Apple delaying HomePod smart speaker launch until next year | Hacker News Reader

Apple delaying HomePod smart speaker launch until next year

9to5mac.com

27 pointsBoorishBears38 comments

I remember the good old days when Apple made an announcement and you could head to the local Apple store that day and buy one. AirPods were worth the wait, I hope this thing is.

I prefer the Apple that is willing to forgo a holiday shopping season to make sure the product meets their standard of quality.

I agree, but I think Apple should have waited on announcing this product until it was ready to ship

If they have no existing product on the market to Osborne then pre-announcing the product is fine and probably good if it depresses sales to competitors.

Oh, I'd prefer that, too. But there was a time when quality and availability would converge at the time of announcement. Not always, as with the iPhone and iPod Touch. But with the iPhone/iPod I imagine that was due to FCC filing than getting it right. The HomePod probably needs an FCC cert, too, but that wouldn't explain the long time to availability, with another delay on top.

So, yeah, take your time, Apple, and get it right. But that doesn't mean I can't be disappointed.

They announced the iPhone months in advance of its availability. Even the iPod was announced three weeks in advance of its availability date.

I would guess they were trying to gauge interest so they would know how much to ramp up manufacturing.

> In the end, Apple decided to reveal the iPhone several months ahead of its official June launch because it could not keep the secret any more. Apple has to file with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for the permits needed to operate the iPhone, and once those public filings are made, Apple has no control over the release of that information. So, Jobs said, he made the decision to have Apple tell the world about its new phone, rather than the FCC.

Source: http://archive.fortune.com/2007/01/10/commentary/lewis_fortu...

Mac vs Windows

iOS vs Android

Google vs Alexa

History teaches us that there’s no room for third place. Furthermore, Google and Amazon have a $50 entry price.

You missed Linux.

No, it's right there: iOS vs Android.

There is a lot of demand in the higher end market for a great speaker. Also, don't forget the apple ecosystem which people are already into. If and when Siri becomes as good as Google Assistant, people will buy into the homepod for sure.

There are already plenty of good sounding smart speakers out there (Sonos, for one). Most good assistants can connect to external speakers, as well. Banking on "it's not good at much, but it sounds good" is a very risky approach.

Plus, the Google Home Max will be out soon, which will presumably far outshine the homepod by being a good sounding speaker and a useful assistant.

Plus the Google Home Max has two 4.5" woofers and the Home pod one 4". Depends how well done but the Max should have excellent sound and a much smarter assistant with better voice recognition than Siri.

I find it a bit surprising that companies like B&W haven't integrated Alexa into their wireless products. Sonos has a new wireless speaker that looks nice, but I wouldn't consider it high-end.

I'm happy to be proven wrong, but isn't Siri on FAR more devices and used FAR more frequently than Alexa? You can talk about reliability of Siri vs Alexa, but lots of people thought Windows Mobile was actually really good, too. Same for the Palm Pre.

"lots of people thought Windows Mobile was actually really good, too. Same for the Palm Pre"

Wasn't that my point?

"History teaches us that there’s no room for third place"

As for Siri being on phones, I was talking about the home assistant market.

> Wasn't that my point?

My understanding of your point wasn't just that there's no room for third place, but that Apple was currently in third place.

> As for Siri being on phones, I was talking about the home assistant market.

This seems to be the crux of our disagreement. I don't see a home assistant market separate from the mobile assistant market. I see an assistant market, broadly, and think people will want the one on their phone to be the same as the one at home. They won't want to use Alexa at home and Google on their phone, for instance. I could be wrong about that, we'll see.

I think history is teaching us new lessons with this current generation of tech companies. Apple is not just bringing a new product, they are bringing the entire trillion-dollar machine that includes worldwide retail presence, millions of stored credit cards, one of the worlds best brands, and a huge and dominant ecosystem. Any product they launch now has an inherently unfair advantage that allows them to be late to market and still enjoy success.

Apple has a huge ecosystem advantage in the iDevice/Mac demography of the market. I for one am holding out until the HomePod is released. One of the reasons is that it will integrate (far better) with Apple Music, Homekit, etc.

