"It's the biggest brains ever in a speaker", said Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller.
HomePod, powered Apple's Siri digital assistant, will be priced at $349 when it begins shipping in December in the United States, Australia and Britain, the tech giant announced at its annual developers conference.
IDC estimates that Apple shipped about 3.6 million watches during the first three months of the year.
Apple is expected to unveil new features for its Apple Watch as its Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off on Monday. Amazon's AMZN Echo and Alphabet's GOOGL Google Home are little speaker-like home automation devices that can do everything from streaming music to dimming lights or adjusting the heat on the compatible thermostat. 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.
A survey released last month by research firm eMarketer found Echo speakers held 70.6 percent of the USA market, compared with 23.8 percent for Google Home and 5.6 percent for others including Lenovo, LG, Harmon Kardon and Mattel.
At about 7 inches tall, the HomePod is a bit squatter than the Amazon Echo, but roughly the same size as Google Home. However, Apple has a long way to go to catch up to Amazon, and even Google, in the smart speaker market.
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Michael Bates, the law enforcement official who extracted thousands of messages from phones belonging to Roy and Carter. Judge Lawrence Moniz is overseeing this case without a jury after Carter pushed for a bench trial.
More than 35 million people in the USA are expected to use a voice-activated speaker at least once a month this year, more than doubling from last year, according the research firm eMarketer.
The company also unveiled new iMacs for software programmers with better displays and graphics capabilities.
It's not just the National Football League and NFL-related programming that will be devoured now that Prime Video is going to be more accessible. Samsung and Google already have VR systems centered on their smartphones. The firm talked a lot about support for virtual reality, something it hasn't spoken that much about before. But so far, interest has been strongest among gamers, developers and hardware makers rather than everyday users. Once again, Apple has illustrated how they prefer to take a step back and assess where the market is moving before throwing their virtual hat in the ring and carving out their own niche.
That leaves Apple. Although it was the first smartphone maker to come out with a digital assistant when Siri debuted in 2011, it hasn't had a stand-alone assistant.
The company rolled out new tools for developers to create augmented reality applications for iPhones and iPads. These devices will only keep the most recent messages in local storage.
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