Sonos One: New smart speaker might have spoiled the release of Apple's HomePod

The new Sonos speaker is a little more square, but is otherwise remarkably similar (Sonos)

When Apple took to the stage to launch its new smart speaker, the HomePod, it began with an explanation that was more like an insult. It was introducing a smart speaker that was the first to include both voice control and good sound, it said, and it flashed up a picture of a Sonos, which it mocked for having great sound but for forcing you to use an app.

Now that image may haunt the release of Apple’s new speaker. Because Sonos just released the new One: a speaker that can be controlled with the voice and includes the same audio quality that Sonos has become famous for.

And what’s more, the Sonos speaker will be available weeks before Apple’s HomePod, which arrives in December, ships. It’s also almost half the price: $199 for Sonos’s effort compared with $349, for Apple’s.

The two companies do appear to be working happily together, despite the competition between their smart speakers. Sonos will be integrating Apple’s AirPlay 2 for music streaming when it launches next year, for instance, and Apple Music is still integral to the Sonos app.

But the two speakers now put the companies in competition and in a way that Apple had explicitly – and unusually – suggested at its HomePod launch event.

Apple’s speaker does have some things that the Sonos doesn’t.

Because Apple is building the speaker, for instance, it’s able to integrate Siri in a way that Sonos isn’t allowed to. While people will be able to talk to their phones to tell their Sonos speakers to play music, Apple’s HomePod doesn’t need any extra hardware and has the voice assistant built right in.

The HomePod also includes “spatial awareness”, which Apple says means that the speaker listens out for how it sounds in the room and changes the audio accordingly, making up for any strange acoustics. Sonos does have a similar feature – TruePlay – but that’s just set up once at the beginning and doesn’t change until it’s re-done.

But Sonos has added a range of features that Apple doesn’t include, too. The One is compatible with rival voice services like Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant, for instance, and it can play music from Spotify and other streaming platforms as well.