Slashdot Mirror
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.
What Apple needs to do is dig Jobs up and do a weekend at Bernie's type of thing. They can splice together old product release speeches.
Apple can explain it with some sort of variation of the Elvis myths. "Yeah, Jobs was alive all along. He was hang'in with Elvis!"
Then sales will be good.
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.
Homepod = $350. Amazon Echo = $85. Market share isn't important if you are losing money on every sale.
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.
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.
"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."
Like with the first iPhone and the Apple watch, they need to upgrade the software to match the hardware, NOT downgrade the hardware--which is what Homepod has going for it.
Apple should have learned here the same lesson as they did with the original Apple TV. The cost of entry has to be low enough to get more of these devices into people's hands. The HomePod esentially is an expensive stereo system. If you are on the market for a Bose or Sonos, this is for you.
If Amazon's market is selling these to customers, then customers earballs to advertisers, they aren't losing money. If Apple is selling it to customers, but customers don't find it a compelling part of their Apple Experience(TM), then they are losing money.
The biggest problem with these is Apple decided to me too it, instead of looking at how the iPhone was handled and going 'We are going to wait 1-2 years and make this device so compelling that everyone who already has a smarthome module is going to buy them anyways, just like they once did with our smartphones. Instead we got... a glorified Bose with Apple branding?
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.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
It does not have airplay 2 (yet?). So it is not the product it was supposed to be in many important ways,. It is a while after release... airplay 2 must be hard to engineer.
Usually so I can plan how long it takes to get somewhere, add in traffic info and it's pretty useful to know if you need to arrive somewhere a certain time.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
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.
Pet peeve: the real meaning of "Skunkworks" has been twisted to the opposite of it's original ("true") one.
What most people think it means that people worked on something clandestinely, without official approval or knowledge.
What is actually means is:
Everett Rogers defined skunkworks as an "enriched environment that is intended to help a small group of individuals design a new idea by escaping routine organizational procedures."[2] [...] Since its origination with Skunk Works, the term was generalized to apply to similar high-priority R & D projects at other large organizations which feature a small team removed from the normal working environment and given freedom from management constraints.[3]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunkworks_project
Basically a company realizing they need something different, and fast: so they (officially!) pull people out of other groups and lock them in a room so they can sprint toward a solution without other distractions.
You need the audio output on the echo dot because it's not designed for music, it's just an Alexa interface. Homepod is designed to play music, and reviews say it does this very well.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I’m a iOS and Mac (for day to day, windows is for games) guy and I’ll tell you Siri fucking sucks. She is too focused on keywords and not context. I gave up on her when I’d ask for directions and she’d google shit. Oh, and the directions suck. I hit a clover leaf on the interstate and she had me drive over three leafs of it to hit the next highway.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
It is designed for rooms, but they demo it in Apple Stores. They should make an enclosed booth that allows people to hear the difference between it and an Echo. Also, the Apple Store employee had it play House music, which does nothing for it. They don't have their best audiophiles selling it, because they can't demonstrate it right now.
Isn't claiming 10% of the market with overpriced high margin device Apple's entire business model? Are they giving up on that?
You missed the point entirely. The dot has a jack which enables it to play music better than the homepod. Not just "very well" (which is debatable for the homepod anyway) but in actual high-end fidelity.
The homepod is junk for junk junkies.
I'm surprised this gossip qualifies as news. Bloomberg and Ming are not accurate analysts when it comes to Apple.
Too expensive, and it can't be used as a Bluetooth speaker. I was interested in it to get easier access to Siri and because it was reported to have excellent sound quality, but it cost more than I was willing to pay, and I wouldn't have been able to use it for things like playing music from my computer.
... if it had classic bluetooth as well.
I would be in the market to replace my big floorstanding speakers with something small and decent sounding. But next to Airplay I would want to connect my stereo to it. There are line output > bluetooth adapters, so i heard. Unfortunately there is no simple airplay sending device (airport express is only a receiver) to get the streaming going.
Big Brother Enterprise at the moment listens and gathers WAY to much data from those smart speakers.
- Some record and transmit everything they hear to their respective mothership.
- Most are granted access to various social media and enterprise accounts.
The combination of access to all communications and data and passing of the data to the Enterprise mothership is a disaster in the making. This makes Enterprise a significant threat to our privacy and safety.
The other end of the issue is the immaturity of the devices themselves. These things are a hackers dream target. I don't need to outline the risks involved of a device that is always connected to our personal data.
The risk factors associated with these devices is way too high to even remotely contemplate inclusion into the home.
There is going to be a segment of the population that will purchase these devices. But those early adopters will quickly become the entire market. If there was such a pent up demand for the devices we would be seeing a much faster uptake of them. But the floundering Apple sales go to the point that the market demand is not at the much overhyped levels.
Can't wait for the Apple car that can only drive on Apple approved streets.
Could get worse. Imagine the type of hell it could become. It can listen to you. It could detect a disturbance in the car and call child protective services on you over something that is nothing (Stop hitting your sister! Don't make me come back there!). It could also refuse to run if it doesn't like your politics, or even if it figures out you're a white male. Imagine if it figures out your on your way to a pro 2nd Amendment rally, or on the way to the NRA range.
Don't worry, it won't stop there. They'll stop you too.