“The installed base of smart speakers in the United States, including the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and HomePod, has reached a combined 50 million units, according to research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners,” Joe Rossignol reports for MacRumors.
“CIRP estimates that, of that installed base, the HomePod has increased its market share to six percent as of the second quarter of 2018, ending June 30, implying that HomePod sales have now crossed three million in the United State,” Rossignol reports. “By comparison, the Amazon Echo has 70 percent market share in the United States, with the Google Home at 24 percent.”
Rossignol reports, “Josh Lowitz, Partner and Co-Founder of CIRP, suggested that it may be difficult for Apple to gain additional market share among smart speakers, unless it releases a more competitively priced model. HomePod is priced at $349, while the Amazon Echo starts at $50, and the Google Home is regularly $129.”
Apple introduced HomePod in the first quarter, and now has a small but meaningful share. It took a small share of the market from both Amazon and Google. Still, Amazon has a two-year head start, and Amazon and Google each have a low-priced device that accounts for at least half of unit sales, so it’s not clear how much further Apple can establish itself in the market without a more competitive model. — Josh Lowitz, Partner and Co-Founder of CIRP
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If Appple were primarily concerned with market (unit) share, you wouldn’t know it from how the company has conducted its business for the bulk of their 4+ decades in existence.
As we wrote just yesterday, “Unit share is cute, but profit share is absolutely gorgeous.”
Newsflash: Apple sells premium products at premium prices to premium customers.
For Apple Homepod is already a multi Billion business.
Anyone who hates Apple is just a nasty NuqFuqqle!
As Tim Cook pointed out during the earnings call, Apple effectively has 100’s of millions of “smart speakers” out there. They’re called iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, Air Pods, Apple TVs and Macs. Users call up Siri on all of those devices many times a day to listen to music, watch videos, look up information and perform tasks.
It just so happens they also have another product shaped like a smart speaker that has awesome sound but for those other tasks that seem to get people excited about smart speakers, they’ve been there for years now.
I’ve been calling up recipes on my iPhone and iPad in the kitchen for ages and a delivered pizza was just a “Hey Siri” away a long time before I got my HomePod.
and solidify functionality and the price won’t matter. The iPhX is the rationale. Why Apple handicaps product releases with product deficiencies is puzzling. This is not the usual Apple protocol of supplementing functionality as a product matures. I’m speaking about blatant deficiencies as compared to what’s in the wild concurrently, per competitor’s offerings.
It’s 1.0 dude chill. It hasn’t even been on the market for a year. Any obvious gaps in functionality exist because that part of the software isn’t done yet.