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Seven years ago or so, when Apple first started working on the HomePod, they just wanted to make a great sounding speaker that you could drop anywhere in a room and that would sound great no matter where you dropped it or where you were standing to listen to it.

They were investing heavily into building up their audio engineering team and delving deeply into the concepts around computational audio. Hardware and software tightly integrated together. Apple’s forte. So what could possibly go wrong?

Well, in the time it took Apple to bring the HomePod to market, the market had changed. Amazon had shipped the Echo with Alexa, Google had begun replicating them, and, it turns out, Apple had brought a premium speaker to a commodity assistant market.

There have been a couple of software updates since, but nothing that set fire to the HomePod like the early, heady days of the iPhone, iPad, Watch, probably even Apple TV.

So, what can Apple do now? How can the HomePod be fixed?

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