Apple’s HomePod speaker pumps up the volume on tech rivals

At the recent WWDC 2017 conference Apple announced HomePod, its own smart speaker.

It would be easy to couch these announcements as moves to combat similar products and capabilities from Google and Amazon, especially in the case of the Apple’s new HomePod smart speaker. In comparison, the HomePod was created to be your primary speaker.

Analysts said Apple is playing to its strength in the music industry by focusing on sound quality and its catalogue of songs.

This deal may encourage more home equipment suppliers to seek compatibility with eachothers’ products burmt don’t bet on it.

But the Apple HomePod looks to be different.

HomePod will be available to purchase in white or space grey in December this year for $349 (£270). Yes, it does hook up with HomeKit, but the list falls way short of the 10,000 skills available on Amazon’s Echo.

Many non-hardware companies have also announced plans to launch their own exclusive smart speakers targeting both local and global markets this year, alongside smaller startups active in the business segment.

If Apple fails to reach these two points, consumers are better off with a combination of Sonos speakers and Amazon’s cheaper Echo Dot, which is expected to be able to integrate with Alexa. Or if someone texts you about owing money, it will ask if you want to pay using Apple Pay. There are more people our there interested in buying or replacing their speakers that care about good sound quality than there are wanting a smart speaker that delivers ok sound.

Of course, this is nothing unusual for Apple to charge a premium for its technology products.

“Apple reinvented portable music with iPod and now HomePod will reinvent how we enjoy music wirelessly throughout our homes”, said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.

Did Apple miss a trick announcing HomePod without demonstrating the vision? Sure, you could use the aux port and a Lighting-to-3.5mm dongle, but this is a charging dock, and by god, we’re going to get this to charge something. The Google Home clocks in right at that same ballpark, with an MSRP of $129.

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.

Apple’s HomePod comes with seven tweeters arrayed inside the cylindrical handy speakers. While Amazon Echo and Google Home began stealing some market share from the Santa Barbara-based speaker company, Sonos prided itself on the excellent audio engineering that went into its speakers as well as the fact it played nicely with nearly every streaming music service out there. I picked the above as my top because they are the ones that will impact people the most and they hint at what Apple is looking towards.

If you’re trying to decide between a HomePod and Sonos speaker, a comparable Sonos can be had for $199, while you can get a much larger Sonos system for what you’d have to plunk down for a HomePod.

John Ternus, veep of hardware engineering, called out the compute power of Apple’s forthcoming iMac Pro by noting how its Radeon Vega GPU would be helpful for machine learning.

Apple has given Siri new male and female voices, described as more natural and expressive, and added abilities such as translating English phrases into Chinese, French, German, Italian or Spanish.