HomePod Is Apples Unimaginative Answer To Google Home And Amazon Echo

Google Home and several versions of Amazon’s Echo, which utilizes the intelligent personal assistant technology called Alexa, are both substantially cheaper than the HomePod.

As far as availability of Apple HomePod is concerned, it will be available in December starting with regions like the U.S, the United Kingdom and Australia.

“It will reinvent home audio“, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said during the conference.

Apple at the Worldwide Developers Conference in California on Monday (7 June) announced HomePod, a wireless speaker that delivers incredible audio quality and uses spatial awareness to sense its location in a room and automatically adjust the audio. If you already have an iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, HomePod just makes sense.

Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of worldwide marketing, said on stage that the product has been in the works for “years”.

While Homepod is created to control smart home devices via Apple’s Homekit program, the device falls short of its brethren’s more advanced offerings.

Apple’s long-rumored Amazon Echo competitor is real. It’s a speaker – the gadget costs $350 and will be available in December – that will bring Apple Music and voice assistant Siri to your home.

It’s powered by an A8 processor that Apple says helps it tap into the cloud and provide the best audio experience in your room. The Home Pod is also being primarily pitched as a wireless music speaker, rather than an all encompassing digital assistant.

But at US$349 (S$480) in the US, the HomePod is almost twice as expensive as the Echo (US$179.99) and three times the price of the Google Home (US$109). Do you know, this is the first time Apple has announced a hardware component, at this event. For years, Siri was trapped inside the computers and smartphones, and finally, Apple has open the door for its own home – HomePod. One of the most significant launches at this conference was the Apple HomePod. The HomePod is compatible with iDevices running on iOS 11 and iPhone 5s and above. Siri updates the watch face with new information through the day – think calendar entries, flight information, or smart home controls – using “machine learning to adjust automatically based on your routine” according to Apple’s vice-president of technology Kevin Lynch.