HomePod Launching in China and Hong Kong on January 18
Apple today announced that its HomePod speaker launches in China and Hong Kong on Friday, January 18. It will be available for 2,799 yuan in China and HK$2,799 in Hong Kong from Apple.com, Apple Stores, and authorized resellers.
Apple had previously announced that the HomePod would launch in China and Hong Kong in early 2019 and now we know it will be later this week. Siri on the HomePod gained support for Cantonese and Mandarin in China and a Cantonese dialect in Hong Kong in a software update last month.
Apple's press release highlights how the HomePod can stream Apple Music genres such as Mandopop and Cantopop and other audio content from any AirPlay-supported apps, including QQ Music, DeDao, iHuman Story, Dragonfly FM, and Penguin FM in China, and Spotify, KKBOX, JOOX, and Podcast in Hong Kong.
Apple's marketing chief Phil Schiller:
We're excited to bring HomePod to our customers in mainland China and Hong Kong markets. We can't wait for them to experience how great it sounds in their home, we think they are going to love it.
HomePod first launched in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia in February 2018, followed by Canada, France, and Germany in June 2018. And in October 2018, Apple made the speaker available in Spain and Mexico.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Top Rated Comments