Why Apple’s Last Foray Into Home Speakers Was Such a Fiasco

Monday's keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference was perhaps the most action-packed set of releases from Apple in quite a long time, with the kicker being Cupertino's take on the Amazon Echo and the Sonos Play speaker systems, the snazzy-but-expensive HomePod.

Certainly the device, which combines high-quality sound with a touch of Siri, is deserving of some of the hype it's gotten so far.

But the buzz of Monday's event stands in stark contrast to the release of Apple's last big foray into the home speaker market, the iPod Hi-Fi. That device was the centerpiece of a February 2006 product announcement that looked downright modest in comparison to this year's WWDC.

The event, featuring "some medium-scale things," according to then-CEO Steve Jobs, was weirdly small-potatoes for an Apple event, with just three new products introduced: The first Mac Mini with an Intel processor; a $99 leather case for the iPod; and the $349 iPod Hi-Fi, which Jobs described as "home stereo, reinvented for the iPod age."

The iPod Hi-Fi, despite being the event's centerpiece, felt like something of a letdown. Jobs sold the device as an attempt by the company to make the iPod suitable for the home—despite an already-crowded iPod speaker market filled with new players like iHome and older ones like Bose. Despite this, Jobs felt there was room for something more powerful.

"You do want room-filling power, but without distortion, and a lot of these products do distort when you crank up the volume," Jobs noted.

I actually remember the iPod Hi-Fi quite well—because it was the speaker of choice for my employer at the time, a newspaper targeted at millennials that received the speaker as a gift. The device felt absurd: It looked like an iPod-ready clock radio, except super-sized.

It was minimalist to the extreme, with little in the way of interface—just volume and play/pause buttons. It had a remote, but that was really only useful for the volume: If you wanted to change the settings beyond simply turning up the volume or selecting the next song, you were better off walking over to the device. It didn't support only iPods, as it had a headphone jack on the back, and in practice, the office mostly used it as a way to play music from an XM Radio receiver. (Steve Jobs probably would have given us the side eye.)

Having used it regularly for about a year or so, I'll say that the Hi-Fi was fine—best compared, both in terms of price and purpose, to a Bose Wave speaker with stripped-down functionality—and perhaps not worthy of some of the more aggressive disdain that it received at the time.

But it failed to connect with consumers. The device was a surprisingly non-interactive block of noise, with no ability to do anything other than play music from an audio jack or iPod connector. (On the other hand, the sound was powerful enough to blow out two rows of candles.)

It was easy for the non-audiophiles to dismiss in favor of cheaper options that did more things, and audiophiles were quick to scrutinize the actual sound.

And after the device went off the market in late 2007, Apple dropped support pretty much immediately. The Hi-Fi's 30-pin connector didn't even support most iPhones, because of a difference in voltage between the iPhone and iPod. (A device called the Coolstream Bluetooth Receiver, released in 2013, fixed this problem by turning the 30-pin slot on the Hi-Fi into a Bluetooth connector.)

The HomePod, with the addition of a lot more interactivity, might have a market for the simple fact that it does a lot more than play music.