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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.
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.
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
No audiophile would seriously present a HomePod as a quality audio experience. I'm not sure what you're saying here.