Apple HomePod: More a play for Apple Music listeners than a rival to Amazon Echo

The HomePod speaker is photographed in a a showroom during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday, June 5, 2017, in San Jose, Calif. You can almost detect the reverberations in and around Cupertino, Calif., as Apple prepares to start selling its expensive and delayed HomePod speaker with Siri in stores Friday. Its first smart speaker enters a three-year-old market where first mover Amazon now drowns out its rivals with an estimated 70% share. Amazon's Alexa digital assistant and Google Assistant, the voice of the year-old Google Home, have trained tens of millions of consumers to equate smart speakers with the ability to answer a broad set of requests in an increasingly human-like way. Apple, in contrast, is going all in on music -- defending a price tag that's about $250 more than the basic Amazon Echo by touting its premium audio specs and integration with Apple music ecosystem, rather than the number of ways digital assistant Siri can insert itself into your life. "We never wanted to lose the focus that (HomePod is) first about making a speaker that plays back music in a surprising really great way," Apple's senior vice president for worldwide marketing Phil Schiller said moments after leading a tour of journalists through a working audio testing lab where acoustic and engineering teams first started working on HomePod a half-dozen years ago.