Apple Inc. kicked off its weeklong Worldwide Developer Conference today with some major announcements, including one entirely new product: the new HomePod smart speaker, Apple’s long-awaited answer to Amazon.com Inc.’s Echo and Google Inc.’s Home.

Apple also announced expanded support for virtual and augmented reality, new machine learning tools, new versions of MacOS and iOS and more.

HomePod

Rumors about an Apple smart speaker have been circulating for months, and today the company finally revealed HomePod, a Siri-powered speaker that is set to release in December.

During today’s presentation, Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple, said that while other companies have been working on their own home speaker devices, “none of them have quite nailed it yet.” Schiller said that devices like Amazon Echo allow users to use apps or play music, but their speakers “don’t sound so great when you listen to music.”

According to Schiller, HomePod combines both a solid sound system and a powerful smart device. HomePod uses an array of seven beam-forming tweeters combined with a custom-designed four-inch woofer, which Schiller says gives the speaker the power to “rock the house.” HomePod also can sense the size of the room it is in, and through spatial awareness it is able to adjust audio to suit the environment.

However, Apple didn’t emphasize the “smart” aspect of the speaker, unlike Amazon and Google. Schiller waited until last in his announcement of the HomePod even to mention the role of Siri and the ability to answer questions. That suggests either that Apple believes sound quality is what will drive consumers to buy the HomePod or that it’s not yet confident in the product’s smarts or the range of its abilities. It may also need to foster an app base before it promotes that aspect, since these “skills,” as Amazon calls them, are key to consumer acceptance.

“Apple really focused on the music and reinforced the quality of the speaker to play music — more of a competitor to Sonos or a Bose speaker than the Echo,” Julie Ask, a vice president at Forrester Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “The notion of a home assistant or a virtual assistant seems to be secondary. In fact, Apple almost positioned as something that’s not that important.”

HomePod will retail for $349 and is set for release in December in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and it will come to other countries sometime in 2018. Even in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, that would appear to be later than would be ideal to catch the important holiday season. But consistent with other Apple products, Ask said, the price point positions the HomePad at the high end of the market.

According to technology market research firm Futuresource Consulting Ltd., the smart speaker industry was worth $1.2 billion in 2016,  and it is on course to reach $2.5 billion this year. Apple’s main competitors in this area would be Amazon Echo and Google Home, with Amazon currently leading the pack by a wide margin.

Amazon’s Alexa smart assistant, which powers Echo, has also seen some major growth in the last year, and it has found its way into other devices and systems, as well as Ford Sync. According to Futuresource, Alexa has already found its way into 8 percent of American homes.

“The key to adoption will ultimately be how powerful the Siri-driven AI capabilities of the HomePod will be vs. the Amazon Echo, and how quickly Apple can ramp global production,” Morgan Stanley Research analyst Katy Huberty said in a note to clients.

Virtual and augmented reality

Apple still does not have its own VR headset to announce yet, but that does not mean the company is ignoring one of today’s hottest tech trends. Today, the company revealed Metal 2, the new version of its hardware-accelerated graphics applications programming interface, which now offers native virtual reality support.

Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, also announced that Apple is working with Valve Corp. to bring the Steam VR SDK to Metal, and the company is also adding support for Unity and Unreal Engine, the two most popular game engines for creating virtual reality content. This support will allow developers to create a wide range of VR experiences on their Macs.

In addition to the support for VR, Apple also announced ARKit, a new tool for developers to create augmented reality experiences for iOS. Federighi said that with millions of iPhones and iPads capable of supporting AR, ARKit will become “the largest AR platform in the world” overnight.

David Goldman, vice president of marketing at AR startup Lumus Ltd., which raised $45 million in December, also believes that Apple’s existing installed base could be a huge boon for the growing AR industry.

“The new Apple ARKit will ease the transition for consumers into the more sophisticated aspects of AR by reaching millions of Apple users and getting them familiar with the technology,” Goldman said. “We should expect to see a larger AR ecosystem develop around software and products to provide enhanced capabilities to the Apple AR features. This is the first step in creating an immersive AR experience for consumers.”

Machine learning

Machine learning was a recurring theme throughout Apple’s presentation today, and it powers a wide range of features across Apple’s devices, from recognizing images on Mac to improving battery life on iPhone. Today, Apple also announced new machine learning tools for developers, including CoreML, a set of APIs that give developers on-device machine learning capabilities.

Some of the machine learning APIs Apple is releasing to developers through CoreML include its Vision API, which uses computer vision to for face tracking and image recognition, as well as its Natural Language API, which is used to understand human speech.

CoreML also uses a machine learning model converter, which allows developers to take machine learning programs created in third-party frameworks like Caffe or Turi and execute them on-device in iOS, WatchOS and so on.

Federighi said that the performance of CoreML “really is incredible,” and he said that iPhone 7 recognizes images more than six times faster than Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy S8.

MacOS High Sierra and iOS 11

Other major announces from Apple today included the new versions of MacOS and iOS, both of which introduce a number of new features to take advantage of Apple’s latest hardware improvements.

MacOS High Sierra features a shift from HFS to the Apple File System, which is supposed to be faster, more secure and more reliable. Video in High Sierra now uses the HEVC compression standard, which supports high quality 4k videos at up to 40 percent smaller file sizes than the current H.264 standard. High Sierra also offers a number of interface changes and simple quality of life improvements, such as Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari, which uses machine learning to remove tracking data used by advertisers to keep tabs on web surfers.

The updates in iOS 11 seem to be more about refinement rather than revolution, with most of the new features focusing on UI improvements. This includes a completely redesigned app store with better app discovery, as well as a new “do not disturb while driving” feature that blocks notifications in the car. The new iOS is also adding powerful multitasking support for the iPad.

The new versions of MacOS and iOS are already available in beta for developers, and the public release for consumers is coming this fall.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Apple