love them or hate them you have to give apple credit for one thing over the past
couple of decades they haven't really put out very many products that utterly
failed in the market i mean they're still selling that absurd thousand
dollar monitor stand because enough people are buying it but one of apple's
most glaring missteps was this thing the homepod apple's attempt to break into
the smart speaker market and the funny thing is that apple seems like the
perfect company to release a successful smart speaker it's much more of a
lifestyle brand than competitors like google and microsoft and it has a strong
foothold in the cloud services market so why did nobody want a home pod one big
reason was that apple was late to the market the smart speaker trend really
started taking off shortly after amazon released the original echo back in 2014
and of course google followed with the google home now called nest in 2016. but
apple's homepod wasn't released till 2018 and by that time both amazon and
google had released mini versions of their original speakers giving consumers
even more non-apple options before apple could even get their foot in the door
but it's not like this thing was the first time apple was late to something
the ipod for instance wasn't the first mp3 player and the iphone wasn't the
first smartphone but both products sold so well they became a cultural
phenomenon however the ipod and iphone offered consumers paradigm shifting ways
of interacting with their devices whereas the homepod just kind of didn't
although the homepod's defining feature was supposed to be its superior sound
quality compared to the echo and the google home that isn't exactly a game
changer when you consider most folks who want to purchase smart speakers just
want sound that's good enough to fill a space not audiophile level quality which
leads us to another key reason that the homepod failed but we'll tell you what
that is right after we thank you green for sponsoring today's video ugreen's
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three in one charger that has two usbc ports and a usb a port in a super
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it also has foldable prongs and a smart power system that intelligently adjusts
output to protect your device's battery so check out ugreen and get your nexo 65
watt charger today using the link down below the homepod sold for a whopping
349 us dollars and while apple has obviously been successful at selling
other arguably overpriced products the homepod price point just doesn't really
make a whole lot of sense it was way too expensive for casual users looking for a
smart assistant with decent sound quality but it was also just too much
money for people who are serious about sound for that price they'd be better
off buying a cheap smart speaker from amazon or google to take care of the
smart aspect and buy hifi speakers for music separately and as an added bonus
some of those other options you can just plug into hifi speakers of course apple
being apple they could have found other ways to add value but they just didn't
although siri was a massive deal when it first came out on iphone the fact that
apple was late to the smart home game meant that siri wasn't all that useful
on the homepod if you wanted to control another gadget with your house with the
homepod it had to be through apple homekit and although homekit isn't a bad
ecosystem there simply weren't as many devices that supported it as there were
devices that already worked with amazon alexa and google assistant but the final
nail in the coffin was the limitations they placed on music if you wanted to
listen to music you could only stream it through apple music meaning if you were
subscribed to another service like spotify or title you were out of luck
although apple finally opened up the homepod software to support other streaming services in 2020 it was far
too late to make anyone care so the original homepod was discontinued in
2021 but apple is trying again with the homepod mini which is much cheaper at 99
and has sold much better than the original model but if that doesn't work
out maybe we'll see you know a homepod nano pro max xs se or something
we'll just have to wait and see so thanks for watching if you like this
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