Apple introduces smart compact music speaker

Another disadvantage it has is that music support only comes from Apple Music. Being a top seed has its advantages. The speaker will be powered by virtual assistant Siri. If Apple manages to beat the latter two in terms of sound quality and match Amazon and Google in terms of voice integration, the price could be justified for Apple device users.

Apple has announced it is is launching a smart home speaker and electronic assistant called HomePod, created to compete with Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home devices.

Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has stressed the importance of Apple’s services business, predicting it will double in size by 2021. “Apple is smart to position it as music centric rather than yet another smart speaker or just a home for a digital assistant”, Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research, told CNET. Speaking at the WWDC conference, Apple’s marketing SVP Phil Schiller boldly said, “This is a chance to reinvent music”. This is Apple’s long-awaited competitor to Amazon’s popular Echo speark.

Other speakers that do the same thing already exist like the Google Home or the Amazon Echo but these products aren’t fully integrated into the Apple ecosystem so this is why it is a big deal in the Apple community.

Speaking to USA Today in an interview published on Wednesday, Amazon senior vice president of devices David Limp seemed unmoved by Apple’s new smart home speaker HomePod. What’s more, you can even ask Siri specific questions like, “Who’s the guitarist on this song?” if you’re really feeling a particular guitar solo.

The HomePod now only supports Apple Music. When it does send information, it will be encrypted and will send an anonymous Siri ID to help with the commands the user is looking for. A smart speaker utilizing an underachieving voice assistant could dampen interest in the product. It features high-excursion woofer with six microphones and internal low-frequency calibration microphone for automatic mass correction.

And HomePod can do that – some of the time, and only with Apple services.

For connectivity, both Amazon and Google have their units connect through wi-fi and BlueTooth while the Apple HomePod so far only connects by wi-fi only. “From our standpoint, it’s a little different philosophically from how we’re looking at Echo”.