Apple’s penetration into the smart home market has produced mixed results. On one hand, they’ve managed to partner with many of the leading smart home accessory producers (with a few notable exceptions)¹, making HomeKit a popular standard that consumers go out of their way to buy. In addition, Apple’s continuous focus on privacy and security has given them a free bullet point when compared to their competitors’ user data-driven model. They’ve also been a major proponent of Thread networking for smart home devices. On the other hand, Siri has been made the laughingstock of the virtual assistant club, with features often being added one year at a time.
Today, I want to look into some of the issues that Apple’s smart home ecosystem has run into over the years, not because I want to bash Apple about it, but because it is something that many users, including myself, are very excited about and want to see succeed. I’ll say right now Apple’s smart home ecosystem is very good, but I believe there are a few things it is missing or needs to improve upon to be the best it can be. That being said, let’s talk about Siri.
The culmination of the frustration of Siri cemented itself with the release of the HomePod in early 2018. While Apple was riding the success of their recently released AirPods, Amazon and Google were competing fiercely with their smart speakers. It only made sense for Apple to join this market with their own Siri assistant. The only issue was that the smart speaker market was already well established and becoming quickly saturated. While Amazon and Google were at the top, plenty of other brands had made their own attempt and failed to make any meaningful impact on the market.
In an attempt to not repeat the mistake of those other brands, I speculate that Apple used a blue ocean strategy with their smart speaker. Amazon and Google both had speakers ranging from a few bucks to a few hundred dollars at most, so Apple leveraged their music background to create a high-fidelity speaker focused on music with a price to match.² The HomePod was released with a price tag of $350, with Apple mentioning the definitive HomePod setup consists of two units in a room acting as a stereo pair. $700 was a tough sell, let alone $350. Suffice to say, it didn’t make the impact that Apple was hoping for.
Over its life, the HomePod received price cuts, both from third-party retailers and Apple itself. Last year, Apple introduced the HomePod mini, a $99 smart speaker with less of a focus on audio fidelity. I’ll say right now I own two HomePod minis as a stereo pair and I do enjoy getting most of the feature set of a normal HomePod at a fraction of the price. Many must have shared this sentiment, because this past March, Apple discontinued the original HomePod after just over three years of availability, shifting their attention to the HomePod mini.³ I do find it mildly annoying that Apple is selling a “HomePod mini” when the actual HomePod is just non-existent in Apple’s eyes.
More frustrating is the fragmented feature set of the HomePod family. No HomePod has every feature. Obviously, the HomePod mini will be lacking in the audio fidelity department, but it also doesn’t have HDMI ARC nor eARC support, which was added to the original HomePod shortly after it was discontinued.⁴ ARC support is a big deal because it allows your HomePod to serve as the speaker system for all of your TV inputs, provided you have an Apple TV 4K connected. This means, you can have not only your Apple TV content go through your HomePod speakers, but also cable TV and video game systems. The HomePod mini also doesn’t have spatial awareness, which allows it to focus the direction of music based on the physical environment around the device. Now some of these features being cut make sense since the price difference between the two products is so dramatic. But it goes both ways, the HomePod mini has the U1 chip, which allows it to be spatially aware of where other U1-equipped devices are in the room for features like Handoff. Again, most of this isn’t a big deal, but I do find it jarring as to why only the original HomePod would have ARC support. It’s a feature that could justify a larger price tag, but now it’s off the market. And all of this is to say that Apple may not know exactly where they’re going with the smart home.
A report from Bloomberg stated that engineers at Apple aren’t optimistic about Apple’s roadmap for the living room. It seems Apple’s own employees echo the sentiments of the larger community. In this light, Apple’s home strategy is recovering at best and confusing at worst. This news comes alongside rumors of an Apple TV with a HomePod speaker and FaceTime camera built-in, which brings me to the Apple TV.⁵
Since 2019, Apple has put a huge focus on its Apple TV+ service. In order to increase accessibility and viewership, Apple has included the Apple TV+ app on third-party TVs, video game consoles, and streaming boxes. As a result, Apple TVs are left in a strange purgatory where their purpose is made 99% redundant by the latest smart TVs that have built-in Apple TV apps. The Apple TV+ app on smart TVs has most of the features of an Apple TV, without the need for a separate box. In addition, Apple TVs connected to smart TVs with HomeKit support show up separately in the Home app and AirPlay menu, despite being the same TV. Realistically, there should be some way to link the two together to avoid duplicate devices from showing up. Given these issues, I don’t think a gimmick like a camera is the next big step for Apple TV because it feels rushed and random to me. Can Apple really think of a feature so ground-breaking that I’d use the Apple TV’s camera over my iPhone’s? Do people want another camera in their homes? I don’t think so. I think what Apple needs to do is invest more into their tvOS department. Every year at WWDC, tvOS feels like a footnote in comparison to iOS, watchOS, and macOS. That’s likely because Apple doesn’t have tvOS as a priority. Perhaps the rumors of a camera-equipped Apple TV are a sign that Apple wants to invest more into the Apple TV. As critical as I am on the idea, I don’t want to fully dismiss it, which brings me to my final point.
I do think it’s important to acknowledge context when looking back at a product that’s clearly failed. A lot of people, myself included, thought the original HomePod would inevitably fail when it was announced. However, I believe Apple deserves credit where credit is due. Apple could’ve released a $50-$100 HomePod with the exact feature set of an Amazon Echo and called it a day. Apple tried to break the mold by using audio fidelity as a selling point but shackled any potential of that idea by limiting what services could be natively streamed to it at launch. I think a much better idea in hindsight would’ve been to release a $99 HomePod that leveraged Apple’s stance on privacy as justification for the higher price because that’s a legitimate selling point. Siri was as bad as it was because Apple didn’t believe in invading its users’ privacy to improve their products, even if it meant they were essentially crashing a product line before it had even launched. The fact that the only major difference between Amazon and Google’s offerings is just who you’re giving your data to is a testament to how stale the smart speaker market is already. I don’t want to throw Apple under the bus for not giving us exactly what we asked for, because Apple is at its best when it gives us what we never would’ve thought to ask for.
Citations and Notes
¹ I am specifically referring to brands owned by Amazon and Google, such as Ring and Nest, which will likely not officially support HomeKit due to its direct competition with their own smart home ecosystem.
² I wasn’t able to find a comprehensive list of prices for smart speakers from Amazon and Google in the year 2018, so this is my own observation, not definitive fact. That said, I highly doubt there was a smart speaker from these brands that cost more than $1,000, let alone $300.
³ Panzarino, M. (2021, March 12). Apple discontinues original HomePod, will focus on mini. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/12/apple-discontinues-original-homepod-will-focus-on-mini/
Apple gave TechCrunch a statement regarding the original HomePod’s discontinuation, specifically mentioning their focus shifting to the HomePod mini.
⁴ HDMI ARC and eARC support were made available on the 2021 Apple TV 4K, released on May 21, 2021, which was after the original HomePod was discontinued. It is also worth noting that ARC support is currently in beta at the time of writing, so a full release could add HomePod mini support.
⁵ Gurman, M. (2021, August 8). Apple’s TV Box Is Now Mostly Pointless. Will That Change? Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-08/why-should-i-buy-an-apple-aapl-tv-instead-of-amazon-fire-google-chromecast-ks3ihfcz
Both the lack of optimism for Apple’s living room strategy from Apple’s own engineers and the rumored FaceTime-equipped Apple TV are from this article.
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