“Late last year, Apple announced that it would delay the promised release of its HomePod smart speaker to early 2018,” Dan Moren writes for Macworld. “The competition already promises to be fierce: Amazon and Google are already entrenched, while everybody from Lenovo to Sonos has been jumping in with me-too offerings.”
“A new report from Canalys says that the smart speaker market is forecast to spike this year, outpacing other technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality. In a rare moment of (for it) transparency, Amazon said it had sold tens of millions of Echo devices during the holidays. (Though many of those sales are likely for the low-cost devices [with which] Apple won’t compete,” Moren writes. “By all accounts, the version of the HomePod shown to press during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last year was far from a fully functional prototype.”
“We might very well never know exactly what was behind the HomePod delay,” Moren writes. “Regardless, though, the stakes are upped: after pushing such a product back, the pressure’s on to make sure it is indeed ‘right.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re going to heed our moms’ “if you can’t say something nice” advice here.
SEE ALSO:
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Why Apple’s HomePod is three years behind Amazon’s Echo – November 21, 2017
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