DanielEran

Xaviercross1971 said:

I think the author misses the point of the smart speaker market.  The question isn't if it will sell or if Apple customers will buy it.  I'm sure it's an excellent product and Apple consumers will love it.  The question is will it entice others to come into the Apple ecosystem.

For the Homepod to have any value, you must have Apple Music.  That currently consists of about 30 million people.  That's roughly the maximum amount of Homepods Apple can sell.  Some people will buy multiples, others will buy none, so 30 million units seems like a good number.  If you don't have Apple Music, there's no reason to buy it.  If you haven't tried Apple Music yet, I doubt a $350 speaker will get you to try it.

Here is where the problem lies for Apple.  Over the holidays, the Alexa app was #1 in the app store and the Google Home was #6.  This means that lots of Apple people were trying out competitors smart speakers.  It's far more likely that an Apple person will convert to being a Amazon/Google person based on the smart speaker than the other way around. Given that this is the fastest growing tech market since tablets, that's a worry.  It's also a worry that people who have smart speakers tend to use their phones less. That's not something Apple wants you to do.

Finally, I think they have a huge Siri problem.  Both Google and Amazon are in a race to come up with the best assistant possible, they can do this because they collect information.  One of Apple core values is to protect that info.  With this limitation, Siri will never be able to compete.  What might be a selling point now could become a liability down the road.  As people become more comfortable with speakers in their homes, privacy will be less of a concern.  At that point, the battle will be about what the assistant can do.  Siri will have a hard time keeping up without that information.

I think living in the iPod past and thinking that Apple will always win, isn't helpful.  Apple TV didn't over take Roku and Apple Music didn't hurt Spotify.  Given the limitations, it's hard to believe that the Homepod will make a massive impact in the smart speaker market. 

As I noted earlier in the comments, iPod faced far greater barriers to adoption in content and competitive hardware. And yet what happened? 

rogifan_new said:

I think there’s a context difference between what’s free in the box, and somebody shopping for a shelf speaker that they presumably want to sound good. 

And the market of people shopping for a shelf speaker that sounds good is how big exactly? I would argue Siri and voice UI is way more important than high quality audio and Apple should be gunning for Alexa and Google Assistant. I have no doubt that Apple will sell a good number of HomePods and people will gloat about Apple earning all of the profits in the smart speaker space. Meanwhile Siri and Apple’s voice UI efforts tred water.

I think Alexa is a gimmicky fad. It's handy to be able to occasionally request common tasks by voice, but voice is not a primary UX. We've had the ability to talk to computers and use voice control since the 80s but it has never rivaled pointing and clicking. We've had dictation for years but only a few people use it very often. Siri opened up useful ways to interact with iOS, initially as a marketing gimmick, then becoming useful in accessibility and in specific cases such as HandsFree and CarPlay and with wearables like Apple Watch and AirPods as an alternative way to do things when your hands are busy. 

But Apple already has Siri everywhere, and is incrementally making it more useful for developers. Alexa is signing up lots of companies to do things that aren't really that useful. The majority of Alexa is asking to turn on Hue lights or stream music. Siri is fine for that. The fact that Amazon is trying to get Alexa into the car, 4 years after Car Play was launched, should give you an indication of who is actually ahead, even with the phony anti-apple propaganda channels that have been broadcasting false facts for decades now.

The market for home speakers? Potentially everyone with a TV. HomePod would make an awesome soundbar, and doubles as a AirPlay speaker and Apple Music streaming device. The primary reason Alexa is perceived as being better than Siri is that Echos have multiple listening mics while iOS devices are constrained by a small mic and battery limitations. Lets see Alexa working awesome on a phone compared to Siri. Oh wait, we can't because Fire Phone tanked, remember?

anantksundaram said:

StrangeDays said:

anantksundaram said:

On this one, I believe Daniel is entirely wrong. I'll stick my neck out and say: it' is a silly analogy. The HomePod will do fine, e.g., sell a couple-of-ten millions, but it will not achieve anything close to the sales, leave alone the iconic impact of, the iPod. There is already an established market for these devices, and the two leading companies in this market are no slouches. Moreover, they've already defined the basic rules of the game. I do not see any major additional functionality that the HP brings. I agree that the design is beautiful, and I have no doubt that the sound quality is better.

If I am proven wrong, I'll be one happy shareholder, but unfortunately this'll be an also-ran product in Apple's menu of hardware offerings. In fact, even if it does about as well as AppleTV in terms of sales, I'll eat my words.

While you may well be right, you’ve offered no reasons for being right. All of the reasons given similarly existed for the other Apple product successes — established market, other big first movers. These haven’t proven barriers to Apple so I think more reasons are needed to make the claim.

I was specifically referring to the iPod comparison, and not making a broad statement. You are saying that there was an 'established market' for iPod-like devices, and from "big first movers"? Really? Who?

Specific to the iPod comparison, there were a series of companies in the late 90s offering digital audio products including DAT and MiniDisc. In 1998 I bought a Diamond Rio with 16MB of Flash for around $200. These were quite popular alongside the Palm Pilot PDAs. Creative Nomad sold hard drive players with more capacity, but they used a larger, clunky (2.5"?) hard drive. CompUSA had a wide selection of both of these kinds of devices. Apple didn't introduce the iPod in a world that had never seen digital MP3s. They'd been out for 3-4 years, the same as Alexa today.

Analogous to the Alexa/Assistant platforms, there were competitive barriers of audio formats: proprietary standards like MiniDisc, CD ROM players that used AIFF and/or MP3, compact digital players that used MP3, Sony's ATRAC, the music industry's Secure Digital Music Initiative DRM and later Microsoft's WMP, etc. Each of these offered some barriers for iPod to get around in content. Music labels tried to support DRM-locked formats (like Sony's and Microsoft's), threatening that iPod wouldn't be able to get new music. Those problems were all far larger for the relatively small Apple than introducing a Siri-equipped speaker that maybe can't tie into some Alexa apps or talk to your washing machine or whatever. 

In 2000 virtually all of the companies that later sold phones introduced MP3 players: Philips, Sony, Sanyo, Sharp, Samsung and LG. Panasonic introduced a new MP3 alongside Apple's iPod. These companies were all bigger, more entrenched and looked far better positioned to sell consumer electronics than Apple, which was generally confined to having a shelf of Macs sitting forlornly at some PC-oriented stores.

Nobody in the industry thought Apple's iPod had any chance of surviving into 2003. Microsoft was supposed to ship its Windows-branded platform RSN around 2002, but didn't manage to get it out until around 2004, by which time iPods had begun shipping in large volumes. But Sony and all of the other conventional audio product makers were all blindsided just as they were in phones, in tablets, in watches, in headphones. 

jrg_uk said:

I do ask myself the question “why now?”

With iPod it was an opportunity given by the small form factor hard drive that let them build a box the size of a packet of playing cards that could hold 1,000 songs (and more, in my experience)

What has HomePod got stashed away in there, hardware or software, that was previously not possible? Apple’s last attempt at innovative speaker technology- the Apple HiFi- was clever but did not become a hit.

rogifan_new said:

Counterpoint:

People who are buying a basic Bluetooth speaker on Amazon, or who are looking for the novelty of Alexa, are not Apple's target audience of HomePod.