HomePod – Tech Narratives

KGI, which as I’ve noted before has a decent track record on future Apple products, says there’s a 50/50 chance that Apple’s entry in the connected home speaker market could debut at WWDC next month. There’s scant detail in the report other than that Apple’s speaker will have better audio hardware than the Echo, which has been criticized as being sub-par as a speaker despite its effectiveness as a voice-activated assistant device. I would certainly expect such a device to combine Siri, AirPlay, HomeKit device control, and possibly some kind of WiFi connectivity, but it’s very unlikely Apple could do all that well and still make its usual margin at the $130-180 price point that the full Echo and Home devices sell for. It’s more likely this would be sold in the range of the larger Sonos speakers (which Apple has been selling in its stores for the last little while), which would mean $300-500. That puts it in a different category from what’s out there today, which wouldn’t be unusual for Apple but would put it well out of impulse buy territory for most people and limit sales quite a bit. One big question is whether Siri is yet good enough for such a speaker, and what upgrades Apple might have in store for Siri at WWDC this year to help it get there. As I’ve suggested in the past, Siri’s shortcomings are at least in part hardware-based: more often than not, the problem is wrongly interpreting what’s said because of the tiny mics being used for voice recognition, and a big device should help a great deal with that. But Siri can also be frustrating even when it does understand what you say, and its more conversational elements are still pretty limited, which could be a big shortcoming on a device without an alternative input mechanism. I’m sure Apple will have some other special sauce in mind so this isn’t just another Echo or Home but something a bit different. But there’s a good chance this ends up being yet another new product category for Apple which sells a few million a year and which critics therefore contend is a flop, while it quietly generates a decent amount of revenue and profit for Apple (see also the Apple Watch and AirPods).

via 9to5Mac