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Apple’s HomePod Isn’t a Hot Seller

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Re: Apple’s HomePod Isn’t a Hot Seller

#61

Post by jbob2000 »

natch wrote: post #52

If Apple Music was cheaper, maybe they would sell more. I mean sure, Apple Music is great, but I'm doing just fine without it. But I would consider it if the price was lower. Yes the price could be considered low by some people when you look at the value, but I have to look at all my different subscriptions, and it sticks out as higher than the others.

I've been subscribed to Apple Music for about a year now. I like the tight integration with the Apple ecosystem, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

For one, the curated playlists and radio stations are garbage. It seems like Apple has some deals with a few artists or labels and shoves them down your throat. Their recommendation engine is terrible too, it's just another way for them to promote these artists.

The front page of Apple music is often filled with hip hop and pop artist garbage as well. I don't listen to this, I hate seeing trashy looking hip hop artists and empty-faced pop divas every time I open the app. In Canada, they have an entire section dedicated to Francophone music. This isn't Apple's fault, our government requires it, but it's just wasted space for me, I don't listen to french music, give me an option to hide this crap.

It does one thing well, and that's it: "I have a song stuck in my head and want to listen to it now". Even then, I find myself going to YouTube more often than not.

Re: Apple’s HomePod Isn’t a Hot Seller

#62

Post by jandrese »

kristianc wrote: post #21
aqzman wrote: post #6

As with all Apple products, I'm sure Apple will iterate on this and keep making a better product until it can rival Google Home and Amazon Echo. It seems quite often that Apple first generation of new products (huge exception for the original iPhone) can't really compete with competitors, but very quickly, in two or three generations, they end up with the best product on the market. Although what really surprised me…

> huge exception for the original iPhone There's quite a lot of revisionism (completely understandable) that takes place about the original iPhone, but the iPhone only really got going with the second gen. The iPhone is probably _the_ case study for not writing off Apple in the first gen of its product. Writing in 2006, many of the predictions why the iPhone would fail seemed perfectly reasonable (high cost, carrier…

The original iPod was a pretty flawed product as well. The price point was very high and the storage was a bit less than it really needed and the scrollwheel was fragile. I'd say Apple didn't get it right until the third generation.

It's hard to overstate just how flawed the original iPhone was. You were locked into AT&T, you had to effectively buy the phone outright AND pay the subsidy (which never went away, no matter how long you owned the phone). The radio in the phone was obsolete before it was even announced (no 3G support at all). There were zero apps nor any mechanism to add apps to the phone, Jobs tried to sell the "just use webapps!" but the phone was really not powerful enough nor were web technologies well baked enough to make that a reality. The battery life was less than amazing and the entire phone was somewhat slow.

However, at the same time the iPhone completely disrupted the phone OS market. It focused heavily on the web browser just as the technology was finally there to put a mostly full featured web browser in a phone. Turns out that going to a webpage and having it render mostly correct was more important than shitty castrated apps hamstrung by artificial limitations on Symbian phones. The built-in apps covered most of the bases too, so the lack of apps wasn't a disaster. Mostly however it was the interface. People were sick and tired of godawful phone UIs and nobody else in the market was the least bit interested in improving it. The world revolutionary gets tossed around a lot in tech circles, but the iPhone UI was truly revolutionary. It was a bloody coup that left Symbian buried in a shallow grave out back and flat glass bricks sitting on the throne.

Apple's strategic advantage is that they have the cash and corporate willpower to iterate the design until it meets the market need.

Re: Apple’s HomePod Isn’t a Hot Seller

#63

Post by jandrese »

draugadrotten wrote: post #29
threeseed wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siri is available on Apple TV, Apple Watch, iOS and Macs. So Apple also will sell hundreds of millions of devices and allow them to improve their AI globally.

I can't wait. Siri "AI" is one of my biggest tech disappointments. I was expecting Apple to data mine the millions of voices and questions they got and teach Siri new things every week. Years later, Siri still can't understand that I want to call back my missed phone calls.

When Siri first came out I wondered if it would be able to improve upon the voice macros that were built into MacOS for years.

Turns out the answer was no. Worse, you can't even get a list of everything Siri knows how to do, so you have to guess and hope she doesn't just stick the query into Google again. So she's only useful for demos and for the two or three things you remember she can do. Apple never even gave us a way to define our own macros. There should have been a whole section on the app store for Siri macros you could install for various interests. She can't even launch apps! It's so ridiculous.

Re: Apple’s HomePod Isn’t a Hot Seller

#64

Post by brandon272 »

draugadrotten wrote: post #29
threeseed wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siri is available on Apple TV, Apple Watch, iOS and Macs. So Apple also will sell hundreds of millions of devices and allow them to improve their AI globally.

I can't wait. Siri "AI" is one of my biggest tech disappointments. I was expecting Apple to data mine the millions of voices and questions they got and teach Siri new things every week. Years later, Siri still can't understand that I want to call back my missed phone calls.

