From the folks that brought us endless fun comparing Apple's new HomePod smarts to the Amazon Echo and Google Home, now comes a more scientific research which follows the market share that said HomePod managed to carve out after its launch on February 9th.
It turns out that Apple's smart $349 speaker already has 3% of the growing market just two weeks after launch. Given that Google and Amazon are saturating the industry with 50-buck speakers, and even less on promotion, this is no small feat.
As to what people are using their smart speakers most for, that's music, unsurprisingly, followed by weather disclosures and general questions. Apple has certainly mastered the first two categories with the HomePod, and, while poor Siri is intellectually challenged compared to Google's Assistant or Amazon's Alexa, it's still the new kid on the playground, and it's inevitable to play catchup to the big AI boys.
Apple's CEO Tim Cook just sat down for an interview, and had the following to say to the naysayers who dub the HomePod a "metoo" product:
FC: Sometimes Apple takes the lead, introducing unique features–Face ID, for instance. Other times you’re okay to follow, as long as you deliver what you feel is better, like HomePod, which is not the first home speaker. How do you decide when it’s okay to follow?
TC: I wouldn’t say “follow.” I wouldn’t use that word because that implies we waited for somebody to see what they were doing. That’s actually not what’s happening. What’s happening if you look under the sheets, which we probably don’t let people do, is that we start projects years before they come out. You could take every one of our products–iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch–they weren’t the first, but they were the first modern one, right?
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