Apple wants to rock the market with HomePod, faces challenges

In fact, if we learned anything this week it’s that Apple plans to leverage the hundreds of millions of Siri-powered iPhones, iPads and Apple Watchs in the market as it does battle with Alexa.

However, tell what you may to Apple fanatics, the HomePod is not without its obvious limits. Even Amazon’s new Echo Show, which comes with a touch screen, will only cost $230 when it’s released later in June. The Google Home clocks in right at that same ballpark, with an MSRP of $129. Again, it wasn’t the first of its kind, but Apple gave the tablet just enough polish to dominate the category. Even though its only 7 inches tall, HomePod features an Apple-designed 4-inch woofer for deep bass and a custom array of seven beam-forming tweeters that provide pure high frequency acoustics with incredible directional control.

Which is the best in-home Smart Assistant Among the three?

You buy 3 Google Home’s or 2 Amazon Echo’s for the price of one Apple HomePod! Better hope you’re using Apple’s calendar application.

The Home and Echo also include mute buttons. Meanwhile, Siri is making its first foray into a living room piggybacking on a high-end speaker. But that convenience vanishes if you can’t get voice control in the rooms you end up using the most. But the Amazon executive in charge of Alexa and the Amazon Echo said he’d welcome the idea.

Secondly, it suffers from the same compatibility issues as any other Apple product: it only plays Apple Music.

The Cupertino company described the 7in device, which comes in white and “space grey”, as a “breakthrough home speaker” created to “rock the house“. I hate market size estimates as much as the next guy, but wireless audio is estimated to be worth north of $50 billion.

Asked to reflect on how Amazon figured out that there would be a giant market for an “ambient device” that would listen and respond to you and do so ahead of its rivals, Limp says Amazon “was in a position where we had a little bit of insider knowledge that maybe others didn’t have”. That’s one hell of an ecosystem to birth from thin air. The Journal said two other Siri employees landed at Google and Amazon.

The speaker is expected to go on sale later this year.

The technology, a feature of the wildly successfully smartphone game Pokemon Go, overlays digital information on real-world images and is seen as an area in which the keenly awaited 10th-anniversary iPhone can stand out from competitors. Imagine pairing a well-done augmented reality app with a voice assistant capability in the home, and you might have something pretty cool.

Apple has introduced the HomePod, a voice-controlled speaker that will help carry out small tasks for the user such as turning on the light or increasing the temperature.

And HomePod can do that – some of the time, and only with Apple services. At the time, it seemed like that was actually leading to something. Now?

I wasn’t expecting Apple to come out of the gate with support for Amazon or Spotify music streaming, but I certainly was hopeful, especially after the company announced, in the same presentation, support for Amazon Video on Apple TV. Plus, Google has been fighting hard to lock up the No. 2 spot in the market. According to Strategy Analytics, in Q4 2016 almost 4 million such speakers were sold globally, of which Amazon commanded an 88% market share.

At this rate, you have to wonder if that’s exactly where Apple might stay.