danox

AppleZulu said:

foregoneconclusion said:

muthuk_vanalingam said: Forget tech press for a moment. What is your definition of "succeeding in the market place"? I see that @AppleZulu has given a different explanation for the OG Homepod to be discontinued. I am not sure I would agree with that explanation either. Someone who tracked Apple's revenue splitup by category very closely would be able to make a better logical explanation on whether OG HomePod succeeded in the market place or not. As far as I could recollect, the category in which HomePod was included did not see any noticeable growth in revenue in that year. But I could be wrong as well on that.

The OG HomePod was always being compared to Alexa speakers and the comparison almost always resulted in something along the lines of "lower price = better sales = better strategy". That comparison then resulted in people thinking the $99 HomePod Mini is what Apple should have done in the first place and proof that Apple had abandoned a more expensive product. Now that the OG HomePod has returned with new internals, those same people are having a hard time admitting that they were wrong. And they're definitely wrong considering that the Amazon smart speaker equation is now known to be "lower price = better sales = lose a ton of money and gut the smart speaker group".

I see it more as a reset on Apple's part. $299 is likely what they learned from the OG HomePod to be the pricing sweet spot. But the OG HomePod wasn't producing the margin they wanted at $299. So they took what they learned from the OG HomePod design to simplify the internals while also maintaining or improving the sound quality etc. 

If you read through these peanut galleries for a while, you'll see that this is a repeating theme that people do not get about Apple and its competitors. Apple never chases market share through low price/high volume/low (or no) margins. Other companies do, and it's at their own peril. Sometimes it works, but other times it costs them a lot of money. Even when the HomePod mini was released, the naysayers proclaimed its doom because it was still double or triple the price of the cheap competition. The mini is priced to sell in sufficient volume to support the HomeKit ecosystem. The full sized HP is priced to support music fans. Neither is priced to be a loss-leader, because Apple doesn't do that.