Homepod selling price after shutdown? It's just the hype of scalpers
2022-04-24
Mentioning Apple's "black history" products, you must think of such products as Pippin game console, hockey puck mouse and Newton handheld computer. However, among them, the first generation homepod smart speaker is obviously "out of number". But this product with a life cycle of only three years must have nothing to do with success. However, after it was discontinued in March 2021, homepod, a smart speaker product that has been abandoned by apple, showed a surprising trend in the second-hand market. Recently, news showed that the price of homepod smart speakers on overseas second-hand websites has far exceeded Apple's official pricing. In the past week, the average price of an unpacked second-hand homepod on eBay was $375, while the average price of new unopened products has reached $639. The original listing price of homepod was $349 / 2799 yuan. A year later, apple reduced it to $299 / 2299 yuan. Statistics from eBay also show that 6610 homepods have been sold on the platform in the past year, with an average selling price of $347, more than 15% higher than the official retail price of $299, of which the average price of unopened homepods is more than $500. It must be said that it is a miracle that a product with poor market performance is revitalized in the second-hand market after it is discontinued, and even more expensive than that year. So what exactly caused such a product abandoned by the government to look popular again? In fact, the configuration of homepod is still very powerful even today. It is equipped with apple A8 bionic chip, supplemented by 1GB ram + 16GB ROM, Bluetooth 5.0, 5g-mimo and Wi-Fi. In terms of audio output, it is equipped with a ring array composed of 6 microphones, 7 tweeters at the bottom and 1 bass speaker at the top. Relying on the acoustic real-time modeling function of A8, homepod can perceive the indoor sound reflection through the built-in microphone array after recognizing the environment of the device, so as to adjust the audio accordingly, realize the adaptive function to the environment, and intelligently eliminate the influence of standing wave and reflected sound interference. It is not difficult to see that Apple's positioning for homepod relies on its strong hardware foundation to bring users the best sound quality in smart speaker products. In short, at this time point in 2018, there are still differences in the field of smart speakers whether they should focus on "smart" or "speaker". Products including Amazon echo and Google home chose the former, while Apple's homepod chose the latter. But the final result must be known to everyone. Amazon echo, Xiaomi Xiaoai speaker, Alibaba tmall elf and other smart speakers that chose the smart route and focused on low prices have become the absolute mainstream of the market, while Apple homepod and Tencent that chose the speaker route ended in failure. Nowadays, the low cost of the intelligent route has become an obvious trend. The solutions composed of cloud services and mature process chips have also made the intelligent speaker very intelligent. On the contrary, homepod relies on the powerful computing power brought by high-performance chips, as well as various microphone arrays and high bass speakers to achieve excellent sound quality. The final result is that homepod, which appeared in the summer of 2017, not only failed to catch up with the first round of dividends in the smart speaker market, allowing Amazon echo and Google home, as pioneers, to occupy more market share. At the beginning, there was an ultra-high price of $399. Although homepod can "hang" a group of smart speaker products on sound quality, and it also overwhelms traditional speakers on intelligence, its high price turns advantages into defects and becomes the existence of "high cannot be low". Homepod's original pricing was aimed at the traditional small-size speakers, but the traditional speaker consumer groups tend to choose the products of traditional brands because of inertia. For ordinary consumers, talking about sound quality is more of a "metaphysics" and it is difficult to quantify it, so the high price deterred them. However, homepod still sells well in the second-hand market after it stops production, and the unpacked products can still sell for $220, which is a 70% discount on the original price, which is obviously rare in the second-hand market. In contrast, the residual value rate of the new iPhone is the highest in December, usually only 65%, while the homepod has been on the market for four years. What does this mean? At that time, Apple's market positioning for homepod was at least partially correct, and there were indeed a number of consumers who wanted both good sound quality and smart speakers. Unfortunately, the number of these consumers is far from Apple's expectation and is not enough to support a brand-new product line such as smart speakers. Because Apple wants a smart speaker product favored by the public, it has a more mainstream homepod Mini. It can only be said that homepod may be the result of Apple's misjudgment of the market. The product strategy of "the most intelligent speaker and the best sound quality in smart speakers" failed to obtain a maximum common divisor in the market. The hot sale of second-hand homepod means that some consumers do like such products, but this obviously does not explain that the new homepod actually sells at a higher retail price than that of the year. So who sold this part of the new unopened homepod? Will it be a consumer who likes homepod? It doesn't seem so. After all, if you are interested in homepod itself, consumers who should buy it have already bought it. At the beginning, the price of homepod plunged several times, and you can buy it for almost $250 at the lowest. No matter how bad it is, real consumers will buy second-hand products instead of buying unopened products at a higher price than the original price. Obviously, this is a cost-effective approach. However, the reason why the prices of unopened products are rising is that in addition to the decreasing number of homepod itself due to shutdown, some people are hyping, which may also be a very key reason. I believe many friends who pay attention to digital products have more or less seen the news that the first generation iPod classic sold for tens of thousands of dollars, the first generation iPhone sold for 30000 dollars, and so on. Behind this, a relatively mature "electronic antique" collection market has been formed, and a considerable number of caring consumers have supported this seemingly illogical market at first glance. Perhaps the key reason for the appreciation of consumer electronic products when they stop production is that their market positioning has shifted from electronic products to collectibles. However, not all electronic products can be "antiques". Looking at all kinds of such products sold in the overseas second-hand market, it is basically appropriate that the more complete the product is, the better it is. It also has a certain historical significance, and it also needs to have a certain scarcity. Homepod happens to have these points. As Apple's first smart speaker product, it has a historical position similar to that of the first iPhone and the first apple I. In addition, homepod stopped production early due to poor sales, so its survival is also limited, which may give some interested people room for speculation. (Xinhua News Agency)
Edit：Li Ling Responsible editor：Chen Jie
Source：IT-3eLife
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