Moreover, I trust Apple enough privacy-wise to put a HomePod in our home, but I would never trust Google and Amazon to not use my data for ads or selling stuff to me.

Finally, it may be room for more competitors here. Windows/Mac and iOS/Android are duopolies because there is an excessive cost to developing/maintaining software for platforms with small popularity. These are basically non-extensible devices (software-wise). So, the most important factor is whether it integrates with the ecosystem that you are in.

Yahoo!... AltaVista... Google.

I'm pretty sure there is room for third place.

Google isn’t in third place and they weren’t the third search engine.

Who is 3rd in search now and what is their market share?

About the same as the 2nd place. There is Google and then far away there’s everyone else.

If you have an Apple device, you're more likely to buy a HomePod than an Alexa or Google Home. The Home Pod is not dependent on an ecosystem the same way that a smart phone or computer is.

I know a lot of people that all have smartphone and computers and none of them have one of these devices. If this is ever going to be a successful product category there is still a very long way to go. This is definitely not a battle that has been fought.

Two things that I've found curious about the HomePod:

1. Apple does not seem to be positioning it against Google Home or Alexa, within the "Voice Assistant" market, but instead against Sonos in the "Wireless Speaker system" market. It remains to be seen if customers will evaluate the HomePod in the same way.

2. I think the success of the HomePod will partially depend on the future of the "Voice Assistant" marketplace. If the current assistants are relatively mature, then HomePod is late to market and will probably need to rely on iPhone-integration cachet to become even a moderate success.

The cause of this delay, however, makes me curious. My guesses are either 1) software delays, or 2) manufacturing delays.

Amazon kneecapped this product before it even came out. Nobody who has used both Siri and Alexa thinks Siri can compete as a virtual assistant, so all this thing had going for it was sound quality, and then Amazon announced the Sonos One. Barring a huge improvement in Siri, I don’t think even Apple die-hards are going to buy this in large numbers.

As a counterpoint, I intend to purchase one. The only smart features I want are the easy ones - "play X, pause, dim lights, remind me of Y." Alexa & Co. are better at the expense of privacy.

The combination of respecting privacy and hifi sound (assuming they deliver) is killer.

Is this a common perception? I've used Alexa (on Sonos One actually) and I thought it was terrible at recognizing commands compared to Siri. Even worse when it doesn't understand you it defaults to listing products you may want to buy. It felt like a parody of voice assistants rather than a real product.

I'd love for Siri to be more extensible but I still find it far more reliable, pleasant to talk to, and ultimately more powerful when integrated with HomeKit.

Had the Echo since it first came out in 2014 and now several Google Homes. The Google Home is far ahead of the Echo in ability to understand natural language and much smarter in answering questions.

I pre-ordered the Echo so have been using it for a long time too. Interestingly for me I’ve found it’s gotten dramatically worse over the last two or so months for simple commands that I use basically every day (turning off lights, setting alarm)

I'm an Apple diehard, and yeah Siri has a lot of issues. Very few integrations and doesn't work often.

I have a first-gen echo, and I will say, hands down, my iphone 7+ with "hey siri" can hear and understand me better. It's also faster at performing actions on my philips HUE hub.

One company wants to sell me a camel that's going to try and get its nose under the tent to sell me other stuff. The other company wants to sell me a speaker with voice commands to play music and turn my lights on and off, and is willing to take my $350 call it a day. I'm going to purchase the latter when it's released.

Put another way, I'll happily pay Apple $350, but Amazon literally could not give me an Echo.

Not surprising. This is going to be a tough product for Apple going up against Google. The Google Home is just perfectly in Google's wheel house. In many ways it is an extension to search. Then Google also has YouTube.

Meanwhile, Amazon is going to blow through a huge amount of Alexa devices (at big discounts) next Friday...

Disaster looms for Apple! Could this be it? Check back next week!

> Both and Google have similar products already on the market

Both WHAT and Google? Amazon?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com