Early indicators of Amazon Echo and Google Home holiday sales highlight cost of Apple’s HomePod delay

While Apple almost completely dominates the smartwatch market, its looks increasingly likely that the emerging electronics category of smart speakers — where the company already lags far behind — is on a far faster path toward mainstream acceptance.
And that makes Apple’s failure to deliver its own HomePod smart speaker in time for the holidays, as promised, look like a huge missed opportunity. It’s hard to say that Apple bet on the wrong device category by deciding to fo