Apple's much-anticipated Siri-powered "smart speaker" broke cover overnight at Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose. Although Apple has the high hopes of wiping out all other smart speakers, I wanted to find out if Apple's new HomePod is a true Sonos competitor. "We want to reinvent home music", Apple CEO Tim Cook said before Phil Schiller, the company's Vice President of Marketing, pointed out the HomePod's unique position in the current market landscape.
Apple reinvented portable music with iPod and now HomePod will reinvent how we enjoy music wirelessly throughout our homes. As is the case with Google and Amazon, Apple's HomePod represents the company's first step into a wider smart home ecosystem, the details of which remain to be seen. In terms of functionality, outside of the high-end speaker housed inside Apple's new toy, you can buy seven Echo Dot devices for the same price as a single HomePod.
Apple has finally unveiled its answer to Amazon's and Google's smart speakers slash digital assistants - and it's called HomePod. Although Apple Watch has emerged as the leader in its technological niche, it hasn't become a smash hit like the iPhone or the iPad - at least until tablet sales started declining. Amazon sells the main version of the Echo for $180; Google's Home speaker goes for $130.
While Siri would respond well to your voice commands, the control is not only with it. The new iPad starts at $649 and will start shipping next week. The company is rumored to be developing a home audio device and has allegedly filed a patent for the design. HomePod will act as a HomeKit base, allowing users to control their homes from anywhere in the world, something now offered on select Apple TV and iPad models.
Like those other products it is created to be a digital home assistant, capable of answering questions about maths as well as music-related enquiries - but it comes with some Apple quirks. If Apple gives you a reason to upgrade every year - the way it did with Apple Watch last year - it will lose the faith of early adopters.
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The confrontation came over the renewal of a domestic surveillance program whose legality Comey had strenuously questioned. He said that the "Flynn stuff" was "very far from any kind of coercion or influence and certainly not obstruction".
Apple is also bringing the ability to send money to friends or other people through its payment service, Apple Pay.
It is the first new device Apple has announced in nearly three years.
Amazon Video, an Internet video on demand service that is developed and operated by Amazon.com, offers television shows and films for rent or purchase and as part of Amazon's Prime subscription, with selected titles can be viewed exclusively to full Prime or Prime Video members.
"Apple has been clever in holding out on its own launch", he said. Developers are being given tools to place 3-D images of objects in the iPhone camera's field of view. The speaker is similar to cheaper devices from Amazon and Google.
There are resemblances to the company's cylindrical Mac Pro computer, although it's not as big, or as shiny.
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