HomePod: Apple's first new product in years

The new gadget will be a direct rival to both the Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers.

The trend-setting company also is putting new twists on existing products as it delves deeper into virtual reality and a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning. These giants are battling over still-emerging fields that are expected to turn into technological gold mines, much the way personal computers and smartphones became moneymaking machines in previous decades.

Apple is expected to announce plans this week to make its Siri voice assistant work with a larger variety of apps, but initial changes were expected to add just a small number of capabilities.

I'm sure HomePod will be great, at least for listening to music. You can talk to the speaker to play anything in your Apple Music library and more.

It also has a "Musicologist" feature for streaming Apple Music through commands barked at Siri, as well as being able to answer queries about the song playing, such as 'who is the guitarist?' and so on.

It does it in a similar way to how Apple AirPods pair with an iPhone 7, but we've been told there's no W1 chip in the HomePod, unlike the AirPods. It starts shipping in the US, the United Kingdom, and Australia. At almost double the price of both the Amazon Echo ($180) and Google Home ($149), the HomePod isn't positioning itself to compete with those devices.

The Echo, released in 2015, and Google Home, released a year ago, were the first entrants in a promising market. Apple packed in a ton of power performance into a tiny seven-inch (6.8 if we're being nitpicky) speaker.

Apple chooses to distinct its product as an excellently innovated sound device first. It will then enter other global markets in 2018.

"HomePod is going to re-invent music in our homes", said Phil Schiller, Apple's marketing head, during the keynote. The company "can't afford to yield valuable real-estate in the heart of people's homes to Amazon, Google and others", said Geoff Blaber, research analyst at CCS Insight. That's especially important because people are starting to access information, entertainment and search in a more "pervasive" way that's less dependent on smarthphones, he said. And all communications will be encrypted, meaning authorities can't try to tap home communications.

Apple had plenty of other announcements.

The biggest news however is the introduction of the Virtual Reality (VR) developer kit for High Sierra. It will not actually block ads, though.

Apple is introducing an iPad Pro in a new size in an attempt to revive interest in its once hot-selling line of tablets. It's part of Apple's effort to entice professionals with tablets that can handle many tasks previously reserved for laptops.

The technology, a feature of the wildly successfully smartphone game Pokemon Go, overlays digital information on real-world images and is seen as an area in which the keenly awaited 10th-anniversary iPhone can stand out from competitors.

Apple also unveiled a 10.5-inch iPad Pro and announced Apple Pay compatibility for Messages, meaning that it will be possible to send money to friends and family. So far, the service has limited payments to purchases of products and services from companies and other organizations.

The conference is typically devoted to software updates and this year, Apple released a series of new features and updates for the iPhone, the iPad, Mac and the Apple Watch - including an augmented-reality kit for developers aimed at making the iPhone "the largest AR platform in the world".

Ortutay reported from NY.