News

Apple forced to slash HomePod sales forecasts by 60%

Apple’s woes continue unabated. Not only are iPhone sales far below initial expectations, but now its HomePod smart speaker is also dramatically underperforming in terms of sales. According to a new report Apple had to slash orders for this device from half-a-million orders a month to only 200,000.

If one converts that into yearly sales, it means the company only expects to sell about 2.4 million of these devices over the next year, instead of the six million it initially projected.

That would put place the HomePod on par with the first year’s sales of the Amazon Echo in 2015, but Apple would undoubtedly not be happy since it expected its big brand name to pull in more sales.

Reports started emerging earlier in April that in spite of the Β£319 HomePod’s high-tech design, unsold stock was piling up.
Ming-Chi Kuo, KGI Securities’ well-known analyst, also suggested sales figures of between 2.2 and 2.5 million a year, and suggested that Apple might be able to increase sales if it released a cheaper version of the device.



Kuo reportedly said in a note that both the price and Siri were responsible for this failure: β€œWe attribute potentially lacklustre sales to: (1) an uninspiring user experience with the voice assistant function, Siri, compared to competitors; and (2) a high sales price, which could undermine demand despite excellent sound quality.”

Other HomePod users have also complained about the device’s unsatisfactory Siri capabilities and the fact that Apple Music was the only easily available option. The latter might be Apple’s biggest problem with HomePod. If it really wants it to be primarily a music device, then preventing owners from using Siri to play their most beloved Spotify tunes (for example) would seem like a rather underhanded and self-sabotaging mistake. That is, unless, the real reason why it launched the HomePod was to drive Apple Music subscriptions.

Before you go

After spending over 20 years working with Macs, both old and new, theres a tool I think would be useful to every Mac owner who is experiencing performance issues.

CleanMyMac is highest rated all-round cleaning app for the Mac, it can quickly diagnose and solve a whole plethora of common (but sometimes tedious to fix) issues at the click of a button. It also just happens to resolve many of the issues covered in the speed up section of this site, so Download CleanMyMac to get your Mac back up to speed today.

mac-pc

Tags

About the author

Chris

I've been a passionate evangelist for Apple and the Macintosh throughout my working life, my first love was a Quadra 605 working with a small creative agency in the south of Norfolk UK in the mid 1990's, I later progressed to other roles in other Macintosh dominated industries, first as a Senior graphic designer at a small printing company and then a production manager at Guardian Media Group. As the publishing and printing sector wained I moved into Internet Marketing and in 2006 co-founded blurtit.com which grew to become one the top 200 visited sites in the US (according to Quantcast), at its peak receiving over 15 million visits per month. For the last ten years I have worked as an Affiliate and Consultant to many different business and start ups, my key skill set being online marketing, on page monetisation, landing page optimisation and traffic generation, if you would like to hire me or discuss your current project please reach out to me here.

You can also follow me on: and

Add Comment

Click here to post a comment

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.