A new report from Bloomberg this evening highlights that Apple itself is concerned about the early market reaction to HomePod. The report explains that Apple has cut “some orders” from Inventec Corporation, its supplier for the smart speaker.
Citing a person familiar with the matter, Bloomberg says that in late March, Apple lowered its forecast and cut orders:
According to data from Slice Intelligence provided to Bloomberg, the HomePod started off strong for Apple, with solid pre-order numbers. The data shows that HomePod nabbed around one-third of the U.S. smart speaker market in terms of sales in the last week of January, but those numbers quickly fell by the time the HomePod hit store shelves:
Furthermore, Apple is said to be facing a growing backlog of HomePod inventory, with Apple Store locations “selling fewer than 10 HomePods a day.” As you would expect, Apple itself declined to comment on Bloomberg’s report.
Three weeks after the launch, weekly HomePod sales slipped to about 4 percent of the smart speaker category on average, the market research firm says.
Ultimately, and as Bloomberg notes, it’s incredibly too early to rule HomePod as a flop. Apple can make numerous improvements to the current-generation HomePod by simply improving Siri, without even updating the actual hardware of the device.
What do you make of HomePod’s early performance? Have you been a customer? Let us know down in the comments!
