Their common inspiration for what's ahead is Star Trek's omnipresent, voice-activated assistant "Computer", which could do everything from calculating a starship's trajectory to making a nice cup of tea. That company offers a similar wireless multi-speaker system for listening to music throughout the home, similar to HomePod's ability to chain together multiple speakers.
Apple has announced its first new product since the Apple Watch more than two years ago.
Apple has entered the Bluetooth speaker market with the HomePod. All of this is controlled by Apple's custom-made A8 chip. This makes the intelligent home speaker market much more competitive, and Amazon may have to introduce new features in its product in order to protect its market share from its rival technology giants.
When it comes to smart-home speakers, the first names that come to our minds immediately are Google Home and Amazon Echo. The company has integrated the Apple Music app into its HomePod device, indicating that it expects the device to also contribute to its Services business.
However, tell what you may to Apple fanatics, the HomePod is not without its obvious limits.
In many ways, HomePod will be able to do the same things as an Amazon Echo or Google Home, including playing back podcasts, setting reminders, checking sports scores, translation and controlling internet-connected devices.
Citing "former executives, close observers, and even devoted customers", the report suggests Apple has fallen behind other voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant due to a continued lack of innovation. But Amazon dropped in, seemingly out of nowhere, with a voice-based virtual assistant that won the early fight of the voice assistant war.
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Both Apple and Google have technological expertise which can allow their intelligent home speakers to compete strongly with Amazon.
On the Amazon Echo, conversations with Alexa are also encrypted in transit and at rest from your device to Amazon's cloud servers and "securely stored", a spokeswoman said in an email.
This has prompted a wide range of shake-ups, including two prime supporters who left Apple and made another firm, Viv Labs, which was obtained by Samsung.
In the game of hide and seek with your voice data, the advantage - for now - goes to Apple. However, design is not why you're buying it for. Let us know in the comment section below. Available only at the end of this year, the Homepod will retail at $349.
Now you might be thinking "too little too late", right? It works just like Siri, with random identifiers used only within the device.
As for the Amazon Echo, is fitted with a 2.5-inch tweeter, and a 2-inch subwoofer.
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