Our ears are ringing at the prospect of a new HomePod.
One renowned Apple analyst believes that a new HomePod might be the company’s next weapon in the fight against Amazon, Google, and Sonos in the smart speaker industry. For the most part, analysts believe we’ll see the new speaker this year.
As far as we know, Kuo didn’t reveal much about his expectations in a tweet, other than telling us to expect “great innovation in hardware design”.
The word “mini” doesn’t appear in Kuo’s report, which indicates that this is a full-size HomePod, rather than a smaller version of the discontinued model, which means that this is Apple’s second effort at the full-size speaker.
According to Kuo, the updated HomePod is expected to be released either in the fourth quarter of this year or the first quarter of 2023.
There is a good chance that HomePod’s sales would increase if it were released earlier, especially during the holiday season. The HomePod might be pushed back to 2023 if Apple has other goods planned for the end of this year—and it almost definitely does—to avoid pulling attention away from those products.
The 2022 MacBook Air, which has been projected as a “good holiday seller,” as well as the iPhone 14 and Apple Watch 8 are all products that Apple does not want to overshadow. We may expect to see these in the coming months, if not sooner.
It’s not like Apple hasn’t done spring launches before. The iPhone SE (2022), an upgraded iPad Air, and new MacBooks powered by improved Apple hardware were were unveiled at an event staged by Apple in March.
Apple’s smart home ambitions
According to Kuo, “Smart speakers are undeniably an important part of the home environment, but I think Apple is still figuring out how to win in this market,”
For me, the two areas where Apple is struggling to compete on that front are price and intelligence.
Correction of the first one is simple but painful. The Echo Dot costs $49 from Amazon, while the full-sized Echo costs $99 from the same retailer. HomePod mini costs $99, while the full-size HomePod costs $350, which is $150 more expensive than Amazon’s Echo Studio.
In the end, the speaker’s lack of intelligence makes it difficult to justify the higher price tag for Apple devices. While Siri was remarkable when it launched on the iPhone 4S in 2011, it has since been surpassed by Alexa and Google Assistant in terms of usefulness and versatility.
HomePod may be a lot more enticing if Siri had a higher level of intelligence, but Apple’s noble devotion to user privacy may limit its options.
As soon as the new HomePod is out, we will learn more about both scores. This will happen between October and March 2023, assuming Kuo is correct.