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Apple Sold an Estimated 600,000 HomePod Speakers During the First Quarter of 2018
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I might get the HomePod someday but Apple got to drop the price at least $100 and make sure the limitations are fixed.
Maybe Apple could give a free one year Apple Music family subscription to entice people to jump in. As it is right now, I will just wait. Not in a hurry to get one anyway.
Maybe Apple could give a free one year Apple Music family subscription to entice people to jump in. As it is right now, I will just wait. Not in a hurry to get one anyway.
I'm sure the audio quality is great. I'm happy with my Sonos setup and doubt I'll be considering this when and if it comes to Canada (which it is strange that it isn't available here, considering we usually get most new products here on the same day as the US).
Its Kind of contradictory what you’re saying. You’re saying it’s A gimped Product and a lot more people would buy if it’s cheaper, so why would somebody by the HomePod if it’s a gimped Product to begin with?
The price point I think is reflective of what you’re actually receiving, it’s a music player first. The sound emanating from the HomePod is superb. If somebody wants a cheaper alternative, there are those on the market. I don’t think the HomePod is likely meant for everyone, in sense of does someone want primarily a smart speaker or music player.
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We love, love, love our Home Pod. We have a full size Echo that tried to replace the Bose SoundLink BT in our kitchen but failed. The Bose sounds better. The Home Pod is better than the Bose. We are on a Apple Music family plan and all have iPhones so it fits us.
The assistant part for us, on any of them is a gimmick at best. Siri seems to work great and fast on the Home Pod for what we ask of it....basically music requests.
Using Air Play from different iPhones is probably the best feature. It works 100000x better than BT. Changing source devices with BT endpoints is seriously a HUGE PITA. With the home pod and different iDevices it is super easy and works every time.
We will be getting more Home Pod's in the future.
The assistant part for us, on any of them is a gimmick at best. Siri seems to work great and fast on the Home Pod for what we ask of it....basically music requests.
Using Air Play from different iPhones is probably the best feature. It works 100000x better than BT. Changing source devices with BT endpoints is seriously a HUGE PITA. With the home pod and different iDevices it is super easy and works every time.
We will be getting more Home Pod's in the future.
I've kept the Homepod in the living room, having relegated the Google Home to the den. Clearly, the sound is best on the Homepod, hands down. However, I really miss the assistant capabilities on the Google Home.
With Homepod tied to my Apple Music account, it still screws up my music requests, and often replies that it doesn't know what song I'm referring to, or it couldn't find it in my library.
Unless Apple decides to implement a killer update to Siri for Homepod, they'll continue to live with a crippled product. And it is crippled.
With Homepod tied to my Apple Music account, it still screws up my music requests, and often replies that it doesn't know what song I'm referring to, or it couldn't find it in my library.
Unless Apple decides to implement a killer update to Siri for Homepod, they'll continue to live with a crippled product. And it is crippled.
Yeah. 6% unit share doesn’t sound like much, but it is with an ASP of $350. Depending on how many Echo Dots are sold, or Google Home minis, Apple could have up to 30% of the revenue in the intro quarter Echo ASP is at $60 or $70. Pretty good!
"The assistant part is a gimmick." I suspect you've never truly used an integrated assistant, because it's FAR from being a "gimmick".
Agreed. I think these so called "digital" assistants need another 5-10 years and a universe of our data to get to the point where we can use natural language to talk to them and when they talk back they do not sound like robot in a can.
The Echo's are were?...the hot holiday gift to give someone because you can't figure out what else to give them. Especially when the price was as low as $29 for the dot.
Uh . . . so, no. With the possible except of the iPhone and iPad (and not really even there in either of those cases), Apple has not competed on price nor has decided it wants to own the market in terms of units shipped. It is fundamental to what Apple is as a company. And I prefer it that way, generally, as someone who is both in the Apple ecosystem and is a stockholder.
It is not about having your hardware or software in the hands of everybody. For them, it is about having great or at least good-enough hardware/software in the hands of a lot of people, and making those products good enough people will want to pay a premium for them. That is clearly what Apple does with Macs, and they are making more profit in total than any PC manufacturer by far these days. That is what they do with Watches, and there really are no other smart watchers that are competing in terms of profits, or even in number solds. Same point for the iPad.
The phone is different. It is in the one area where Apple seems to want to have a ton of skus, though none of them are what I would call cheap. Not counting size differences like "pluses", they sell five currently as new on their site--X, 8, 7, 6s, and SE. From $1,149 to $349. And it seems to work for them . . . enormously. My guess is that they deviate so much from the other product line decisions on the number of skus, because 1) they have already done a lot of the heavy lifting, as a couple of these were flagships from previous years; 2) the turn-over in phones is so much higher; I mean seriously, the fact that a substantially minority of Apple phone customers trade up every year, and a good majority every two to three years is crazy good for them; and 3) the hardware is good enough that you can seriously feel OK using a three year old flagship with current software. Mostly.
At the end of the day, how profitable is the Echo Dot? And perhaps just as importantly, how profitable would it be if they did not sell your data . . . which is somewhat Apple does not want to do, generally. I would guess not much. But Google and Amazon have a very different business model . . . and I own stock in both those companies, too. I am just not in their device ecosystems like I am with Apple. Generally love Gmail, though, and their own phones are near or on-par with iPhones, I think. I buy almost everything I can with Amazon. With Amazon, I am all about exact product selection at the lowest price . . . I would hate them telling me I can only buy two versions of a thing, especially at a premium. Let them all thrive, and we'll see who can outdo each other . . . but I see no reason for Apple to try to be one of them, or vice versa.
Sounds like most owners like theirs...I might have to reconsider...
