I will personally never buy one of these no matter what the price whilst it's not fully compatible with all major music streaming services like Spotify. I just refuse to be forced into using apple music. All my playlists and stuff is on spotify and I'm perfectly happy with it. I can either get a homepod and it would be very annoying to use spotify on it, or change to apple music which would also be more annoying.
Frankly even if spotify is included in a future update as mentioned in the article, I'm very skeptical about getting one, I mean what if there is a great app out there for smart speakers but then apple effectively bans the use of them except for their own? I just think it's a ****** practice by apple.... they can do it if they like, it's their product, but it'll never be for me after they've taken so many years to include spotify.