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It Wasn’t The Price That Made Apple’s Original Homepod Fail
Not that the high price helped, of course
In November 2014, Amazon announced its Alexa Echo. They also offered it to me and probably thousands of others soon after. I bought it.
It was a pretty cool product, and I knew it would be successful, so I bought more Amazon stock (it was so cheap then), but the Echo wasn’t all that slick and I wished Apple had made it instead of Amazon.
A mere three years and two months later, barely an eyelid blink later in Apple product development time, Apple began taking orders for its Homepod. I had retired from my business by then and was working part-time at an Apple store, so I bought two of the suckers with my employee discount.
Even with the discount, that was a hefty purchase as Apple’s list price was $349 each and we could only buy one at a discount.
But I didn’t have good stereo speakers and Homepods were fantastic. True audiophiles might argue that praise, but my wife and I were fully impressed by the sound quality.
As I did have that part-time job at the Apple store, I was initially quite enthusiastic about selling HomePods. I soon realized that my customers didn’t share that enthusiasm and it wasn’t hard to see why.
