Despite being one of the most valuable companies on the planet, Apple remains an underdog in the smart home business.
Its rival Google commands a 30.9pc market share, while Amazon has 53pc, according to smart speaker news site VoiceBot. By comparison, Apple has 2.8pc — beaten by Sonos, a far smaller but more specialised firm, with 4.7pc
It is a rare area of failure for Tim Cook’s company, which has enjoyed success in everything from smartphones and watches to fitness and music streaming.
That could be about to change following Tuesday’s unveiling for the HomePod Mini, a £99 Siri-powered smart speaker that is set to help Apple expand its reach into the home.
The device, which looks similar to Amazon’s Echo speaker, includes the same voice control features as the full-size HomePod. At just 8.5cm tall, however, it is far more agile.
Apple says that several mini units can also be paired together around the home and play audio in multiple rooms, while placing two HomePod mini speakers in the same room will create a stereo pairing.
It can also sense when an iPhone is nearby so Apple users can more easily control the speaker. The company also announced a new Intercom feature to let users send messages between HomePods around the home.
Ben Bajarin, an analyst for research firm Creative Strategies, says Apple’s advantage is that it has fleshed out its vision for how its devices could interact more directly with its own speakers than its rivals.
"That’s not something that Google or Amazon, particularly Amazon, can do so cleanly," he says. "The advantage Apple has that they pressed on is that a good portion of those (Google and Amazon) customers have iPhones. They leveraged the fact they own the pocket."
To keep the costs and size down, it also has fewer tweeters — the actual speakers inside the devices. It features an S5 chip from Apple Watch, rather than the A8 processor from the iPhone that powers the original HomePod.
Combine the HomePod Mini with Apple’s music streaming service as well as its new Intercom home messaging service and Apple now has an opportunity to “own your home,” says Wendy Johansson, a vice president at Publicis Sapient.
“Their ease in connecting the home ecosystem with HomePod Mini and Intercom could be a bump for households to focus on singular brand loyalty with Apple”.
Apple taking the smart home market seriously is long overdue. In theory, Apple should have a series of large advantages in this market: it has Siri, arguably the most famous virtual assistant in the world, a knack for designing beautiful objects that look good in your home, and a strong reputation for privacy.
Apple has aggressively priced the HomePod Mini at £99
Credit: Apple
But Apple’s expensive devices have struggled to compete against rivals’ cut-price smart home options. Amazon and Google are trying to position their speakers, the Echo and Nest Mini, as low-cost command centers for helping people manage their homes and lives. They cost as little as £50, while the orignal HomePod costs £279.
Apple’s lack of market share may also be down to Siri’s limited capabilities. Amazon’s Alexa has become the market leader for virtual assistants while Siri has languished.
The first model, launched in 2018, also only has the ability to stream directly from Apple Music and has had limited support from other developers’ apps and different smart-home devices.
In a bid to improve the situation, Apple last year posted a job advert for an analyst to research what people were saying about Siri on social media and to come up with ways to improve the technology.
The HomePod Mini is designed to convince people that Apple and Siri is the solution to building a smart home set-up. And its aggressive pricing strategy is a clear signal that it sees new, cheaper smart home devices as an important new product line.
The future of smart living
"Offering the HomePod mini at £99 is surprising,” says Ben Wood, the chief of research at CCS Insight. “Such keen pricing is rare from Apple and illustrates the company’s efforts to invigorate its smart home strategy in the face of intense competition from Amazon and Google.
Apple’s hope is that offering the HomePod Mini so cheaply will see a flood of new customers filling their homes with the devices and, hopefully, also subscribing to Apple’s music and television streaming services.
There is evidence to show that filling your house with a company’s smart speakers can convince you to spend more on its services. Research conducted by CIRP in 2018 found that customers of Amazon’s Echo smart speakers spent an average of 70pc more on Amazon compared to other customers.
Apple is hoping that it can benefit from a similar effect, especially as its customers are spending more time at home than ever amid the coronavirus pandemic.
But the company is a long way from toppling Amazon when it comes to dominating the smart home. “Apple still faces an uphill battle when it comes to smart home tech,” Wood says.
Time will tell whether Apple continues to take the market seriously. If it launches a series of other smart home products at affordable prices, as Amazon has done with its Echo Show and Echo spot devices, then it may just be able to topple its rivals.
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