Apple HomePod (1st generation)

» see apple.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

apple announced the homepod at wwdc 2017 with a software-defined-acoustics pitch. seven beamforming tweeters in a ring, a four-inch woofer, an a8 chip running audio analysis in real time, room sensing on first power-on. the demo sounded good. the ship date slipped from december 2017 to february 9, 2018, by which point amazon's echo had been on sale for three years and google home for two. apple was late and priced 200 dollars above the room.

the speaker itself was uncontroversial: most reviewers agreed the audio quality was best-in-class for the price. siri was the problem. you could not run spotify natively, you could not call multiple users by name, you could not ask it most of the things a 2018 alexa or google assistant could answer. it was an iphone accessory in a category that did not want to be an iphone accessory.

the homepod 1st gen never had a turkish launch. it sold officially in the us, uk, australia, france, germany, canada, mexico, spain, japan, china. anyone in turkey running one was running an import bought in london or new york, on a us icloud account, talking to a siri that did not speak turkish. that defines the distance: the device was never positioned for this region.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

apple cut the price from 349 to 299 dollars in april 2019, an unusual move for a product apple normally lets the rest of its line subsidize. a software update added stereo pairing, calendar dictation, and improved siri response. but the homepod mini, announced october 2020 at 99 dollars, did the smart-speaker job at a price that fit the category. the small mesh ball moved real units. the big mesh cylinder did not.

~ the day it died ~

apple discontinued the original homepod on march 12, 2021 in a brief statement. "we are focusing our efforts on homepod mini." units stayed available while supplies lasted; software updates continued for a few more years on a degraded support tier. as of macworld coverage in 2025, the first-gen was still receiving point updates, four years after the discontinuation, which is unusually long for an apple end-of-life arc.

~ what it became ~

the homepod 2nd gen shipped february 2023. it looks almost identical from the outside. it has fewer tweeters than the original. it costs 299 dollars instead of 349. it runs the same kind of room-sensing trick. the existence of a redesigned 2nd gen is the cleanest possible admission that the 1st gen was the prototype.

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