Thoughts on AppleTV & HomePod Pricing
According to John Gruber’s “birdies”, the AppleTV and Homepod are most likely sold close or at a loss. I heard the same thing myself when listening to the ‘The Talk Show’ podcast this week and thought it curious. I imagine if this is true then the reasoning is Apple is building these devices for themselves and figure that the services that they are dependent on will make up for the cost. God-knows I’ve been an Apple Music subscriber since Day 1 and been using the AppleTV almost every single day as my primary entertainment device. It got me thinking, what happened if Apple went down-market with their TV and Music services?
You can see the beginnings of that with the iTunes TV and Movies app coming to Samsung TVs later this year and Apple Music coming to Amazon Echo Devices. I feel like Apple makes the majority of their money off the iPhone, iPad, and Macs and everything else is built to support that. I think if Apple wants their TV service to go anywhere they are going to have a make a cheaper AppleTV stick that’s more limited in scope. I think it should probably be like the AppleTV 2 and you just get the apps that Apple provides, not the entire store. Stuff like TV, Podcasts, Music, Photos, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, etc, but not games. I think that the bigger $150 and $180 AppleTV 5 should be refocused on being a home hub for entertainment, gaming, and home automation. Apple geeks have been using the Mac Mini as a Home entertainment PC for years and the bigger AppleTV should replace that. Give people USB-C ports to plug in removal media and keep the ethernet cable and include a gaming controller. I think the 4K AppleTV is powerful enough that for $200 it could be a capable gaming console for a lot of people, especially if Apple does indeed build out a Gaming Subscription service. Use Facetime for audio/video and iMessage for chat and focus on the multiplayer expeirence. I think Apple could make a Nintendo-play and focus on the broader gaming market interest of the stereotypical gamers that everybody thinks about. I think that market is bigger as a whole than what people think of traditional gamers and much more lucrative, especially if they could sell a cross-device Apple gaming service that works across iPad, iPhone, and AppleTV with support for bluetooth controllers and online multiplayer. As for the HomePod, I think the HomePod Mini is an obvious next step and a good way to get Siri and Homekit into more places. I think it should be able half the price of the current Homepod and a smaller physical form. I would still want a large HomePod, but at $350 they are MUCH to expensive to have in every room. $150 is still pricey, but I could fill out an apartment or small home much more reasonably. They should also open up Siri to supporting 3rd party music and podcast services. That would expand the Homepod’s broader appeal. I think they should develop Siri into a personal assistant that comes with you everywhere like Google is doing, but instead of living in the cloud, it lives in your devices and communicate locally as much as possible. Apple’s A-series chips are more powerful than most Google devices and I think that’s something that they could do.
I feel like that the TV landscape has been shifting for a few years now to it may be time to refocus the AppleTV. The Homepod clearly did not take off the way that Apple had hoped, I think primarily because of the price and the weakness of Siri as an ecosytem. I think by opening up the Homepod to more services and introducing a line of speakers would expand the appeal of the devices. I’m not sure when we’ll see these changes, but I feel like we’re at that point that Apple is about to make some big changes to its entertainment ecosystem.
