HomePod occupies 4 percent of smart speaker market as sector growth soars
Analysts suggest the HomePod could capture ten percent of the smart speaker market by 2022, slowly catching up with its rivals as the sector itself grows exponentially.
A new report from Canalys projects a huge amount of growth in the smart speaker market, in which Apple's HomePod will play a part, albeit a relatively small one.
Canalys predicts the worldwide install base of the smart speaker category will approach 100 million by the end of 2018 -- a 2.5-fold increase over the end of 2017. The report also finds that the Apple HomePod's market share at the end of this year will reach 4 percent, compared to 50 percent for Amazon's Echo and 30 percent for Google Home products.
By 2022, Canalys says, Apple will reach 10 percent of the market, with Google and Amazon tied with 34 percent each. The report also found that the U.S. comprises 73 percent of the market, with the U.K. second with 10 percent and Germany third with 8 percent.
The last time Canalys put out quarterly smart speaker figures, in May, Google led with market share of 36.2 percent, following by Amazon with 27.7 percent and a pair of Chinese manufacturers taking the third and fourth spots ahead of Apple.
Apple is behind Google and Amazon in the smart speaker race for several reasons, mostly related to its late start and to the HomePod's higher price point.
In addition, the HomePod has only recently become available in new territories, arriving in Canada, France and Germany last month, while the competition's availability has been widespread for longer.
In addition, Apple has been criticized in some quarters for not opening the HomePod up to third-party developers, as well as various problems that have plagued Siri ever since its launch.
However, it's still very early in the HomePod's development, and projections are merely projections.
A new report from Canalys projects a huge amount of growth in the smart speaker market, in which Apple's HomePod will play a part, albeit a relatively small one.
Canalys predicts the worldwide install base of the smart speaker category will approach 100 million by the end of 2018 -- a 2.5-fold increase over the end of 2017. The report also finds that the Apple HomePod's market share at the end of this year will reach 4 percent, compared to 50 percent for Amazon's Echo and 30 percent for Google Home products.
By 2022, Canalys says, Apple will reach 10 percent of the market, with Google and Amazon tied with 34 percent each. The report also found that the U.S. comprises 73 percent of the market, with the U.K. second with 10 percent and Germany third with 8 percent.
The last time Canalys put out quarterly smart speaker figures, in May, Google led with market share of 36.2 percent, following by Amazon with 27.7 percent and a pair of Chinese manufacturers taking the third and fourth spots ahead of Apple.
How Apple fell behind
Apple is behind Google and Amazon in the smart speaker race for several reasons, mostly related to its late start and to the HomePod's higher price point.
In addition, the HomePod has only recently become available in new territories, arriving in Canada, France and Germany last month, while the competition's availability has been widespread for longer.
In addition, Apple has been criticized in some quarters for not opening the HomePod up to third-party developers, as well as various problems that have plagued Siri ever since its launch.
However, it's still very early in the HomePod's development, and projections are merely projections.
Comments
The problem is that Siri is an embarrassment. I don't even try to ask Siri to do anything other than play music, and she routinely screws that basic task up. if she were able to do anything right, I'd expect it to be playing music (given that it's a speaker!), but nope.
Just to clarify, Siri does understand words pretty well. The problem is figuring out intent/meaning. I actually suspect that if Apple were to ditch the whole "machine learning" approach and instead just write a whole bunch of "if" statements, they might end up with a more usable product (although clearly in the long run, ML is going to be needed)
As an aside, I now have Alexa, Goggle assistant and Siri on my iPhone and after hours of asking them all the same questions it is pretty amazing for me to discover Alexa and Google assistant are just as prone to the 'I don't know that' as Siri.
By 2020, Apple would probably capture the top 10% of the market and 90% of the profits from this sector.
They’ll let Amazon and Google battle it out for the scraps.
Also, what constitutes as no an acceptable number by Apple? Only Apple know what its sales goals were. I don't know where this came from, but it seems like some think every single Apple product will sell like iPhone does and if it doesn't, then its automatically a failure and they should just ditch it.
Things take time to get going. Apple Watch didn't exactly set the world on fire (or so it seemed) at first and now look at it.
My wife's family does a family vacation to the beach every couple of years and we rent a large beach house. This years house had an Alexa device, but someone in the family unplugged it and when ask about it everyone just said to leave it unplug. They were not interested in it randomly responding and listen to the "what happens at the beach vacation says at the beach" conversations.
That installed base number I would image will be meaningless, people are buying these things and within a short period of time they seem not to be using them. Installed yes, but useful not at all.
Thanks for the suggestion -- I will do that.
But I have to say... the need to do that isn't really consistent with the "it just works" user experience that Apple generally aspires to.
Quoted for truth and irony.
Apple thought the point of a Smart Speaker was the speaker. The market is going for smart. This means that comparatively lousy sounding entries from Amazon and Google with better AIs and a cheaper price are beating out Apple whose product may have great sound but is crippled by a poor AI and very high cost.
Apple just messed up, that's all. It happens.
https://blog.bolt.io/what-cracking-open-a-sonos-one-tells-us-about-the-sonos-ipo-dcab49155643?source=email-a85cb02af0eb-1531147267935-digest.reader------0-49------------------d96737d3_a089_44e1_93c8_8ad360705ed3-1§ionName=top&gi=3f628ea04a3e
It appears that Amazon has both over engineered the Echo Plus, likely minimizing future engineering efforts for variations, and has the advantage of maintenance of its margins over Sonos.
So, high quality speakers are likely bought as speakers, and at least at this point in time, lack of a fully competitive Siri doesn't appear to be a long term liability to Apple not only gaining marketshare, but maintaining those margins by selling high ASP audio products. You note that lots of these are, what I would describe as novelties, and inexpensive ones at that, which will likely see replacement by future smart speakers with superior audio quality.
Looks to me like there is plenty of room for market expansion in the high quality smart speaker niche, for any company that wants to pursue that. Apple appears to want to pursue that.