L’HomePod di Apple it does not seem to have the success hoped for on the market. And the Cupertino company is forced to run for cover. Precisely for this reason, he decided to hire a new HomePod Software Head to optimize the product and be able to compete with the best-selling smart speaker at the moment, the Amazon Echo. Here then explains the return of Afrooz Family, who previously worked at Apple between 2012 and 2018, first in audio applications and then as a Senior Audio Engineer.
HomePod: Apple hires a new Software Head
Afrooz Family will be Apple’s new HomePod Software Head, and will be tasked with increasing sales of the company’s smart speaker as much as possible. An important responsibility, which Apple has chosen to entrust to an old acquaintance. According to reports from Bloomberg, Family left the company in 2018 to co-found the startup audio Sync with former designer Christopher Stringer. He then left the startup in early 2021, after contributing to the development of Cell Alpha, the world’s first triphonic loudspeaker.
Clearly, the sector of origin of Family can not help but benefit the sales of the Apple HomePod, which is suffering not a little from the competition of the Amazon Echo. And not only. Even Google seems to have now gained a fair share of the market in the sector. Analyzes have shown that more than two-thirds of speakers in the United States are Amazon-branded, and a quarter are Google-branded. Apple, on the other hand, can barely reach a third.
Among other things, remember that the company has abandoned the production of HomePod to focus on the HomePod mini. In short, the situation is clear. Conquering the smart speaker market is the Cupertino company’s next challenge. Will Family be able to achieve such an ambitious goal? Or will we be forced to say goodbye to the HomePod mini too?