PaulieP

Comparing to Echo and saying it doesn't make "real" phone calls is ridiculous. If you're at home and you're calling a US number on your iPhone while on wifi calling, it's just as "real"as a call on Echo to a US number. 

You should also be comparing to Google's calling implementation which now works on the Home series, as well as growing numbers of third party speakers (Insignia first, now JBL).

Google's calling is also real calling, doesn't need any phone at all, and can be tied to Google Voice. And cleaner integration with contacts vs Alexa. HomePod is better at contact calling in time to convo though, to me.

The iPhone integration is a double edged sword for HomePod. Architecturally, a strategic blunder resulting in low sales so I expect that their smart speaker strategy will have some big changes come June.

I think on the calling side it's a drawback as Google's implementation is the most flexible and doesn't need a smartphone. On the taking calls side, I think HomePod is a better experience.

one thing that benefits everyone, in a perverse way, is the competition absolutely eating apples lunch in the smart speaker market (in the smart home for that matter). It will force them to innovate and deliver far more for less money on the next iteration than they normally would in their typical fashion.

Where to start with this highly biased article...

China is scorched Earth for Western smart speakers . The market there is growing for Alibaba, Baidu, etc because of inexpensive product linked to popular local ecosystems . iPhones selling in china you say? Apple predicts a 50% slowdown in sales in China this year. They will not seed the market enough to drive volume especially because of local market support for Chinese ecosystems. Price differential will keep the total available market limited to only a fraction of the Apple faithful. The rest of them are more faithful to Baidu and others that are more integrated with their daily lives.

HomeKit will not drive adoption. Despite recent desperation for partnerships, thanks to Amazon and Google, HomeKit is now an afterthought in most smart home connectivity conversations by consumers and homebuilders.

Thanks to Googles John Gianndrea now at Apple, Siri's smartphone smarts have improved greatly but it's capabilities on smart speakers have yet to be tested for improvement . Unfortunately Homepod is hamstrung by its iPhone-shackled architecture so it will be a challenge to get it to feature parity with the competition.

Apple does not chase market share. Yes. That is definitely a stance they have had to take over the last decade since they have absolutely no choice but to say that, with their losing the Lions share of share in both tablets and smartphones. But with Android at 85% of global smartphone share and slowly creeping upward every few years, the differential is too much to ignore, which is why all islands of iPhone-only holdouts in terms of apps, support, compatibility etc have been nearly eradicated. Too large a base to ignore.

The opposite is in effect for Homepod. If they do not grow their share and Installed base rapidly, they will not have enough market relevance to matter. Revenue and profit are short term overly shareholder focused things to focus on. Long term things are market presence and dominance. The article is thinking checkers when the game is chess .

Hence the desperation to launch a cheaper Homepod. Apple was supposed to hit it big in china and India.. but iPhone is floundering in China and has failed in India.

Author is making the same projection mistake with Homepod. It is an excellent sounding piece of kit but it is limited in overall capabilities and appeal. Don't count on "new markets" to buoy its fortunes, especially ones that are incredibly competitive.

If Homepod grows beyond healthy small single digits niche player, color me pleasantly surprised. 

This entire article is heavy with straw-grasping. I dont think the author goes to IFA, CES, CEDIA, ISE, is an insider, or has solid overview of the industry.

In terms of scale, it's Google Assistant''s race to lose, with 1 billion GA devices as of Jan 2019 and Android at 80-85 percent of global smartphone shipments.. , Chromecast Built-in a far larger supported audio and video casting standard than AirPlay, Android TV taking over the pay TV industry as a platform (over 100 operators and counting} and so on.

However Alexa still has the lions share of smart home support, but it's rapidly equalizing between Alexa and GA. Siri and HomeKit are an afterthought in most industry conversations about the smart home. Voice has indeed become the new primary interface there and Apple is trying feverishly to get relevance back. Hence trying to push a handful of new HK products at CES, striking AirPlay 2 deals, and putting up building sized banners during CES - a show normally Apple couldn't care less about in the past.

If you think Alexa, and Echo sales, have amounted to nothing, then you're having a checkers thought process in a chess level topic. There's a lot of pro Apple bias here in the writing compromising any honest assessment.

Come back to this article in a year and see how it reads. Apple snatched up Giannandrea in order to help drastically shore up Siri, a hail Mary hire they wouldn't need if Siri was in a good position or faring well competitively. With their privacy stance, they can never leverage cloud data for personalization the way Google can - so their only card to play is to go very deep into on-device based AI and machine learning. Which I expect them to excel at. However much of the market is leveraging cloud based services. Not just intelligence.

Siri and HomePod issues are interrelated, in that they're indicative of Apple having lost the plot competitively. The pressure is on them now to change tack.