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posted by martyb on Sunday February 11 2018, @03:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the garden-full-of-apple-orchards dept.

The HomePod is the point of no return for Apple fans

The notion of Apple's "walled garden" ecosystem of products precedes even the iPhone. For as long as the company has existed, Apple products have worked best with other Apple products and that's been that. But the new HomePod speaker, which is going on sale today, ratchets this commitment up another notch. If you thought you were locked inside the Apple ecosystem before, buying a HomePod is like adding an iron ball to those chains.

The HomePod costs $349. That's a high price for the vast majority of people, and it pretty much guarantees that you'll be using the HomePod as the primary listening device in your home. The HomePod has voice control for music playback, but you'll have to be tapping into Apple's own Apple Music, iTunes tracks, or iTunes Match to take full advantage of Siri. Alternatively, you can use AirPlay from an Apple device, which gets you access to services like Spotify but with drastically simplified play / pause voice control. In any and all cases, to get the most out of the HomePod, you absolutely must have a subscription to an Apple music service and an iOS device to set the speaker up.

[...] Apple's HomePod is, by all accounts, a superb speaker that sets a new benchmark for sound quality in its size and price class. But it is also brazenly hostile to any hardware or service not made by Apple. If you decide to buy one, do so with the full awareness of how deeply ensconced inside the Apple bubble you will be.


Original Submission

Related Stories

Apple Struggling to Sell "Superior" HomePods 17 comments

Apple's HomePod has failed to take away much market share from rival devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home:

When Apple Inc.'s HomePod smart speaker went on sale in January, it entered a market pioneered and dominated by Amazon's Echo lineup of Alexa-powered devices. Apple has been touting the HomePod's superior sound quality but so far hasn't enticed many consumers to part with $349.

By late March, Apple had lowered sales forecasts and cut some orders with Inventec Corp., one of the manufacturers that builds the HomePod for Apple, according to a person familiar with the matter.

At first, it looked like the HomePod might be a hit. Pre-orders were strong, and in the last week of January the device grabbed about a third of the U.S. smart speaker market in unit sales, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence. But by the time HomePods arrived in stores, sales were tanking, says Slice principal analyst Ken Cassar. "Even when people had the ability to hear these things," he says, "it still didn't give Apple another spike."

During the HomePod's first 10 weeks of sales, it eked out 10 percent of the smart speaker market, compared with 73 percent for Amazon's Echo devices and 14 percent for the Google Home, according to Slice Intelligence. Three weeks after the launch, weekly HomePod sales slipped to about 4 percent of the smart speaker category on average, the market research firm says. Inventory is piling up, according to Apple store workers, who say some locations are selling fewer than 10 HomePods a day. Apple declined to comment.

Also at BGR and AppleInsider.

See also: Why Apple's HomePod Is Three Years Behind Amazon's Echo

Related: Apple's "HomePod" Sinks Users Deeper Into a Walled Garden


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Sunday February 11 2018, @04:04AM

    by Gaaark (41) on Sunday February 11 2018, @04:04AM (#636256) Journal

    Open the homepod portcullis HAL.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 2) by http on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:28AM (2 children)

    by http (1920) on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:28AM (#636272)

    If I was given one for free, I'd have to throw it away. No way to sell given that I couldn't even demo it.

    --
    I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
    • (Score: 2) by vux984 on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:46AM

      by vux984 (5045) on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:46AM (#636275)

      "No way to sell given that I couldn't even demo it."

      Look, I agree its piece of proprietary crap that I wouldn't want in my house either. But you'll have no trouble unloading it on craigslist or ebay or whatever. People buy stuff on ebay and amazon all the time without a "demo".

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by melikamp on Sunday February 11 2018, @07:19AM

      by melikamp (1886) on Sunday February 11 2018, @07:19AM (#636295) Journal
      They are sort of a darwin award, from great business-people to various nice persons $349 poorer (+$1389 more for accessories to make it all just work™®).
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:45AM (3 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:45AM (#636274) Homepage Journal

    I ripped them all then loaded them onto my iPhone with iTunes.

    I use the Cyber Acoustics "Party Speakers". While I don't care for the colorful lights they possess, they were the only Bluetooth speakers I could find that plugged into a power outlet. I'm listening to Otis Redding just now.

    I will be damned if I ever execute Apple Music.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Hyperturtle on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:48PM (2 children)

      by Hyperturtle (2824) on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:48PM (#636393)

      I'm with you there.

      I have mostly ripped my entire collection, and pass it through fancier hardware as time goes on. Great speakers can last 20 years or more; my speakers are dumb and my entertainment system is mostly hobbled together via seperate components. Local storage and systems handle the playback in the event I don't stick an actual media of some kind into the relevant media player device.

      I can't imagine the version of the bluetooth protocol that modern speakers are using even being compatible with the DRM handed down to us in the future. If history is any guide, consider how HTML5 evolved and how bluray already is, the context is that it's only a matter of time before that expensive walled garden gear is no longer functional due to incompatibility and needing to upgrade.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:15PM (1 child)

        by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:15PM (#636460)

        I haven't played a CD for I don't know how long, because why would I?

        I do like to have control over the stuff I buy however, so when Mrs. PartTimeZombie thought she might like one of those iSpeakers I explained to her how having an always on microphone in the house was creepy and wrong.

        Then I put together a Raspberry Pi, a DAC I already owned and a touchscreen with Volumio. This plays the music on our Serviio server and some web radio stations she likes through a pair of pretty reasonable speakers.

        There is no voice control because an always on microphone in your house (that you have no control over) is creepy and weird.

        • (Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday February 13 2018, @01:04AM

          by Hyperturtle (2824) on Tuesday February 13 2018, @01:04AM (#636916)

          Oh I use CDs often enough. I rip them once for the home; I still use them in the car. I also have used CDs and DVDs as data carriers for mp3s and oggs; you can fit a lot of compressed audio on those disks! And they are more flexible than a USB stick when it comes to keeping data on something where I can find it later. (I keep wanting to reuse USB sticks for something else...) This is from a guy that bought blank diskettes for his c64 not long ago, despite getting solid state storage and wireless ethernet for it, so your mileage clearly will vary.

          I actually have a similar setup for personal audio that you described. Except that it's one of the original Roku streaming radio appliances; it can stream from a local file share as well and can be controlled via a PC and post a play list on its dot matrixy screen in a scrolling marquee -- as well as visible on a webserver it has built into it. We bought some nice shelf speakers for it and she uses it while using her computer -- if the PC crashes or she's doing a data transfer or something, her PC won't bog down the playback.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @06:23AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @06:23AM (#636284)

    They're even tastier! Now laced with Jobs' juices!

  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Sunday February 11 2018, @08:39AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 11 2018, @08:39AM (#636304) Journal

    How many of these Apple Fanbois are the same people who chase after UFO sightings, hoping to be anally probed by the lizard people? How many of them are flat earthers? For the sake of our more progressive members, I'll ask, how many of them are secret Nazis? But, please, let us not wake up the Sheeple!! https://xkcd.com/1013/ [xkcd.com]

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @09:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @09:27AM (#636314)

    >For as long as the company has existed, Apple products have worked best with other Apple products...

    no, from the apple ][ to powerpcs apple was easy to interface with 3rd party stuff. macs had the newer interfaces, scsi firewire, but they were standard. The apple 2 also had most memory mapped features documented, modulo some reserved for the future bits and possibly a backdoor*, which would be a hackers' dream nowadays...

    *) not that there were many places to hide it

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