Apple's artificial intelligence product HomePod recently exposed news of poor sales. According to reports, HomePod has a large inventory backlog, and Apple stores in some regions have less than 10 daily sales. Guo Minghao, an analyst who has always screamed at Apple, is no longer optimistic about HomePod, and expects HomePod to ship about 200 to 2.5 million units this year.
Now there is news that Apple believes that HomePod's sales are bleak because the pricing is too high, but it is more difficult to reduce the price of HomePod, so Apple plans to develop a cheap version to restore the market.
HomePod
Earlier, it was pointed out that the HomePod price of $ 349 was 216 dollars, and the profit margin was only 38%, which is already very low for Apple. In contrast to the iPhone X, the iPhone $, which costs $999, costs $357 and has a profit margin of 64%!
In this way, HomePod really does have a much larger layout for Apple than the actual revenue. The 38% profit margin is already very low for Apple. If you continue to push down the price, it may cause dissatisfaction on the board. Therefore, Apple can only design a cheap version to supplement the market.
But the real problem is that even though HomePod is already very cheap for Apple, the price of mainstream products on the market is much lower than it. For example, Amazon's Echo II is priced at only $99 and $149, and the most expensive is no more than $200. HomePod's $349 price is really hard to compete.
Some friends here may say that Apple's products have always been sold very expensive, such as the iPhone, but still consumers are eager to rush. The problem is that HomePod's product quality is not good enough, this is the biggest problem Apple will face.
As Apple's first artificial intelligence product to enter the home space, HomePod's selling point is undoubtedly its smart voice tool, but unfortunately, HomePod's Siri voice assistant is "the most stupid" in almost all comparison evaluations, even In some respects, it lags far behind Amazon, Google and other similar products.
In the Loup Ventures test, the testers asked a total of 782 questions. HomePod understood 99.4% of them, but only answered 52.3%, ranking first in the entire test. In the reddit community, forum users also reported that HomePod's sound effects are satisfactory, but the intelligent voice part is completely "mental barrier."
I remember that we have said that the layout of smart speakers is not based on a single product, and its true competitiveness lies in the smart home ecosystem behind it. In this regard, the scalability of HomePod is strictly limited. HomePod is now able to link home products far below other Android-based products, which once again hit consumer enthusiasm.
To say that HomePod really has any advantages, that is, the sound effect is really much better than others. It's no wonder that HomePod costs $58 in microphones, tweeters, and woofers, and $25 for the AI ​​part, which is completely wrong.
This animation effect costs $60.
A product that is "stupid" and expensive, and has weak expansion is not surprising. But the real warning is that Apple's gap in artificial intelligence has opened a big gap with the industry.
As we mentioned in the previous article, Apple's AI field is very thin, and there is almost no foundation. Now more is to expand the technical strength by means of money acquisition.
From the perspective of companies acquired by Apple, the design field is varied, from speech recognition to neural networks to computer vision. But how to integrate these scientific research forces and find a point of strength, Apple has not yet scored, at least in terms of performance.
The future of competition is in artificial intelligence. Apple understands this truth, so even if HomePod's profit margin is so low, it still has to be introduced to the market, but Apple's answer sheet has exposed too many problems.
Some time ago, Apple announced that Google's former search and AI senior vice president John Giannandrea joined Apple and entered the company's core management as the chief of the "machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy", showing Apple's determination and thanking Apple for finally finding it. A person who can lead the artificial intelligence business from a higher perspective.
As for the cheap version of HomePod, Apple can consider shrinking the gorgeous audio function, and the cost can be greatly reduced. After all, the first demand for people to buy smart speakers is not here.
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