Post #154

There were a lot of rumors about it and yeah, it happened. Yesterday, at the annual WWDC event Apple revealed their Amazon Echo/Google Home competitor called HomePod. And yea, it’s with Siri inside 🤖 But what’s more interesting - according to the Apple CEO Tim Cook who said “We want to reinvent home music”, HomePod is more focused on music first, not Siri. The price for this thing is 349$, which is really a lot in comparison to Amazon Echo (180$) and Google Home (130$). Seems like Apple executives looked to justify that higher price by pitching the HomePod as a premium-tier speaker for music - a big focus for Apple - while implying that the Echo and Home are not. But let’s talk voice assistants. From my perspective - Apple is doing the right thing positioning its new device as something different and premium because of 2 reasons: 1. Siri kinda sucks. A big question for the new speaker, though, is whether Siri is good enough to power its own dedicated device. Siri was around from 2011, but Apple has been slow to improve Siri's voice-recognition technology and set of responses, especially compared with Alexa and Google Assistant. A smart speaker housing an underachieving voice assistant could weaken demand. 2. Apple is late to the market. Amazon's two-year head start with its Alexa-powered Echo smart speaker has allowed it to introduce a whole range of Echo devices, partner with dozens of smart home device makers and sell millions of speakers. Google started selling its competing Google Home, powered by Google Assistant, in November. But as we know from the experience of past decades Apple usually knows how to break patterns and conquer the market. Let the battle begin 😄 https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/05/apple-announces-the-homepod/