The real issue with the HomePad is not its name, but its niche. Potential customers will ask every marketing manager’s most feared question: What is it for? If Apple hasn’t come up with an answer in the multiple years the product has been in development, it’s unlikely something will spring to mind in the next eight days. But one way or another an answer will be needed.
As I hinted with my silly Echo joke, this isn’t an unprecedented concept or a new market. Amazon’s closest rival is probably the Echo Show 8 (the Show 5 is closer in screen size, but has a different design), while Google has the Nest Hub, and both sit in the space Apple will be looking to dominate. The presence of these incumbents might seem like a good omen for the company, which loves to wait until a market is established before taking a swing with the definitive product. But as with the foldable iPhone Duo, there are two problems: First, while tech fans in general are intimately familiar with the concept, Apple’s own fans are not. And second, Apple’s version is likely to be more expensive.
The original HomePod may be an illustrative comparison here. Apple was expected to go after the smart speaker market, but ended up leaning far more on the second word than the first. The HomePod is sort of smart, but it’s really just a nice, decent-quality speaker you can command (some of the time…) using your voice. And so Apple didn’t end up displacing products like the Echo and the Nest because the HomePod couldn’t do what they do and didn’t really try, while overachieving in other areas and costing more. And Apple customers, unless they were bold enough to become platform-agnostic, remained outside that bubble.
Siri is a lot smarter now than it was then (not that you’d know it from the performance of legacy HomePod models, unfortunately), so the chances are that Apple will try to do the smart-home concept properly this time. The HomePad will run Siri AI, and thus be able to field questions, surface information from your messages and email inbox, and use natural language. It will have excellent capabilities. But again, the question is what we will use these capabilities for. Where will it sit? What functions will it perform? Speaking personally, I’m not sure how it would fit in my life. So the product’s introduction will need to do a great deal of imaginative heavy lifting.
Let’s say the HomePad sits in the kitchen. Useful for recipes, perhaps, although it’s important to remember that it will only have a 6-inch screen and thus won’t match an iPad for legibility. Or it might sit in the living room and act as the hub for smart-home controls. But what proportion of Apple fans actually use HomeKit smart lights, smart door locks, and a smart thermostat so much that they need a dedicated device? A relatively small one, I’d guess, and those that do will be accustomed to controlling them via automations or manual control on an iPhone. Or even voice controls via a HomePod.
At least with the iPhone Duo, Apple had some user experience to lean on. It is, after all, still a phone, albeit one that’s a little smaller than we’re used to, with the ability to offer a bigger screen than we’re used to. But customers get what it’s offering. It’s a phone, only conceptually better. (And pragmatically, in some ways, rather worse.) You don’t need to make such an imaginative leap of faith.
