Apple recently received FCC approval for its HomePod product, paving the way for the company to gear up its product launch. The HomePod has already been delayed for quite a few weeks now and may soon hit the store shelves. It’s worth noting that Apple was required to submit the HomePod for FCC approval because the device has wireless technologies like Wi-Fi.
Even though FCC approval doesn’t necessarily tell us that the company will launch the device pretty quickly, we do know that the documents released by the FCC are from September show us there haven’t been major hardware changes in the product recently, if any, over the past several months.
The HomePod was originally unveiled in last year’s WWDC event. That’s when Apple initially said that it expected to launch the device sometime in December of 2017, but we’re already in January 2018 and still no HomePod launch. In November of last year, Apple announced that the HomePod launch was pushed back to sometime early 2018, with no specific details provided. Now that the HomePod has obtained FCC approval, we may see Apple launch the HomePod in the near future.
Apple’s HomePod is priced at $349, which certainly isn’t cheap, especially since it’s compared to rival smart speakers from companies like Google and Amazon. Apple in a sense is deliberately positioning the HomePod as as speaker with premium acoustics that its competitors won’t be able to match.
