The Google Home Max is dead—Google shuts down production

Google’s largest good speaker, the Google Dwelling Max, is lifeless. The speaker is listed as “offered out” on retailer.google.com, and the corporate instructed Android Police, “We’ve offered out of Google Dwelling Max and can not be manufacturing the machine.” For those who’ve been wanting Google’s 12-pound mega speaker, now might be your final probability to scrounge round on the Web in search of the final bits of inventory. On the time of writing, Verizon nonetheless has some.

The Google Dwelling Max was released in 2017 alongside the Google Dwelling Mini. The Max was a whopping $400, and apart from the larger, higher sound, it was the one Google speaker with a 3.5mm aux enter. It additionally had a mysterious USB-C port on the again, which, so far as I can inform, might solely ever be used for a wired Ethernet dongle as an alternative of connecting by means of Wi-Fi. (If that was all the time the intent, why not simply give it an Ethernet port as an alternative of USB?) The unique Google Dwelling and the Google Dwelling Mini each received sequels up to now 14 months—the Nest Audio and Nest Mini, respectively—however the Google Dwelling Max is simply getting killed. I might guess that Google simply by no means offered that a lot of them.

The dying of the Max represents Google’s exit from the larger good speaker market, the place it was the costliest entry by a mile. Its foremost assistant competitors, the $300 Apple HomePod and $200 Amazon Echo Studio, will now be left to struggle amongst themselves. It appears like even Apple has had a troublesome time within the premium good speaker market, with the HomePod getting a permanent price drop from its introductory $350 value.

Google’s highest-end good speaker is now simply the common $100 Nest Audio. Google notes you should buy two of them and pair them for stereo sound, however that will not rival the ability of the Max. There are additionally third-party Google Assistant audio system that supply higher sound, notably the $200 Sonos One.

Google says that present Google Dwelling Max customers will nonetheless be supported for the foreseeable future. “Current Google Dwelling Max customers shouldn’t fear as they gained’t see any change of their service. We’ll proceed to supply software program updates and safety fixes to Google Dwelling Max units.”