When it comes to Apple's "black history" products, I think everyone will think of such as Pippen game consoles, Hockey Puck mice, Newton handheld computers, but among them, the original HomePod smart speaker is obviously "not on the line". But this product, which has a life cycle of only 3 years, certainly has nothing to do with success. However, just after the production was discontinued in March 2021, homePod, a smart speaker product that has been abandoned by Apple, has shown a surprising trend in the second-hand market.
A few days ago, it was reported that the price of HomePod smart speakers on overseas second-hand websites has far exceeded Apple's official pricing, and in the past week, the average price of an unopened used HomePod on eBay is $375, while the average price of new unopened products has reached $639. At the beginning, the listing price of homePod was 349 US dollars / 2799 yuan, and a year later, Apple reduced it to 299 US dollars / 2299 yuan.
Statistics from eBay also show that a total of 6610 HomePods have been sold on the platform in the past year, with an average price of $347, more than 15% higher than the official retail price of $299, of which the average price of unopened HomePods is as high as $500.
It has to be said that it is a miracle that a product that did not perform well in the market at the beginning was revitalized in the second-hand market after the suspension of production, and even sold more expensive than it was that year. So what is the reason for such a product that was officially abandoned, and now it seems to be on fire again?
In fact, the configuration of the HomePod is still very powerful even today, it is equipped with Apple A8 bionic chip, supplemented by 1GB RAM + 16GB ROM, with Bluetooth 5.0, 5G-MIMO WI-FI. In terms of audio output, it is equipped with a ring array of 6 microphones, as well as 7 tweeters at the bottom and 1 woofer at the top. Relying on the acoustic real-time modeling capabilities of the A8, HomePod can perceive the sound reflection in the room through the built-in microphone array after recognizing the environment in which the device is located, so as to adjust the audio accordingly to achieve adaptive function to the environment, as well as intelligently eliminate the effects of standing wave and reflected sound interference.
It is not difficult to see that Apple's positioning of homePod is based on its strong hardware foundation to bring users the first sound quality in smart speaker products. To put it simply, at this point in time in 2018, there is still a disagreement in the field of smart speakers whether smart speakers should be "smart" or "speakers" as the core, including Amazon Echo, Google Google Home and other products chose the former, while Apple's HomePod chose the latter.
But the final result must already be known to everyone, Amazon Echo, Xiaomi Xiaoai speaker, Ali Tmall Genie and other smart speakers that choose the smart route and focus on low prices have become the absolute mainstream of the market today, while apple HomePod and Tencent Listening, which choose the speaker route, have all ended in failure.
Nowadays, the low cost of the smart route is already an obvious trend, cloud services and mature process chips composed of solutions, but also let the smart speaker show a very high intelligence, but in contrast, homePod to achieve excellent sound quality is based on the high performance chip brought by the powerful computing power, as well as a variety of microphone arrays, high and low speakers. The final result is that the HomePod unveiled in the summer of 2017 not only failed to catch up with the first round of dividends in the smart speaker market, but also allowed Amazon Echo and Google Home as pioneers to occupy more market share, and there was a super high price of $399.
Although homePod on sound quality can "hang" a number of smart speaker products, on intelligence also overwhelmed the traditional speaker, but its high price has made the advantages into defects, become the existence of "high or low". HomePod's original pricing was aimed at the traditional small size speakers, but the traditional speaker consumer group will often be more inclined to choose traditional brand products because of inertia, and for the average consumer, talking about sound quality is more of a "metaphysics" and it is difficult to quantify it, so the high price makes them prohibitive.
However, homePod is still selling in the second-hand market after the suspension of production, and the unopened products can still sell for $220, which is 30% off the original price, which is obviously not too common in the second-hand market.
For comparison, the highest salvage rate in December after the launch of a new iPhone is usually only 65%, while the HomePod has been on the market for 4 years. What does this mean? At that time, Apple's market positioning for homePod was at least partially correct, and there was indeed a group of consumers who wanted to have good sound quality and hoped that the speakers would be smart enough.
But unfortunately, the number of consumers in this part is far from Apple's expectations, and it is not enough to support such a new product line as smart speakers. Since Apple hopes for a smart speaker product favored by the public, there is also a HomePod Mini that is positioned more mainstream. It can only be said that homePod may be the result of Apple misjudging the market, "the smartest among the speakers, the best sound quality in the smart speakers" product strategy, in the end did not get a maximum common divisor in the market.
The hot sales of the second-hand HomePod mean that some consumers do like such products, but this obviously does not explain the fact that the new HomePod actually sells higher than the retail price of that year.
So who did this new unopened HomePod sold to? Would it be a consumer who likes homePod, it seems that this is not the case. After all, if you are interested in the HomePod itself, the consumer who should buy it has already bought it, and the price of the HomePod has dived several times, and the lowest is almost 250 US dollars or so. No matter how bad it is, real consumers will also buy second-hand, rather than spending a higher price than the original price to buy unopened products, which is obviously a costless approach.
But the reason why the price of unopened products is rising steadily, in addition to the homePod itself because of the discontinuation of the number of less and less, some people are speculating may also be a very critical reason.
I believe that many friends who pay attention to digital products have more or less seen similar to the original iPod Classic sold for tens of thousands of dollars, the first generation of iPhones sold for 30,000 US dollars, etc., and the news that the old Apple electronic products sold at sky-high prices. Behind this is actually the formation of a relatively mature "electronic antiques" collection market, a considerable number of sentimental consumers to support this at first glance seems illogical market.
The most critical reason for the appreciation of consumer electronic products when they are discontinued may be that their market positioning has drifted from electronic products to collectibles. However, not all electronic products can be regarded as "antiques", looking at the various such products sold in overseas second-hand markets, it is basically the more complete the better, but also has a certain historical significance, and itself also needs to have a certain scarcity.
It just so happens that these homePods have, as Apple's first smart speaker product, it has a similar historical status with the original iPhone and the original Apple I. In addition, homePod was discontinued early due to poor sales, so its existence is also limited, which may give some people the space to hype.
【The picture of this article comes from the network】