Wow... quite the packed event this year. ARKit is going to be huge.

And there's the most important product they launched that day.

Very nice!

I'll admit, I'm jealous of the supposed sound quality from the Homepod (I assume it's really good). Google Home fits me better but the sound quality could be greatly improved.

Hearing press describe the sound quality as better then Sonos caught my attention. Though my interest in a Homepod is likely dependent on them also supporting audio from a TV somehow. Otherwise if it's only for music, I may pass it up. Clearly there's more details to be released, and Sonos has yet to respond to the voice control aspect yet. So I'm mostly in a holding pattern currently.

Apple doing demos comparing it to Sonos and the Amazon Echo did pretty much tell me it's not likely that Apple will be buying Sonos. Thought maybe they were on that path especially after seeing Sonos speakers sold via Apple Stores.

I did end up ordering a new iPad, the 10.5 Pro. The Air 2 I have now is still really great, though it's turning into a hand me down in the family to get rid of an old iPad 2. Really interested to see how iOS 11 changes up the experience, feels like this is finally a good solid split between the phone and tablet that may lead me to abandoning a home/travel notebook down the line.

I'm also surprised that they didn't end up buying Sonos. It seems like a no-brainer. Everything about the Sonos company just screams Apple, right down to the build quality and design aesthetic.

It also seems like the smarter play, from a sales standpoint, is to sell a small device with the advanced microphone array, and simply use that to control the Sonos speakers. That way, they'd be able to sell a device that was technically still in the price range of the Echo and Home, even though it doesn't have speakers in it.

But, based on the advanced acoustic stuff they're putting into it, I'd see how that would be difficult to implement without a newer generation of Sonos products that would include all the new Apple stuff in it. I guess they decided they'd just build their own thing. That makes sense too, but it's definitely going to be a slight challenge to market a product that's 2-3 times as expensive as the competition, especially in this day and age where the average consumer just doesn't care as much about sound quality as they do about price.

I'm not digging Apple on this, BTW (I know, for once! ). I think they built an extremely impressive device here. I'm sure a large number of people will buy one. But time will tell how many. This certainly isn't like the Apple Watch, which blew away all competitors (and still does). The Echo is extremely popular, and even Google Home is gaining traction, especially at the current $109 price point. I have no doubt that the sound quality of the HomePod would blow my Google Home out of the water. It's almost enough to make me wish I were in the Apple ecosystem

I'll just hope that Google puts out a beefier Home sometime soon. I'm not counting on it. They'll probably get distracted like usual and focus on their lousy assistant, letting everything else fall by the wayside. (can you tell I'm not pleased with Google lately?)

I'm guessing the reason Apple didn't buy Sonos is because Sonos is technically not all that high-end anymore.

Don't get me wrong: I also use Sonos and I love it, but there are some quirks about it. For one, they are the victim of their own legacy. Sonos was one of the first to make streaming devices, which means they still use "old" hardware, or at least have to be compatible with their own older hardware (meaning users that bought a ZP120 15 years ago will still want to be able to connect it to their Sonos array). That's the reason they can't update their stuff with modern hardware, and older drawbacks of the Sonos system still remain and are not fixable because that would kill compatibility. Eg. Sonos still has about half a second delay when it plays audio. Not so much a problem when it's just audio or webradio, but it was a problem for their TV Playbar because you can't have voices delay when watching TV. They tackled that problem by having their Playbar and Play:3 range use a separate 5Ghz network instead of their 2.4 Sonosnet mesh network. It's a solution, but not a clean one.
IMO, this is also the reason why they have been flat out refusing to support Airplay or Chromecase natively for years, because then this shortcoming would become very apparent.
Another shortcoming of their lagacy is the fact Sonos only supports up to 65.000 tracks in their library. A lot of users have larger libraries than that nowadays. This limitation is also because of the hardware (too little memory) and cannot be easily remedied without making certain Sonos hardware incompatible with the Sonos system.

Sure, they are still the biggest and everybody knows them, but nowadays there are better alternatives, and people are starting to discover them. I'm thinking eg. about the excellent Denon Heos system.

Interesting points, though I thought Sonos did Chromecast...