Apple appears poised to unveil a voice-activated, internet-connected speaker that would create a new digital pipeline into people's homes.
Apple CEO Tim Cook introduces the Homepod. But does HomePod stand a chance against the rivals?
Analysts said the smart home speaker market is ripe for Apple. The success of the Amazon Echo, released in the United States in 2014, paved the way for Google to follow with its own sleek Google Home device a year ago.
Siri can also be used manage smart devices on a home network, such as heating and lighting. Sounds like, literally, a friend from future.
Amazon sells Echo devices for US$179, and smaller "Dot" versions for US$50.
To be "smart", the latest product in Apple's portfolio, known as HomePod, comes with an A8 microprocessor chip, the same power engine in the company's flagship iPhone smartphone and iPad tablet computer. While this "anonymous Siri ID" thing needs to be examined properly before saying anything about it, if it's implemented properly then people will certainly have one more reason to buy Apple HomePod over Amazon Echo and Google Home. The protection is similar to what Google Home and Amazon's Echo speakers already offer. Besides, it has a custom array of seven beam-forming tweeters, each with its amplifier providing high-frequency acoustics, along with a well-balanced, smooth timbre, as well as precise directional control of a multitude of beam shapes and sizes.
Apple's new iMac computers get a big horsepower boost
U.S. chipmaker AMD on Tuesday unveiled a high performance, power-efficient " Radeon Pro 500 " series graphics for Apple iMac . And for half-precision computation, ideal for machine learning, iMac Pro delivers up to a 22 Teraflops of performance.
HomePod is deemed a more expensive competitor of Echo, which was released two years ago. Google, meanwhile, previewed new speaker features such as hands-free phone calling during its software conference last month. Do you know, this is the first time Apple has announced a hardware component, at this event. Not a very big one but it is good enough to keep all the internals packed in the size and for that size, the HomePod is quite heavy with the 2.5kg weight. It also works with Apple Music in order to stream sound tracks for iCloud libraries.
"Apple reinvented portable music with iPod, and now HomePod will reinvent how we enjoy music wirelessly throughout our homes", said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice-president of worldwide marketing.
The Cupertino, California-based company said Siri, which also competes with Alphabet Inc's Google Assistant, will now work across devices. But you can also get tons of information out of Siri as well with questions like, "Who's the drummer on this track?" or "What's the weather going to be like tomorrow?" - Sonos is shaped how you would expect a speaker to be shaped, with a front facing grill and play/pause controls and volume up/down buttons on the top. Google and Amazon are betting that majority customers will just not care for it.
On the other hand, Amazon Echo being the pioneer has an early hands on most of the other third-party services than just streaming music from Amazon Prime Music and Spotify.
All told, companies are pushing for voice-powered commands where computing is not tied to a screen.
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