Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Apple’s Big Screw-Up: The HomePod”.
Love them or hate them. You have to give apple credit for one thing. Over the past couple of decades, they haven’t really put out very many products that utterly failed in the market. I mean they’re still selling that absurd thousand dollar monitor stand because enough people are buying it, but one of apple’s most glaring missteps was this thing. The homepod apple’s attempt to break into the smart speaker market – and the funny thing is that apple seems like the perfect company to release a successful smart speaker.
It’S much more of a lifestyle brand than competitors like google and microsoft, and it has a strong foothold in the cloud services market. So why did nobody want a home pod? One big reason was that apple was late to the market. The smart speaker trend really started. Taking off shortly after amazon released the original echo back in 2014 and of course, google followed with the google home now called nest in 2016., but apple’s homepod wasn’t released till 2018 and by that time both amazon and google had released mini versions of their original speakers. Giving consumers even more non-apple options before apple could even get their foot in the door, but it’s not like this thing was the first time apple was late to something. The ipod, for instance, wasn’t the first mp3 player and the iphone wasn’t the first smartphone, but both products sold so well. They became a cultural phenomenon. However, the ipod and iphone offered consumers paradigm, shifting ways of interacting with their devices, whereas the homepod just kind of didn’t.
Although the homepod’s defining feature was supposed to be its superior sound quality compared to the echo and the google home that isn’t exactly a game changer when you consider most folks who want to purchase smart speakers just want sound, that’s good enough to fill a space, not Audiophile level quality, which leads us to another key reason that the homepod failed, but we’ll tell you what that is right after we. Thank you, green for sponsoring today’s video ugreen’s here to make charging more convenient with their nexo 65 watt charger. It’S a three in one charger that has two usbc ports and a usb a port in a super compact package that fits in the palm of your hand, though it’s small, you can still charge our 13-inch macbook pro from zero to 100 in less than two hours. It also has foldable prongs and a smart power system that intelligently adjusts output to protect your device’s battery, so check out ugreen and get your nexo 65 watt charger today, using the link down below the homepod sold for a whopping 349 us dollars and while apple has Obviously been successful at selling other arguably overpriced products.
The homepod price point just doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. It was way too expensive for casual users looking for a smart assistant with decent sound quality, but it was also just too much money for people who are serious about sound for that price. They’D be better off buying a cheap, smart speaker from amazon or google to take care of the smart aspect and buy hifi speakers for music separately and as an added bonus, some of those other options you can just plug into hifi speakers, of course, apple being apple. They could have found other ways to add value, but they just didn’t. Although siri was a massive deal, when it first came out on iphone, the fact that apple was late to the smart home game meant that siri wasn’t all that useful on the homepod.
If you wanted to control another gadget with your house with the homepod, it had to be through apple homekit and although homekit isn’t a bad ecosystem, there simply weren’t as many devices that supported it. As there were devices that already worked with amazon, alexa and google assistant. But the final nail in the coffin was the limitations they placed on music. If you wanted to listen to music, you could only stream it through apple music, meaning if you were subscribed to another service like spotify or title.
You were out of luck, although apple finally opened up the homepod software to support other streaming services in 2020. It was far too late to make anyone care, so the original homepod was discontinued in 2021, but apple is trying again with the homepod mini, which is much cheaper at 99 and has sold much better than the original model. But if that doesn’t work out, maybe we’ll see you know a homepod nano pro max xs se or something we’ll just have to wait and see. So thanks for watching, if you like this video hit that like button, you can also dislike, although it won’t show anywhere, you can check out our other videos, probably to the side somewhere, they’ll they’ll recommend some great ones or even over my face. You can also comment with video suggestions and don’t forget to get subscribed.
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