No One Cares About the HomePod.

Normally, new product releases from Apple are met with an unprecedented degree of fanfare, so much so that even before a given product is announced people are already hyped and enthusiastic about it. And this is true when you look at almost every product in Apple’s lineup, every product except one: the HomePod. I consider, and and I’m sure that at least some considerable amount of people share this consideration, the HomePod as to be Apple’s greatest failure of the past 10 years. Even when compared to the setbacks that were the failing MacBook keyboards, the slow as all hell Mac Pro, or the so called slowing down of iPhones, none of these can hold a candle to the flop that was the HomePod. Why? Well it’s not because of what the HomePod is, but what it could have been. The HomePod, on its own, is a pretty respectable piece of hardware. It has an amazing sound, it looks beautiful in almost any location in your home, and it’s probably the best at being a speaker of all of the smart speakers on the market. But being a great speaker also happens to be just about the only thing the HomePod is good at. When compared to other devices in its category, like the Google Home or like the Amazon Echo, the HomePod doesn’t come off as that smart at all, and all of the flaws that stop it from reaching its full potential stem one root issue: price. When you boil it down, the HomePod just does not do enough to warrant its hefty price tag. What Apple needs to do to make the HomePod succeed, even if it means cutting down on audio quality, is to cut the price of the HomePod and market. I want a really great smart speaker that I know won’t listen to me, most people do and would pay good money for one, and the HomePod can fill that role, Apple just needs to get people to care about it.