“Apple has officially lowered the price of the HomePod worldwide. In the price has fallen from $349 to $299,” Benjamin Mayo reports for 9to5Mac.
“HomePod has seen promotional discounts at many third party retailers (eg: it’s $279 right now at Best Buy) over its lifespan, but now Apple has dropped the smart speaker’s standard list price,” Mayo reports. “This price cut represents a roughly 15% drop and seemingly applies to every region, not just the US. For example, the UK price has fallen from £319 to £279.”
Even when priced at $349, Mayo reports, “HomePod has carved a solid niche for itself and dominates the market for smart speakers above $250.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Move ’em on out, boys!
New to HomePod? Need a second to make a stereo pair? How ’bout one for the bedroom? Now’s your chance!
SEE ALSO:
No, Apple’s HomePod is not a ‘flop’ – March 8, 2019
After a year with Apple’s HomePods, I’m glad I bought them – February 28, 2019
Apple’s HomePod sold 1.6 million units last holiday quarter – February 20, 2019
Apple’s HomePod shipments surged 45% in holiday quarter – February 19, 2019
My HomePods were one of the best purchases I have made. Siri works great for me, I use it for home control, and the stereo sound us a delight. I could not be more pleased. I have three, perhaps it is time to pick up a couple more.
Add a line-in and I’ll buy it at $350.
ROFL! How old are you?
Kidding. Me too I want a pair of good old unbalanced RCA…
You’re silly. I want to be able to hook up Alexa as well….
Agreed – at present, the best “smart” device is Echo/Alexa. Homepod may have the edge in audio (if the marketing is to be believed, but at $700 per stereo pair, that’s a-crayzee), but without any way for non-Apple sources to send to it, it’s dead in the water.
Add bluetooth (and analog stereo line, for that matter) to Homepod and sell it as (smart) speaker — this way I can enjoy its audio, and both Alexa’s and Homepod’s smarts. They can compete on merit.
As it is currently, Homepod is a dog. Discount it and discount it until it’s sold for what it is — a good speaker with no useful input.
It’s an intentional crippling of a product to support an ecosystem.
Agreed on both counts.
For me to even consider buying it, Apple’s got to knock that “2” off the front of the price.
Oh, and ship the damn Mac Pro first.
YMMV but NO new Apple products in this household until the mMP ships.
Much better in price, although it won’t do much with a market flooded with far cheaper smart-speaker devices. Consumers don’t seem to be interested in higher-quality as much as getting low-cost devices with so-so quality. Besides, most of the world uses Android OS so Apple is facing a huge disadvantage. Both Google and Amazon can easily afford to keep cutting prices in order to hold their market share percentage and will simply undercut any product Apple offers in smart-home devices.
Google and Amazon are probably laughing at Apple’s feeble attempt to sell more HomePods. Ugh.
Home Pod is not a high-quality speaker unless your idea of music is EDM or Hip-Hop.
Not dissing EDM, but it is not critical listening.
The HomePod is a throwaway.
that’s nonsense…. i take it you like sour grapes ?
Like Apple is laughing at Whole Foods or Pixel profit?
Worlwide? You mean USA and the 2 european countries? What a laugh.
Even at a $150.00 you would be hard pressed get me to bite.
There are hundreds if not thousands of other speaker options that are just as capable & feature rich. If not more versatile.
Well, it’s now a bit cheaper than my 5.1 soundbar system…that does Bluetooth, by the way.
Yep, the key is Bluetooth.
The political jargon equivalent of “international community.”
Desperation.
Price cuts don’t make an AM Siri can a winner.
Jobs said people want to own music. He wasn’t wrong.
So you are recommending that we buy stock in Tower Records? Steve has been gone for 10 years and the music market has dramatically changed. Maybe you and I prefer to own our music, but when I want to check out a new artist I prefer not to spend $10 on something I might not like.
What did buying stock have to do with it?
Buying stock is supporting what is good for Apple. Mike talked about the customer, not the gambler.
Come on, TXUser, you are better than that.
I never mentioned Tower Records (which by the way remains very popular in Japan, but was mismanaged into oblivion in the USA).
Music has not dramatically changed. The means by which the consolidated music distribution business takes money from people (and gives them less value) has changed dramatically.
Change is inevitable but Apple isn’t making music better.
