Jakub Karnik The HomePod smart speaker is starting to spread into homes around the world, but it still falls short of its competition. The results of the last quarter of 2018 show that HomePod sales grew despite not entirely favorable forecasts.
Compared to Google Home or Amazon Echo, however, the speaker from Apple still has a lot to catch up on. Analytics company Strategy Analytics shows a comparison of the global sales of individual devices, in which at first glance the HomePod is doing great. It sold 2018 million in the last quarter of 1,6 and took a 4,1% share of the total smart speaker pie, up 45% year-on-year.
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However, at the same time, both Amazon and Google sold many more smart speakers. Amazon with its Echo speaker succeeded with 13,7 million units and Google Home sold 11,5 million units, almost ten times more than the HomePod. It must be added that the competition offers several variants, some of which are cheaper and some more expensive, comparable to the HomePod. People can thus choose whether they will be satisfied primarily with a speaker, the main benefit of which will be a smart assistant, or whether they will reach for a more expensive variant with high-quality sound and more premium processing.
Recently, there has been a lot of speculation about a cheaper and cut-down version of the HomePod, the arrival of which was also predicted by the well-known analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. So it's quite possible that sales of Apple's smart speakers will pick up rapidly after its introduction.
What's the point of comparing global sales when those products aren't available globally? Then such a comparison has no telling value.