Apple‘s smart speaker is not selling as much as expected.
Apple’s newly released HomePod speaker costs $349 which is a bit higher than competing products like Google Home and Amazon Echo. There isn’t much of a momentum for Apple in this market, as the company has not managed to capitalize on HomePod. The product has now around 4% of the whole market, even though in the first 10 weeks alone HomePod had a 10% market share. The company has reportedly lowered the orders with suppliers.
Bloomberg is reporting that Apple has not managed to maintain momentum:
During the HomePod’s first 10 weeks of sales, it eked out 10 percent of the smart speaker market, compared with 73 percent for Amazon’s Echo devices and 14 percent for the Google Home, according to Slice Intelligence. Three weeks after the launch, weekly HomePod sales slipped to about 4 percent of the smart speaker category on average, the market research firm says.
In addition to being more expensive than competing products, HomePod speaker lacks some important features like support for third party music streaming services, and inability to pair with non-Apple made devices. However, future iOS updates will enable additional features like stereo pairing, the ability to control speakers in different rooms, and more.