apple had lowered sales forecasts and cut some orders with Inventec, one of the manufacturers that builds the HomePod for Apple." From the report: At first, it looked like the HomePod might be a hit. Pre-orders were strong, and in the last week of January the device grabbed about a third of the U.S. smart speaker market in unit sales, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence. But by the time HomePods arrived in stores, sales were tanking, says Slice principal analyst Ken Cassar. "Even when people had the ability to hear these things," he says, "it still didn't give Apple another spike." During the HomePod's first 10 weeks of sales, it eked out 10 percent of the smart speaker market, compared with 73 percent for Amazon's Echo devices and 14 percent for the Google Home, according to Slice Intelligence. Three weeks after the launch, weekly HomePod sales slipped to about 4 percent of the smart speaker category on average, the market research firm says. Inventory is piling up, according to Apple store workers, who say some locations are selling fewer than 10 HomePods a day. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says Apple is "mulling" a "low-cost version" of the HomePod that may help short-term shipments. However, even if the product materializes, he predicts it will only provide a short-term boost to sales.

Comments

Is it even a smart speaker?

[alvinrod]

My understanding was that the "smart" capabilities of this thing were extremely lacking and that the main reason to get one is that the sound quality was decent for what it is. It sounds like the hardware is fine (albeit pricey, but it's Apple so what else did you expect) but that the Siri functionality is what's lacking.

Re:Is it even a smart speaker?

[eminencja]

I think Apple got it all wrong. They should have released it without Siri. Not only would the speaker have made it to the market much faster but also the lack of Siri would be seen as an advantage in view of the recent privacy concerns.

Re:Is it even a smart speaker?

[alvinrod]

I'll give you that. I've stayed away from all of these since I have no interest in an always on, always listening digital assistant (or whatever they're called) due to the potential privacy concerns. I don't think Apple will do it as they're not going to charge less for a dumb speaker that doesn't cost them less to manufacture because I suspect that most people would buy that version instead of the premium version with Siri.

Apple's other problem is that unless you're already part of their ecosystem, this speaker probably isn't that useful. I guess you could just put your music in iTunes and use it to stream stuff, but there are plenty of much cheaper boxes that can be used to stream a music library through an actual stereo system.

Leaves marks on furniture.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who wants to purchase a product that leaves marks on furniture? The sad thing is that Steve Jobs probably would have completely recalled the product if it was leaving marks on furniture. I don't know how it is acceptable to just keep shipping the product.

Confused product, and pre-announced

[mccalli]

I wish I could find the post, think it was 9to5mac or similar, but they stated they'd been told the HomePod was originally a skunkworks product by the audio people. It wasn't a smart speaker, it wasn't even a product as such. It was a skunkworks high quality speaker.

This shows. Everything compares it to things like the Echo, but according to what I reads that' the wrong way round. The Echo is Alexa with a speaker bolted on. The HomePod is a speaker with Siri bolted on. The market for expensive speakers is likely much smaller, and it doesn't help that reviews keep pitching it against the Echo - Echo sound quality is reputedly nowhere near the HomePod, but Alexa can do more than the HomePod Siri.

It's a confused offering, and it's Apple's fault that this is so. Not the original skunkworks - by all accounts they've succeeded and produced exactly what they were trying to do, great sound from a smaller form factor. No, for once this is a product and marketing failure. It has been positioned wrong, it has been released without obvious features (no bluetooth? C'mon...), it has been priced high which might well be deserved from its sound alone, but it has been allowed to be seen to be an Echo competitor. Worse, an Echo also-ran.

As I write this, I'm listening to SomaFM playing on an iPad 2 attached to a good quality speaker dock. I thought the HomePod might be a nice update. I actually am the target demographic for once. But naah - I'm not in for this as it stands. Needs to let my daughter's Android phone play too, needs to allow third party services so I could use SomaFM on it directly...arguably it could even do with a simple display. At the moment, I see my iPad-2-plugged-in-to-a-speaker-dock as a far better solution, and that should make Apple's product people give some serious thought to what they've released.

Who wanted these big brother speakers anyways?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole product category sucks, but if I really wanted a home assistant recording everything I say for the FBI I sure wouldn't want one with Siri. Siri is awful. I love Apple stuff, but Siri is just not useful. Moreover, for people who don't live in big houses in the suburbs no one wants to be making web searches via voice when you have roommates and neighbors etc. We all around have Siri on our phones and Macs and don't use it, so why would I buy a device with only the feature I don't use? I get that Apple didn't want to totally ignore the product category and not at least have an offering in their ecosystem, but did they actually expect this thing to be a big seller? I hate to "go there" and start talking about Jobs, but it does seem like the fall in quality is finally starting to hit Apple as more and more of the old timers retire or get poached.

Flawed Targeting

[ThomasBHardy]

This product is fatally flawed. While it may have good sound, that alone will not carry it over the finish line.

It lacks native spotify/pandora/amazon music support. If you want the entire speaker market to buy the most expensive speaker on the market, you need to have a total potential audience as large as you can get. Currently the target audience is only Applephiles due to the walled garden.

It's too expensive. If you want to capture the largest segment of Applephiles and get them onto the music subscription service, then the speaker needs to be much less expensive, subsidized by the ongoing subscription costs. If your total audience is only a fraction of the market, then you need to be able to sell into as much of that smaller audience as possible.

It lacks a solid "smart" for the speaker. In a time where everyone either has, or is starting to get curious/envious of smart devices, offering the most expensive yet least smart speaker available misses the mark.

While perhaps being the best sounding speaker on the SmartSpeaker shelf, it improperly targeted and could have been easily saved by even a basic review of the product's capabilities versus the available markets.