A HomePod a Day Keeps the TV at Play (Premium)

We don't write much about Apple's HomePod line of smart speakers here at Thurrott.com, but I'm suddenly knee-deep in them. They work well within the company's ecosystem and not at all otherwise, which is problematic and makes me wonder what all the fuss was about Sonos before its recent "Sonosgate" new app troubles. Kind of.

Curious about the history of these speakers--I have only a vague memory here, as I never intended to buy one--I looked it up. And I was surprised to (re)discover how long ago the first HomePod debuted. It feels more recent. But Apple announced the OG HomePod, an expensive "Siri-powered" (yes, really) smart speaker that would sell for $349, all the way back in mid-2017. Back then, the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus were still current offerings, and Apple would go on to release its first "all screen iPhone," the iPhone X, three months later. What it wouldn't release that year was the HomePod: Apple promised the speaker would ship soon, but then it delayed the release to 2018.

The HomePod didn't get off to a good start, and I described it as an immediate failure in February 2018 because of its high price, Apple exclusivity, and low sales. Worse, Apple didn't allow Spotify to access the speaker as part of its anticompetitive strategies. Bloomberg reported two months later that HomePod inventory was piling up, unsold. But Apple gamely kept up the ruse, lowering the price to $299 in April and releasing software updates throughout the year, adding features like phone call support, stereo pairing, and more. And then we kind of lost interest, just like Apple's customers had.

This is amusing to consider now, since we've come to understand that Amazon and Google both lost billions of dollars trying to build out their respective personal digit assistant ecosystems, Alexa and Google Assistant, with smart speakers and related smart devices. But at the time, it was clear that Amazon was the market leader with its Echo speakers, and that Google was a distant number two (and went on to rename its Google Home speakers to Google Nest). Meanwhile, Sonos was the brand to beat in the high-end of the market, and Apple wasn't particularly competitive there: Potential customers could purchase two Sonos One speakers for the price of a single HomePod.

So Apple tackled the low-end of the market next, taking on Amazon and Google more directly by introducing the HomePod mini in October 2020. Priced at a reasonable $99 and available in white or space gray like its bigger sibling, the HomePod mini delivered the basics, with stereo pairing support out of the box. But it also had some interesting new internals, including the same S5 processor Apple used in its then-current Apple Watch Series 5 and the Apple U1 ultra-wideband chip that first debuted in the iPhone 11. This enabled a neat Handoff feature, where you could move music playback between the speaker and an iPhone by tapping the two together.

Though it also lacked Spotify compatibility...