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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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 15 2018, @10:08AM (2 children)
Amusing.
If you want the highest fidelity you can get for your music, there's FLAC or ALAC. 192 kbps MP3, M4A, or Ogg Vorbis ain't it.
Personally, I rip my music to q10 Ogg Vorbis, which is at 500 kbps.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 15 2018, @11:36AM (1 child)
I think that archfeld implies that he rips music at higher than 192, but he will accept 192 when nothing better is available. He pretty clearly states that he'll accept nothing lower. Just read his post again, and see if what you thought you read is actually what he said.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 15 2018, @11:56AM
Diff AC here. If you are ripping from CDs, what would ever be the point of making 192 kbps MP3s instead of just doing FLAC, WAV, or 320 kbps MP3 if you need that format? I guess the answer is some mix of needing to save precious megabytes years ago when he was actually ripping discs (who bothers anymore?), and certain recordings not benefiting *that* much from the full quality.