HomePod Launch Delayed Until Early Next Year ⇥ buzzfeed.com

Nicole Nguyen, Buzzfeed:

In June, Apple announced that it was challenging Amazon’s sleeper hit Amazon Echo with its own voice assistant-enabled speaker, called HomePod, and said the product would be released in December 2017. Today, the company released a statement that the speaker will be delayed until 2018: “We can’t wait for people to experience HomePod, Apple’s breakthrough wireless speaker for the home, but we need a little more time before it’s ready for our customers. We’ll start shipping in the US, UK, and Australia in early 2018.”

I’ve been trying to figure out why the HomePod was announced at WWDC in June at all instead of, say, during Apple’s more product-focused September keynote. My best guess is that it was a way to complete the story of SiriKit in a broader context and encourage adoption.

No word on the iMac Pro, by the way, which is still scheduled to begin shipping in December.