re: Apple Cuts Homepod Orders After Lackluster Sales

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TigerGman

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I did. It works great with Apple music and the sound is very good.

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My main gripe is that Echo's and Home were devices that can work across platforms and utilize voice and smart home automation much, much more efficiently and effectively than the HomePod can dare to dream of in its wildest REM cycles.

With Echo, you have a $30 entry point with a $99/year service like Prime. Or with Google, it's a similar price point for entry and without a need for Prime.

Apple's product won't work without another, far-more-expensive device that's tied to a huge up-front payment or a two-year long service agreement, period. It's easily the most expensive cost to get into the game, and that's not counting the actual cost of the product which is over 11 times more expensive than Amazon's product.

You can crow about the quality but it falls flat on functionality, so regardless of the design or build quality, it ends up being an inferior product from both a cost and a functional perspective.

You cannot compare this product to the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad or even the Apple Watch. In each case, Apple came out with a product that was compelling. Comparing my iPod Mini or 5th Generation iPod (Video iPod) to my Sansa tiny-arse, barely functional mp3 player before was laughable.

The iPhone was a revelation. Likewise, the iPad created a market for tablets almost out of thin air. The Apple Watch was a product that many people were already used to paying for at the price point it entered the market at to start off with, and had plenty of uses that extended the usefulness and functionality of existing Apple Products it was paired with.

The HomePod does not do that. It's a speaker that you can use Siri with. Siri being an already inferior feature. It does not provide the smart assistant (much less the polish) that Alexa or Home do...and it fails to hit these marks at over 10 times more of an expense to its market.

CAD and perhaps some others will tell you that I am an Apple aficionado. I have owned Apple Products for 14 years and extolled their virtues here since I was posting on the OT with the title, "Tech Board Post:..."

But this is a big failure. To be honest, it's not Project Ara or Google Glass...but it's in the same ballpark. Just a dumb decision on pricing and lack of functionality on Apple's end.