“Over the past 16 years, the wireless speaker company Sonos has had to contend with a parade of naysayers who thought competitors would knock it out,” Eric Johnson reports for Recode. “‘There were a lot of people, back when we started, saying, ‘There’s no way you could ever compete with Bose and Sony,’ the heavyweights of audio at the time,’ Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said on the latest episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask. ‘And here we are. I was joking with the team, the reward for having disrupted the space over the last decade is to get to compete with Apple and Google and Amazon.'”
“Next week, Apple is scheduled to release its own smart speaker, HomePod, which works with Siri,” Johnson reports. “But Spence doesn’t worry that Sonos’ customers are going to jump ship. One of the company’s strongest advantages, he said, is that its newer hardware — such as the voice-enabled Sonos One — can work with multiple virtual assistants, the same way all Sonos speakers can access multiple competing music services… That means that people who have already bought the Sonos One, which currently only supports Alexa, won’t be locked in if they want to use Google Assistant when that comes to the platform later this year.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple has more work to do on HomePod (multi-rom, stereo pairing) before we’ll make any judgement on Sonos’ future. But, competing with Apple in the high end smart speaker market (they only market in which Apple competes currently) is going to be a tall order. No smart speaker will ever work as well for Apple product users as Apple’s own smart speaker(s). And that’s not even taking Apple’s massive monetary and retail advantages into account.
According to new data from Slice Intelligence, Apple’s launch outperformed its competitors on the first day of release, selling 9x more units than the Sonos One and outselling the Google Home Max by a factor of 11.
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s HomePod speaker requires an iOS device to work – February 2, 2018
Apple reveals all of HomePod’s supported audio sources – February 1, 2018
Apple’s HomePod, the iPod for your home – January 25, 2018
One hour with Apple’s new HomePod smart speaker – January 25, 2018
Apple’s iOS 11.3 beta delivers AirPlay 2 with multi-room playback – January 25, 2018
How Apple is positioning the HomePod and why – January 24, 2018
How I got talked into buying an Apple HomePod despite my reservations – January 24, 2018
Tim Cook says audio quality puts HomePod ahead of ‘squeaky-sounding’ competition – January 24, 2018
Apple’s HomePod arrives February 9th, available to order this Friday, January 26th – January 23, 2018
Apple delays HomePod release to early 2018 – November 17, 2017
Apple reveals HomePod smart home music speaker – June 5, 2017