A few months ago, I wrote a piece lamenting the slow and sad demise of the original HomePod. This week marks four years since the original HomePod was released, and the fate of Apple’s smart home efforts are just unclear as they were then. Here’s what we know about what the future holds…
The current state of HomePod
The first HomePod orders hit the doorsteps of pre-order buyers and Apple Store shelves on February 9, after a three-month delay. With a retail price of $349, the HomePod was viewed at launch as a premium alternative to Amazon and Sonos smart speakers with excellent sound quality, but also with a lackluster voice assistant.
Fast forward to 2021 and the HomePod was discontinued, with Apple refocusing its efforts on the smaller and more affordable HomePod mini. As it stands today, the HomePod mini is still the only smart speaker that Apple sells, which means the “mini” adjective isn’t really doing much work.
The HomePod mini has proven to be a popular product, with sales data indicating that it has helped boost the overall smart speaker industry as well as Apple’s own share of that market.
What’s next for HomePod?
Companies like Amazon, Google, and Sonos continue to innovate in the smart speaker industry, and the HomePod mini seems to be evidence that Apple isn’t ready to cede the market to those companies just yet.
Bloomberg reported last year that Apple is continuing its internal efforts to ramp up its smart home product offerings. The company is apparently considering multiple different products in this category, the most interesting of which sounds like a new version of the Apple TV that also integrates a smart speaker and camera hardware.
Combining the Apple TV, HomePod, and camera hardware into one product would be an incredibly enticing product for those in the Apple ecosystem. Bloomberg says that the device would support standard tvOS capabilities, smart home functions, and FaceTime calls using the integrated camera.
But that’s not the only new smart home product Apple is said to be mulling. That same report from Bloomberg also said that Apple is considering a “high-end speaker with a touch screen.” This product would purportedly be similar to something like the Amazon Echo Show, which is a tablet-style device meant to serve as the “hub” of your smart home.
Apple has also reportedly even “explored connecting the iPad to the speaker with a robotic arm that can move to follow a user around a room.
9to5Mac’s Take
Unfortunately, we still don’t know much about when Apple could release these new smart speaker products. It’s also possible that development gets scrapped altogether. I would hope, however, that Apple sees the value in being a player in the smart home industry and that it stays committed to not only developing new products, but also maintaining and iterating on its existing HomePod mini.
Outside of hardware, there are some big changes coming to the smart home industry over the next year. Namely, this includes the Matter smart home standard. Matter is a new consortium of tech companies, including Apple, committed to making smart home devices that are interoperable between ecosystems.
Matter should make it significantly easier for device manufacturers to build smart home accessories that are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and HomeKit, Google’s Assistant, and more. This includes smart lights, smart locks, cameras, and more.
Matter, if everything goes according to plan, could be a major boon for HomeKit accessory adoption. It would be a pity for Apple not to offer a versatile lineup of smart speaker options to tap into and expand upon this ecosystem. And I don’t just mean offering HomePod mini in different colors (but that’s pretty cool, too).
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