HomePod, released in February of 2018, is Apple's smart speaker, designed to compete with popular offerings like the Google Home and Amazon Echo. The HomePod focuses heavily on sound quality, with a 7 tweeter array, an Apple-designed 4-inch upward-facing woofer, and an A8 chip that enables powerful spatial awareness features for excellent sound no matter where the HomePod is placed in the room.
Apple's HomePod is normally priced at $299, but while we've occasionally seen sales as low as $199, we haven't yet seen any significant sales from major retailers for Black Friday, so keep checking back to see if we discover any great discounts on it.
While it's not a straight cash discount, there is one solid HomePod deal for Black Friday, and that's straight from Apple. As part of its four-day shopping event running from November 27–30, Apple is offering a bonus $100 Apple gift card with the purchase of a HomePod. The gift card is good not only on future product purchases at Apple, but also on apps, iTunes Store content, and other Apple services, so if you're an Apple fan it's likely the gift card is as good as cash.
OWC also offers discounted HomePods in white for $209.88 and black for $219.88. This is about the only straight cash discount we've seen around Black Friday, but Apple's gift card deal is better if you can make use of it. Also be aware that OWC's HomePods come in non-retail packaging and with a one-year warranty through OWC rather than Apple's normal warranty.
In addition to the full-size HomePod, Apple has just released the $99 HomePod mini, a much smaller and more affordable version of the original Apple smart speaker, but with the product being so new and even Apple having trouble meeting demand for new orders, we're not expecting to see any discount on that one.
