My house, for instance, is filled with speakers from Amazon, Apple, and Google-acquired partly to fulfill my duties as a tech journalist and partly because they’re so often on sale for peanuts. Now that Apple is focusing on cheaper speakers with the HomePod Mini-it discontinued the original HomePod three years after launch-its focus could help the company win over customers in the long run, especially if Amazon’s and Google’s attempts to monetize their speakers become more desperate. While the company’s market share is far lower than that of Amazon and Google, its narrower ambitions with HomePod are more in line with the way people actually use their smart speakers. Their attempts to clue people in to profitable features-for instance, with Alexa blurting out shopping offers in response to unrelated queries-tend to come off as unwelcome intrusions.Īll of which puts Apple in a surprisingly strong position despite its late start. Data reported on recently by Bloomberg-along with my own anecdotal experience-shows that people don’t often use their smart speakers for much beyond music and timers, and that doesn’t leave Amazon and Google with great business prospects for the speakers they’ve sold at thin-to-negative profit margins. I admit that I bought the idea that they were building a post-phone ecosystem, and that Apple was a laggard.īut over time, that sprawling array of features has started to become a liability. They’d even enlisted developers to create third-party voice skills so that users could order a Domino’s pizza or call for an Uber without lifting a finger. Those companies had spent years tacking on new features to their Alexa and Google Assistant speakers, and they had a long head start on integrating smart home devices.
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