Farhad’s Week in Tech: Netflix Is a Monster, and Apple’s HomePod Arrives Soon<br />Last summer, Apple unveiled a smart speaker inspired by Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home, because it is apparently the rule in the tech industry<br />that if one big company does something, every other company has to do it, too.<br />Now that there’s just so much stuff on Netflix — so many comedies, so many dramas, so many dumb movies, so many smart<br />movies — it has become not just another premium cable channel but something like a replacement for TV itself.<br />It was a crucial miss — the Echo seems to have had a gangbusters holiday, with Amazon<br />expanding its head start in the category by probably tens of millions of devices.<br />A new Apple device is usually a Big Deal event, one of those campaigns that Apple rolls out with the precision of a military conquest.<br />But nobody heard anything more about the HomePod until late November, when Apple announced<br />that the timing had slipped and that HomePod wouldn’t come until after the holidays.
