Following an agreement, earlier this month, with Amazon to make the Apple Music service available on Amazon Alexa smart speakers, the Cupertino-based company is now heavily discounting its own high-end smart speaker, just a little over 10 months since its launch. Surprisingly, neither Walmart nor Fry's, a local but large electronics retailer chain here in Silicon Valley that usually matches its competitors' prices including Amazon's, offered any discount on Apple's smart speaker. We estimate that with this latest holiday push, Apple will sell over 3 million HomePods this year (2018) while Amazon and Google will surpass 20 million units. Apple Music is also available on the more upscale Sonos One ($179) that has Alexa built-in, but you would need to use the Sonos app to stream the music service to the smart speaker. At $249, the Apple Homepod is now $100 cheaper than the Google Home Max, which is currently on sale at $349, down $50 from its regular price ($399).

Source: Forbes December 14, 2018 17:53 UTC