CultCast #331 - Is HomePod already doomed?

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This week: 

• HomePod is already stumbling in sales—is it doomed?  
• Apple Is the richest company on earth, so where are all its billionaires?
• Face ID could replace passwords on your favorite websites
• The death of Touch ID scheduled for this fall
• And stay tuned for Under Review, where we go hands on with an $80 tech-packed coffee cup, a beautiful new HomeKit smart lock, and the all-new Mavic Air drone.

 

This week: 

• HomePod is already stumbling in sales—is it doomed?  
• Apple Is the richest company on earth, so where are all its billionaires?
• Face ID could replace passwords on your favorite websites
• The death of Touch ID scheduled for this fall
• And stay tuned for Under Review, where we go hands on with an $80 tech-packed coffee cup, a beautiful new HomeKit smart lock, and the all-new Mavic Air drone.

  This episode supported by   Easily create a website by yourself, at Squarespace.com/cultcast. Use offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.   The single-router wifi model just doesn’t work for our increasingly high-bandwidth world. The EEROdistributed system will blanket your home in hyper-fast, reliable WiFi, and you can score free overnight shipping with code "CultCast" at checkout.   On the show this week @erfon / @bst3r / @lewiswallace   New RED iPhone 8 So beautiful. So red. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O9dNuiOWDg   Join us for a live hangout on Friday the 13th, 12PM Pacific! live.thecultcast.com   Erfon’s YouTube review of the tech-packed Ember Ceramic mug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6oOEv70mec   Apple's Stumbling HomePod Isn't the Hot Seller Company Wanted https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-12/apple-s-stumbling-homepod-isn-t-the-hot-seller-company-wanted

• Is the HomePod toast?
• According to some Apple store workers, inventories are piling up and Apple has cut orders with their manufacturer.
• "At first, it looked like the HomePod might be a hit. Pre-orders were strong, and in the last week of January the device grabbed about a third of the U.S. smart speaker market in unit sales, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence. But by the time HomePods arrived in stores, sales were tanking, says Slice principal analyst Ken Cassar. “Even when people had the ability to hear these things,” he says, “it still didn’t give Apple another spike.””
• According to Slice Intelligence: During the HomePod’s first 10 weeks of sales, it eked out 10 percent of the smart speaker market, compared with 73 percent for Amazon’s Echo devices and 14 percent for the Google Home
• Why aren’t people buying HomePods?