One area where I've noticed improvement in Siri is that it makes far fewer errors in recognizing what I am saying lately.

A year ago, I would fight with her constantly in my car on my way to work. "Hey Siri, play playlist iPhone 3" .. "Sorry, I can't find playlist iPhone Free" .. That type of thing doesn't happen anymore, for me, at least.

Can't speak to her overall capability to do other things, but in the car this morning I asked her to "Play Spotify" and she had no idea what I was saying - or at least pretended to not have any idea!

Re: Apple’s HomePod Isn’t a Hot Seller

#65

Post by jandrese »

jammi wrote: post #39
struppi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The original iPhone was: Firs, a big wow. Then a longer series of disappointments over the next few months. I remember I didn't buy the first iPhone because you could not write apps for it for the first 9 months or so (Just with JavaScript or a hacked version of XCode). And it was slow and could not do many things that other phones could do at that time. Bought an Android soon after and so far, I have stayed. Bu…

I bought the first iPhone a couple of months after release, which was in August or September 2007. The first jailbreak allowing your own software to be run on one was the reason I got one. I and everyone I showed it to were blown away by what was doable with it with custom software. The CLI-only hacked SDK was pretty hard to set up and use, but it was still better than what was available for other phones. Used it jai…

Yeah, Jailbreaks became much less necessary over time and also harder to do. I had gcc on the original iPhone and a full build chain. It was glorious, if a bit slow and annoyingly hacky because you had to self sign everything gcc spit out before it would run.

There's only a couple of things I still miss from the jailbreak days. One was a hack for iTunes that downloaded and displayed the lyrics for whatever song you were playing. The other was a SOCKS proxy that let me tether my phone without incurring the ridiculous tethering surcharge.

Re: Apple’s HomePod Isn’t a Hot Seller

#66

Post by jandrese »

votepaunchy wrote: post #9
jrimbault wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple Watch wasn't a hot seller Is it a hot seller ? I don't know, but I don't see many smartwatches around me. The only one person I know who has one and wears it is the boss of a friend and they make iOS apps specifically. But I don't have any numbers, and I can't find really any...

Apple was the #1 global watchmaker by revenue before Apple Watch 3. https://www.wareable.com/apple/watch-sales-rolex-tim-cook-55...

That statistic seem cherry picked. Their competitors either sell absolutely tiny numbers of luxury watches or are basically commodities and operate with relatively thin margins.

Competition in this space with both volume and profit margin is what? Rolex?

Apple is basically a corporate behemoth that moved in next to the Mom & Pop boutiques.

Re: Apple’s HomePod Isn’t a Hot Seller

#67

Post by jandrese »

guyzero wrote: post #31

The single largest app used across all smart speakers is Spotify, so it's not surprising that the lack of third-party streaming service support hampers HomePod.

I did not know that. It's Apple Music or the highway on the HomePod? That seems like a serious design flaw for a smart speaker.

Re: Apple’s HomePod Isn’t a Hot Seller

#68

Post by jacksmith21006 »

kondro wrote: post #20

I'd prefer to see the HomePod compared to the speaker market. I would bet that it sells better than Sonos.

Selling only 2 million in 2018 sounds pretty bad. Google sold 6 million in just 10 weeks.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/5/16855982/google-home-sales... Google sold over 6 million Home speakers since mid-October - The ...

Re: Apple’s HomePod Isn’t a Hot Seller

#69

Post by jacksmith21006 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #18
make3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is Siri that bad compared to the other home assistants? from what I've seen at least, it feels pretty similar to google assistant and alexa (which imho is strictly worse than google assistant, but that's just an opinion)

I think Siri is better than Alexa, worse than Google. Apple’s lockdown on the api makes it less useful in some ways, but I think it handles queries better. Alexa seems formulaic to me. Google is under appreciated — imo its way more capable. HomePod Siri is dumber, which 10x the irritation.

Would agree. We started with the Echo and replaced with the Google home.

Re: Apple’s HomePod Isn’t a Hot Seller

#70

Post by dingaling »

jandrese wrote: post #62
kristianc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> huge exception for the original iPhone There's quite a lot of revisionism (completely understandable) that takes place about the original iPhone, but the iPhone only really got going with the second gen. The iPhone is probably _the_ case study for not writing off Apple in the first gen of its product. Writing in 2006, many of the predictions why the iPhone would fail seemed perfectly reasonable (high cost, carrier…

The original iPod was a pretty flawed product as well. The price point was very high and the storage was a bit less than it really needed and the scrollwheel was fragile. I'd say Apple didn't get it right until the third generation. It's hard to overstate just how flawed the original iPhone was. You were locked into AT&T, you had to effectively buy the phone outright AND pay the subsidy (which never went away, no mat…

> and nobody else in the market was the least bit interested in improving it

Without even digging I can name the LG Prada UI as one other contemporaneous effort. The KE850 was actually announced before the iPhone.

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