“Apple said on Friday that it’s delaying the launch of its HomePod smart speaker until next year,” Todd Haselton and Sara Salinas report for CNBC.
We can’t wait for people to experience HomePod, Apple’s breakthrough wireless speaker for the home, but we need a little more time before it’s ready for our customers. We’ll start shipping in the US, UK and Australia in early 2018. — Apple Inc.
“The HomePod was originally announced during Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June,” Haselton and Salinas report. “It’s priced at $349.”
“The HomePod was originally scheduled to ship in December ahead of the holiday shopping season,” Haselton and Salinas report. “Apple did not provide a specific reason for the delayed launch.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Unfortunately, this is par for the course at Tim Cook’s Apple.
$268.9 billion in cash on hand. Still can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
Sometimes Apple, the world’s most profitable and most valuable company, still operates as if they only have five guys from NeXT working around the clock trying to do all the work on a shoestring budget. — MacDailyNews, April 4, 2017
Yes, we want Apple to ship products when they’re ready. We also want them to ship products when they said they were going to ship them and, most especially, not miss Christmas.
Real artists ship. – Steve Jobs
Luckily for Tim Cook, Steve Jobs left him a perpetual profit machine that can absorb pretty much any lackadaisical fsckatude that can be thrown into the spokes.
We can almost see the smiles of the Amazon Echo and Google Home execs from here.
SEE ALSO:
Apple CEO Tim Cook: The ‘operations genius’ who never has enough products to sell at launch – October 23, 2017
Apple reveals HomePod smart home music speaker – June 5, 2017
Apple is misplaying the hand Steve Jobs left them – November 30, 2016
Apple delays AirPod rollout – October 26, 2016
Apple delays release of watchOS 2 due to bug – September 16, 2015
Apple delays HomeKit launch until autumn – May 14, 2015
Apple delays production of 12.9-inch ‘iPad Pro’ in face of overwhelming iPhone 6/Plus demand – October 9, 2014
Tim Cook’s mea culpa: iMac launch should have been postponed – April 24, 2013
I think it’s too early to chime in on criticism. After all, we don’t know the cause of the delay. It may we’ll be a component from a 3rd part supplier that has created the delay and Apple may be protecting them from an unreasonable stock market overreaction by publicly naming them.
It might also be that there is some overlap in manufacturing resources on iPhones and HomePods (hint: the SoC) and priority is being given to the product that delivers the most profit as any good CEO would do.
With any luck it’s due to a last minute feature inclusion or upgrade or even a blockbuster content partnership.
In any case, waiting for an almost perfect launch of a premium audio product is far better than the can of shit that would be opened if a subpar product was released on time.