No Surprise: HomePod Supplies Will be Limited When Launching in December
This shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone familiar with Apple new product launches, but the HomePod speaker will apparently be in short supply when it lands in December for $349. That news comes from supplier Invertec via Nikkei.
The speaker sports an A8 processor and six microphones.
“We will finally ship the smart home device this year, but its contribution will be fairly limited and hopefully that will improve next year,” Inventec Appliances President David Ho told analysts and reporters during an earnings conference.
While Ho did not specify what product he was talking about, market watchers said it was Apple’s HomePod, the $349 gadget that will compete with Amazon Echo and Google Home.
“Inventec Appliances will likely only ship some 500,000 units of HomePod this year, and the device’s contribution to the group’s revenue will be less than 1%,” said Arthur Liao, an analyst at Taipei-based Fubon Securities.
With the supplier expecting to ship such a low number of speakers, the HomePod will more than likely be extremely difficult to purchase.
Along with the HomePod, Invertec is the supplier for Apple’s AirPods, which are still somewhat hard to come by after a late 2016 launch.
But the Nikkei report said that sometime in 2018, Invertec would be splitting HomePod orders with Foxconn.
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