Love my 4 HomePods. My home wouldn’t feel complete without them now after all this time. Just another part of the ecosystem really. I picked up my last 3 on eBay for approx £160 - £180 each so perhaps that’s why I don’t feel any negativity whatsoever about it. Lucky to find several 2nd hand ones in perfect condition. I think there should be a HomePod Mini - it’s probably coming. (if only to gain more market share due to a reduced cost)
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple's HomePod Estimated to Have Just 5% of Smart Speaker Market Share in U.S.
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Only Apple would consider a $150 device to be a "more affordable" alternative when the market is already saturated with $25 (let's be honest, who buys them at full price?) devices that perform much better.
HomePod is #1 in market share for private smart speakers that don't commoditize 100% of your interactions with their devices.
I’m getting the Echo Show 5 for Christmas, will replace my Echo Dot 2nd gen that I got for £30 in an Amazon sale, got the Show 5 in the Prime sale for £50. So that’s a decent sounding speaker with screen that can show lots of info and play Prime video, and no doubt You Tube at some point. And it’s a clock alarm and has Alexa built in.
And it’s open to run with many smart home products and platforms and music streaming services, and it has Bluetooth built in..
And then I look at the Apple HomePod, it’s £289, rarely goes on sale if ever, sounds great sure, but it lacks sooooooo many features and is locked down like Fort Knox, and has crap Siri on it.
I can clearly see why Apple is failing and Amazon is winning, they can make great sounding speakers but that’s about it.
And it’s open to run with many smart home products and platforms and music streaming services, and it has Bluetooth built in..
And then I look at the Apple HomePod, it’s £289, rarely goes on sale if ever, sounds great sure, but it lacks sooooooo many features and is locked down like Fort Knox, and has crap Siri on it.
I can clearly see why Apple is failing and Amazon is winning, they can make great sounding speakers but that’s about it.
I have a 1st gen echo in my bedroom, the kids each have a dot and there is a HomePod in the living room.
I love my HomePod, but the kids like the features of their Dot's and the HomePod sound quality and capability is really too much for small rooms, at least too much for me to justify more than the one I have...
I love my HomePod, but the kids like the features of their Dot's and the HomePod sound quality and capability is really too much for small rooms, at least too much for me to justify more than the one I have...
The Jony Ive blindness strikes again. Why put the display on the top, when it could have been used to communicate, for example.
I don't know... the sound is great, but other than that... if it had some extra features like integrated Apple TV or something. Some vision what to do with it in the future. They clearly don't care about it or they don't know what to do with it. You can't even buy it officialy in a lot of countries in EU, because Siri doesn't support our languages (like here in Czech Republic). I really feel like Apple is abandoning a lot of their products. I would consider buying one if it supported my native language. It all takes too long...
Target quickly sold out when they had them down to $199. That's probably the sweet spot on pricing.
Unsurprising. It’s an overpriced dumb mono speaker.
I’d like to think that most Apple users are smart enough to avoid having a smart speaker of any kind in their home.
I can’t believe people are suckers enough to actually pay money for Amazon and/or Google to listen to everything going on in their homes. If Facebook made a smart speaker, would they buy that too?
I can’t believe people are suckers enough to actually pay money for Amazon and/or Google to listen to everything going on in their homes. If Facebook made a smart speaker, would they buy that too?
Key word is Premium. This is Apple's brand. They aren't even trying to compete with the low budget stuff Amazon is making. They get compared, obviously. But they're not the same product category and not the same target audience.
I would guess we'll never see a $30 junk speaker from Apple, and anything they release that falls in between their current offering and that $20-$30 range will still be seen as overpriced by everyone that wants an Apple echo / google home.
The Homepod -- purely from a cost to build perspective -- is not really overpriced. The problem with its price is that the average consumer does not know or care just how advanced the technology in these things is (and there are plenty of people here who will even deny that there's anything advanced about it).
People just don't value it, just like they probably wouldn't spend money to buy nice speakers otherwise. Maybe they're interested in something mid-range... maybe Apple can produce something that is decent but not as good as the homepod *speaker-wise* to sell a few more. (I'm sure people will still complain about their price though because they're not $25).
But I don't ever see there being a super cheap one.
It's a wireless speaker without bluetooth-- what did you expect?
Though $150 is definitely “more affordable” than $300, Apple never said that. And HomePod has excellent sound compared to the smart mic products sold by Amazon and Google. If you care about how music sounds when you’re listening, you can’t possibly say the $25 devices “perform much better” than HomePod.
Yep. If the HomePod had entered the market at $199 it would have done much better, even against the super cheap $25 alternatives. I would have picked one up day 1 at that price. But, $350 and now $299 is just too much regardless of nice it sounds.
Glass half full look: they were so late to the market 5% is s great result.
From a business perspective don't you then have to ask why they went the route they did?
I have 4 HomePods, and bought them to replace 4 Sonos speakers ( a mixture of Play 1’s and Play 5’s). In my opinion 1 HomePod sounds better than 1 Play 1 and two stereo linked Homepod’s Sound better than 1 Play 5. I find Siri works well for all my music requests and I can quickly transfer music from one room to the next. Comparing Sonos to HomePod, the Homepods I think come out well compared to performance and price. However compared to Amazon and Google’s smart speakers Apple’s do appear expensive and offer reduced voice assistant performance. Rather than try to make a high margin on the Homepods, perhaps Apple’s pricing should be reduced to drive increased sales of Apple Music subscriptions. I know Apple has reduced the price recently - I am not sure what impact that has had on sales.
I hope Apple keeps the HomePod line going as I would not hesitate in buying them again. Stereo linked Homepods sound amazing. I guess most people are happy with slightly lower audio quality for a significant reduction in price.
I hope Apple keeps the HomePod line going as I would not hesitate in buying them again. Stereo linked Homepods sound amazing. I guess most people are happy with slightly lower audio quality for a significant reduction in price.
Well those who value it will buy it. But so far that’s apparently only 4,000,000 customers in the US. A billion dollars of revenue isn’t much to Apple.
They may only have 5% market share but I bet they have over 75% of the total profit for smart speakers. If you were a company, would you rather have 75% market share or 75% of the market profit?
Good premise, but I'm not sure the facts support the conclusion. Assuming that Apple was willing to sell the HomePod "at cost"... it would still be TOO FREAKIN EXPENSIVE because Apple totally missed the mark on what people wanted. High-end speaker? Nope. SMART device? Yep. Connectivity with many services and capabilities? Sure. Updated frequently? Of course! Instead we got a high quality speaker with little to no smart capabilities that is updated only a couple of times a year.
Apple has managed to deliver an amazing solution to a problem that the major of people simply don't have, all the while ignoring the use-cases that they want.