The more someone pays for something, the better it is (to them). You can find the same product listed at different prices on amazon (by different sellers), and the more expensive item always has a better rating. A paid version of an iOS game is always better than the ad-based one, even though it's the same game.
This list is a guess, but take the numbers for what they are.
600K units in 90 days is better than Google did in its first quarter (according to this) and Amazon shipped only 2M Q1 2017, of a much cheaper unit.
Give this time...Apple will make quite a good home in this market, no pun intended.
600K units in 90 days is better than Google did in its first quarter (according to this) and Amazon shipped only 2M Q1 2017, of a much cheaper unit.
Give this time...Apple will make quite a good home in this market, no pun intended.
Best feature IMHO. BT basically sucks unless you have a 1 to 1 relationship. If you try to change source devices, start playing music from another device it is often a miserable experience. Often you have to turn off BT on the device that you want to stop playing from, or power off/on the target device etc to get it to work.
I see this report as an exercise in comparing apples and oranges by lumping together two disparate markets. It’s similar to throwing Apple Watch and fitness bands into the same bucket, when they’re actually completely different products, with a rather significant price difference.
The $50 Google mini and Amazon products I categorize as smart microphones. Nobody in the market for the $399 Google Home max, the $499 Sonos Play 5 or $349 HomePod is going to be considering a $50 smart mic, unless you enjoy the sound of an AM radio.
Few are buying HomePod just to get a voice assistant. Correctly categorizing HomePod with other higher-quality, amplified speakers, with or without a voice assistant—Denon, Harman, Bose, Sonos, Google Max, etc—would be much more meaningful.
The $50 Google mini and Amazon products I categorize as smart microphones. Nobody in the market for the $399 Google Home max, the $499 Sonos Play 5 or $349 HomePod is going to be considering a $50 smart mic, unless you enjoy the sound of an AM radio.
Few are buying HomePod just to get a voice assistant. Correctly categorizing HomePod with other higher-quality, amplified speakers, with or without a voice assistant—Denon, Harman, Bose, Sonos, Google Max, etc—would be much more meaningful.
They might have sold 600,000 but how many were returned.
I bought two and returned both of them due to only having very average sound quality, definitely not worth the money.
Also Siri is crap, but we all know that anyway.
HomePod is definitely a beta product, it will probably take until the HomePod 3 comes out before it is any good.
I bought two and returned both of them due to only having very average sound quality, definitely not worth the money.
Also Siri is crap, but we all know that anyway.
HomePod is definitely a beta product, it will probably take until the HomePod 3 comes out before it is any good.
Sorry they are gimmicks. Sure it can set a timer!!!!!!! Or I even connected my Nest thermostats to the full size Echo we have. Asking Alexa to change the temp on the upstairs Nest is slooooooooooow because Alexa/Amazon have to log into the Nest skill with my user/pass (I am sure that is private
) then change the temp. I can do it much faster with my phone. Not to mention I have to be near the Alexa to do it.All of these assistants need to be spoken to in a specific manor for them work right. All of them can be tripped up easily. The need another 5-10 years and mountains of data before you can speak to them like a normal person.
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Sounds like most owners like theirs...I might have to reconsider...
I certainly enjoy mine, listening to music on it a few hours everyday. The sound is outstanding no matter which room I place it in due to HomePod's dynamic room equalization. Another nice feature is being able to give HomePod commands in a normal voice level no matter how loud currently playing music is.
What's great is it's always on, waiting for a command. Nothing needs to be turned on or booted up. I absolutely didn't want a "smart assistant/speaker" outside of interpreting my music requests.
HomePod is about music and in that regard it meets and exceeds my expectations.
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600k units? I highly doubt it, maybe 60K.
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I had been waiting for Siri to get better since 2011, but her improvements are minimal vs the competition in the same period.
This. Look at the keynote and look at the product page. It's 90% about music. Apple hasn't positioned it as a smart assistant. It's a music device, which is why that's almost all they talked about in the keynote and almost all they talk about on the product page. They've made a point to show that's the focus, and yet many still think it's in direct competition with these $20 devices from Amazon and Google. It's like comparing a Honda Civic and Toyota Camry to a Porsche 911. Yes, they're both cars, but they're built with entirely different intentions.
wait.. not having a feature is the best feature?
I'm not sure how to process such absurdity. More features, whether you use them or not generally is a better idea because it offers ranges of choice. Without Bluetooth, you are either subscribing to Apple's dedicated services, or using Air Play. This means that the Air Pod incompletely irrelevant to anyone with mixed devices. Adding Bluetooth, even if it's not quite as good as airplay, would have gone a long way to opening up the device to others.
If the AirPod is being considered not succesfull because of lackluster sales, trying to lock down functionality to exclusivity and proprietary technology is a bad business decision.
Problem is.......
It's simple to add great speakers to an Amazon Alexa or a Google Home, companies have been building and designing millions of different types of speakers for decades, and it's almost a non-issue to do that.
However, you can't just add a great voice assistant to a good speaker.
Amazon and Google have done the hard bit, and they can do the easy bit whenever they wish (better speaker/s)
Apple has done the easy bit (good speaker) but don't have the hard bit done.
Which is pretty sad and embarrassing when you consider, they started first!
It's simple to add great speakers to an Amazon Alexa or a Google Home, companies have been building and designing millions of different types of speakers for decades, and it's almost a non-issue to do that.
However, you can't just add a great voice assistant to a good speaker.
Amazon and Google have done the hard bit, and they can do the easy bit whenever they wish (better speaker/s)
Apple has done the easy bit (good speaker) but don't have the hard bit done.
Which is pretty sad and embarrassing when you consider, they started first!
Good question.
Amazon may have sold 4 million, and google 2.4 million, but how many of those units were returned after users concluded music sound quality wasn't up to snuff?