Considering how early reports claimed the Apple Watch was a bust (now it’s the top product in the smartwatch field), take this one with a grain of salt: Bloomberg claims that inventor of Apple’s HomePod is “piling up” as the wireless speaker isn’t the hit the tech giant expected.
Quoting an unnamed “person familiar with the matter,” the article says that, last month, Apple had lowered sales forecasts and cut some orders with Inventec., one of the manufacturers that builds the HomePod. According to data provided to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence, during the speakers ’s first 10 weeks of sales, it “eked out” 10% of the smart speaker market, compared with 73% for Amazon’s Echo devices and 14% for the Google Home. (Hmmm, 10% market share in 10 weeks sound pretty good to the Sellers Research Group.)
Three weeks after the launch, weekly HomePod sales slipped to about 4% of the smart speaker category on average, Slice Intelligence says. Bloomberg claims that inventory is piling up, according to Apple store workers, who say some locations are selling fewer than 10 HomePods a day.
Also, Loup Ventures analyst Gene Munster in February said he expects sales to pick up later in the year. He predicts Apple will sell a total of 7 million HomePods in 2018, with that number set to grow to 10.9 million in 2019.
The $349 system is just under seven inches tall and looks like a piece of furniture. It’s available in both space gray and white. The HomePod also acts as a hub for HomeKit devices to provide remote access to home automation. It uses Siri to browse and select music from Apple Music, control the home through HomeKit, and answer questions.