From a fair business perspective, the CD or SACD may be the high point of the recorded music history. In that era, the sheer volume of new music was overwhelming. Today, not so much. Consolidation is the order of the day. Apple leads the way by burying/breaking convenient song management tools like iTunes used to be. Apple Music subscription nagging is a major step backwards for anyone who grew up with music collections. To some, in fact, iTunes itself was a degradation of album cover art (remember that view?), lyric, and information. Apple could have kept improving iTunes, but they stopped long ago. The trend continues downward cor Apple to focus only on the lowest common denominator, the kid who is too lazy to use any music tool that isn’t preinstalled on his iPhone. Apple might as well call it Microsoft Music, because that’s what they are pushing now.
Or more precisely, for a company that supposedly was a quality step above the competition, Apple’s music business mimics Comcast video perfectly. Avertise the number of songs in your library that the renter can access, but don’t tell them that it’s all compressed and poor quality. Then condition them to just click on a few things because it’s too hard to locate the hidden gems, as Apple doesn’t offer hardly any information about artists or albums. Apple “curation” is an algorithm based on popularity polls of a small subset of music (what the major labels want to push this month) fed to you so you don’t have to think. Isn’t that nice, little drone bee? You get fed the same crap as everyone else, all nicely compressed and sanitized. Unless you work hard to train the algorithm, you will never be surprised. The vast majority of people will have their music exposure narrowed, not opened. You’ll never have to know the name of the producer or what other albums the producer made with other artists. And if just sticking to Apple defaults, kids will never have to hear anything longer than 3:30 long, no live performances with crowd noise, no groove dub from an old (legal) record rip. Never ever a song that wasn’t on the “Greatest Hits” compilation, and certainly never any rare classical, blues, or jazz. Kids many never hear a song recorded before their birth because, you know, the algorithm has identified that it isn’t popular for kids like Michael Bublé to learn the classics from grampa these days. Only what’s on your iPhone is hip. If you listen to lyrics, they will only be delivered in the language of the country your credit card billing statement goes. Want to hear the most popular music in Spain this month? Oh wait that’s half English too, and you have to exit Apple Music and go to some website to discover what people there like. What a boring world.
The day the music died has been a long time coming. First terrestrial radio and live DJs were killed off by Clear Channel’s coast to coast model of playing pre-recorded stuff from only the few artists the big labels are pushing this month. Then Youtube decided not to police its site, so it’s full of pirated audio and video that people think they shouldn’t ever pay to enjoy. In the cell phone era, kids think life happens on an OLED screen, so live gigs today aren’t even covering the rent. Live venues keep drying up to make way for more condos.
To the uncritical person that just wants noise in his earbuds, then streaming looks like a great deal. But see what it does to the variety of music you hear — plainly the future of recorded music in a hyper consolidated industry is bleak. Young artists are the ones most getting ripped off by the streaming media companies, noise made by sampling machines have been promoted over natural talent. Why spend years mastering an instrument, writing difficult passages, and live in poverty for years or decades when what the algorithm decides is that sampled computerized synth hop whipped up by less than 100 worldwide studios would take all the profits???
Jobs offered a great democratic model, which undoubtedly could have evolved into an amazing forum where middlemen didn’t need to get in the way. Artist could upload his art, Apple set the price floor for a song and offered users a convenient means of managing their music collections, everyone wins. Consumer could maybe have had the option to get uncompressed music for a little more, maybe correct metadata with the files too. Nope. Not from Apple. Apparently that was too much work to maintain so Cook abandoned the entire model to chase after Pandora and Spotify. Now offline listening is a pain in the ass. The iTunes interface sucks. iTunes file metadata and quality never improved so proper music management became a time suck. iTunes and iPods were left to rot. Now the artist gets paid fractions of a penny and is subject to the whims of Apple’s “curation” as Apple collects monthly fees for a low quality experience. No album art or info. No improved means of associating related artists, producers, etc. Genres and basic facts like recording dates are comically wrong. Search for 1960’s Motown hits and you are guaranteed to get Stax and 70’s tunes too. Talk to Siri about what live album Danny Gatton played guitar for Roger Miller and she’ll shit herself. Tell her to play the latest from Italian band Modà and you will almost certainly get Richard Melville Hall (Moby) from the US instead.
The end customer today is being railroaded into a subscription model that looks and smells an awfully lot like the monopolistic cable TV industry that Apple fans used to hate. Ironic, isn’t it?
I’ll be a little bit more succinct in my criticism. I for one can’t stand the subscription model because I don’t want another hand in my pocket.
Apple pricematched Best Buy for mine.
Love my HomePod. It replaced my Bose speaker- HomePod sounds so much better.