How Apple Could Challenge Amazon’s $10 Billion in New Revenue

Siri can do the usual smart assistant tasks, but the device’s music commands are designed specifically to work with a $10 monthly Apple Music subscription.

Apple says the $349 HomePod will be rolled out from December, initially being sold in Australia, the United Kingdom and the US.

Alexa, the voice of Amazon’s Echo, could one day be chatting it up with Siri, her counterpart on the Apple iPhone.

But Apple’s discussion of the product’s powerful A8 processor (the same one used in the iPhone 6) may foreshadow how the product could go well beyond what Sonos offers today.

My colleagues Mark Gurman and Alex Webb reported last week that Apple is manufacturing and preparing to unveil its own home assistant, an Echo-like device powered by Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri.

On Wednesday during a WWDC session called “What’s new in tvOS?”, Apple did reveal tvOS 11 and there’s not an very bad lot to it, on the front end.

In a statement, Apple said the HomePod is “a breakthrough wireless speaker for the home that delivers wonderful audio quality and uses spatial awareness to sense its location in a room and automatically adjust the audio”.

The big draw of the HomePod is its audio specs, which Apple touts as best in class.

Apple’s AirPlay 2 Early Partners.

Apple is hoping a new smart home speaker will strike a chord with music lovers – the latest test of the iPhone maker’s ability to redefine markets originally staked out by its rivals. These are a more affordable solution than Apple’s ecosystem, if you wish to place several speakers about the home for a multi-room system. That’s why companies like Apple and Google have developed their own respective “languages” for enabling these devices to stay in sync.

Apple is so confident in this one-two punch that they’ve slapped a $350 price tag on the sucker.

The unveiling of Apple’s brand new smart speaker, the HomePod, has descended into farce after netizens swiftly compared it to a roll of toilet paper – among other things.

What Does All This Mean? And given the tremendous potential there seems to be in smart speakers, it’s still disappointing that Apple is playing it safe with the HomePod instead of taking a chance to make something greater. The new speaker that is dubbed HomePod, was launched on Monday in San Jose, California at the Worldwide Developers Conference. Even though Apple, Amazon and Google encrypt the data, recordings are saved.

New features coming to iPhones and iPads, meanwhile, include marginal improvements such as syncing messages to Apple servers in the cloud, saving storage space on phones and tablets.

And HomePod can do that – some of the time, and only with Apple services. That’s different for the Echo, where you need an Amazon account – which has a user’s credit card information and shipping address. Much like with Siri, Apple is just simply doing less than its competitors here. Though not flawless, he says Alexa is better at identifying when the Alexa wake word is coming from a television rather than someone in your house who really does want to ask the speaker something.

For Amazon Echo and Sonos users, the HomePod has the capabilities (and enhanced security features) to replace both. Here are three reasons I think HomePod is dead on arrival. Unlike devices like the Echo and Google Home, audio part isn’t secondary functionality.

The general clarity of the HomePod was good, however at times the bass did sound a little too heavy, verging on uncomfortable.