Apple HomePod: More a play for Apple Music listeners than a rival to Amazon Echo

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Is Apple's music-geared HomePod a sound strategy? We'll soon know. 

You can almost detect the reverberations in and around Cupertino, Calif., as Apple prepares to start selling its expensive and delayed HomePod speaker with Siri in stores Friday.

Its first smart speaker enters a 3-year-old market where first mover Amazon now drowns out its rivals with an estimated 70% share. Amazon's Alexa digital assistant and Google Assistant, the voice of the year-old Google Home, have trained tens of millions of consumers to equate smart speakers with the ability to answer a broad set of requests in an increasingly human-like way.

Apple, in contrast, is going all in on music — defending a price tag that's about $250 more than the basic Amazon Echo by touting its premium audio specs and integration with the Apple Music ecosystem, rather than the number of ways digital assistant Siri can insert itself into your life. 

“We never wanted to lose the focus that (HomePod is) first about making a speaker that plays back music in a surprising really great way,” Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing Phil Schiller said moments after leading a tour of journalists through a working audio testing lab where acoustic and engineering teams first started working on HomePod a half-dozen years ago.

Three years ago, Apple vowed to reinvent the way listeners accessed an increasingly fragmented streaming music market, adding a human touch to Apple Music, which it revamped after it bought Beats Electronics. Today, the still-private Spotify has about double its subscribers with a service that seems more similar than different, though Apple may be narrowing that lead with a service that quietly rakes in the dollars. Apple Music's monthly fees contribute to its parent's rapidly growing services division, which could top $30 billion in sales this year.

So now the test: Can a smart speaker strategy focused on audiophiles pay off?

HomePod certainly lives up to its advance billing as a small but splendid-sounding speaker that tunes itself to the environment you place it in. At $349, though, it is pricier than all but the $399 Google Home Max smart speaker that Google hopes will also appeal to customers passionate about music and sonic fidelity. And Google sells far cheaper Google Home speakers, too.

HomePod, meanwhile, costs at least seven times as much as the Echo Dot and more than triple what the standard Echo speaker fetches.

“The bulk of the market is in the least-expensive versions of these things,” says Avi Greengart, research director for platforms and devices at GlobalData. “Consumers aren’t quite sure what they’re going to do with them. They find them delightful when they get them.”

Indeed, when most of you think smart speaker you’re almost certainly thinking Echo with Alexa. Such speakers are a conduit into people’s lives and have become hallmarks for what voice-controlled artificial intelligent digital assistants are capable of doing, from turning on smart lights to delivering the news.

Left unsaid is that sitting there in your living room, on your kitchen countertop or bedside, the speakers are daily reminders to — if you haven’t already accepted the invitation — dance inside the ecosystems being pushed by the industry’s respective giants.

“There is a limit to how many of these service ecosystems a consumer can play in at the same time, both from a monetary perspective but even just from a mental load perspective,” Greengart says.

Apple’s vested interest is in having you boogie with them, and it' is banking on a loyal fan base that is accustomed to, if not exactly jazzed about, having to pay a premium for Apple products.  

HomePod pretty much demands consumers embrace the Apple ecosystem, requiring an iOS device, and for full functionality, a subscription to Apple Music.

Given its more narrow purview, Apple may only sell 3.8 million units in HomePod's first year, or less than a 10% market share, David Watkins of Strategy Analytics says.

This is partly because those who have already bought a smart speaker might stick with that brand. His research suggests rather than switch to the HomePod, owners of Echo and Google Home devices are more likely to purchase secondary devices from the same company.

Despite overlapping skills in telling you the weather, a joke or controlling a thermostat, , Apple is playing a very different game than Amazon, which pushes a catalog of more than 30,000 Alexa “skills,” whether letting you check your bank balance or playing a round of Jeopardy.

Apple has opened up Siri to developers, but the feature set for HomePod and Siri is more narrow — you might send messages by voice or consult your grocery list, but the list of third-party apps that are compatible with HomePod are relatively thin, including LinkedIn, What'sApp, Skype for iPhone and Evernote. CEO Tim Cook even misspoke during Apple’s recent earnings call when he said that you could summon Siri on HomePod to hail a Lyft or Uber. That is not the case right now.

Indeed, the perception out there is that Siri, despite being on tens of millions of iPhones and the first virtual assistant to make a name for itself, just isn’t as smart or useful as Alexa and the Google Assistant.

Apple’s chief pitch with HomePod is not only to have you go all in on music, but to rely on Siri the “musicologist” to not only help you determine what to listen to (among 45 million Apple Music tracks), but to dig into the material by being able to name the drummer of the song you’re listening to.

Music is indeed a driver for smart speaker listeners. According to a recent survey by Parks Associates, more than 62% of Echo and Echo Dot customers use the speakers to stream music or audio, the No. 1 reason. Next on the list: requests for traffic or the weather.

Still, HomePod is late to the game, and besides smart speakers that focus more on tasks than music also trails a music-focused $199 Sonos One that earned high marks from reviewers.

Apple originally intended to ship the speaker last year, only to delay the launch until now. Schiller dismisses any negative impact. “How many times in my life have I heard that? It never matters in the end. Our goal is always to be best. That’s what matters most. Sometimes that means you’re first, sometimes that means you’re not. That’s OK.”

When it comes to speaker hardware, Apple is certainly mindful of the competition. In demonstrating the audio quality of the HomePod to journalists recently, Apple placed its own speaker in a home environment next to Google Home Max, Sonos One and Amazon Echo speakers and separately played snippets of the same audio tracks off each. HomePod may have prevailed in this controlled taste test, but the average consumer is not going to repeat such a test in their living room, and the sonic differences were subtle enough that only those most attuned to outstanding audio might be able to tell.

Moreover, the product that shows up Friday isn't fully baked yet. Coming later this year are software updates that promise to let you pair two HomePods in the same room for a rich stereo effect, or to control what you’re playing on HomePods in different rooms.

On Apple's side is history. The market for portable audio players was already pretty crowded when the iPod came along in fall 2001. Its popularity changed how consumers carried and listened to their music. 

“If Steve (Jobs) were around, he’d be applauding this product,"analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies said. "This is part of Apple’s DNA. And anytime Apple does something that is in their true DNA, they tend to be pretty successful.”

That success may simply be measured by Apple Music subscribers, who have one more reason to stay tuned in. 

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter