My biggest question is this:
How is there even a comparison to this and a Sonos? This is a 7.1 omnidirectional speaker designed to fill a room with sound (like music, and Siri’s unsexy voice), not a directional driver intended for focused attention, like a show or film would perform best with.
Can we please get back on track with the fact this is an over engineered, although likely superior option to an Alexa or Google speaker?
I think
WE made this compare with Sonos. Why? Because priced at $349 mostly on only the strength of "better quality speaker," we needed to position $349 more toward comparable... or even a bargain, instead of trying to rationalize most expensive of the smart-speaker category.
I think we knew we could NOT easily rally around Siri as the "smart"(est) part.
If it's solely about better speaker hardware, it's easy to swap out speakers. In fact, the direct competitors have separated their smart speaker brains from the speaker in products like Dot. Buy a dirt-cheap Dot-type device and attach it to ANY quality of speaker.
So, we quickly decided that this needed to compete with Sonos so that the price could even "win" against select products... like rationalizing the Gold Apple Watch against Rolex and similar back when that product launched.
Else, as you seem to imply, there's almost no comparison. Personally, I see this trying to be Deluxe Echo much more than I see this trying to be a Sonos competitor. My own hope is that Apple sees it that way too and is going to roll out a Siri upgrade that makes this "smarter" than Alexa, Cortana, Google... and release a much smarter Siri to the rest of the Apple hardware I already own. From my perspective, that's the BIG "win" here for the bulk of us consumers... but mostly because I already have great speakers, some of which are already partially voice "controlled" by Siri via
TVs.
It will be exciting to see and hear what this can actually do though. Maybe there's a hidden "one more thing" not yet evident? Maybe there's some breakthrough innovation not available from competitors entirely focused on trying to build the best speakers in the world? etc. All TBD... soon!
