HomePod 1st Generation

The HomePod was Apple's first entry into smart speakers, originally planned for a December 2017 launch before Apple pushed it back, eventually shipping February 9, 2018 at $349, and only in the US, UK and Australia at first. 

It came in just two colours, White and Space Gray, wrapped in the same acoustically transparent mesh fabric look Apple would carry through later HomePod models. Inside was Apple's A8 chip, the same one that had powered the iPhone 6 a few years earlier, handling real-time audio processing rather than general computing tasks.

The audio hardware was built around a 4-inch woofer for bass and a ring of seven small tweeters for the higher frequencies, with each tweeter able to be driven independently to beam sound in different directions depending on where the speaker sensed it had been placed in a room. Six microphones picked up "Hey Siri" even with music playing loudly. Notably, at launch it could only take voice commands for Apple Music, there was no way to ask Siri to play something from a rival streaming service, and stereo pairing or multi-room playback across several HomePods didn't arrive until a software update a few months later.

Apple cut the price to $299 in 2019 in an attempt to boost sales, but the speaker never sold in the numbers Apple had hoped for, and it was discontinued in March 2021 so the company could focus on the far cheaper HomePod mini, which had launched the previous autumn.