Man oh man. All the designers for this, even Rubin sometimes, sound just like hipsters. They want to carry something which will tell everyone around them that they don’t care what everyone around them thinks about what they’re carrying. (Yeah, right.) They named the product line “essential” and then say it’s going to be exclusive and definitely something that not everyone will have. And they’re talking about a voice assistant/hub that can talk with pretty much everything without giving any engineering specs. Or a price. And say it’s going to work with HomeKit, which would be a big surprise since that’s a long development cycle. (Only later corrections said that not all the features will be available at launch. Hint hint)
Also, if the voice processing is local, I’ll be very surprised if it matches up to either echo or google home.
OK, yes, it looks cool in the totally spec-free marketing videos. And Rubin has a lot of cred, obviously. But dang, I hate hipster marketing. 
And here the vision details:
Everybody at Essential hates the idea that you, your grandma, and your accountant all carry the same phone. Gadgets once said something about the people who carried them. They communicated fashion sense or nerd cred. Now they’re as personal as refrigerators. Rubin wants the Essential phone to clearly and emphatically state that the person carrying it isn’t won over by marketing, isn’t a fanboy, isn’t driven by trends. People who buy an Essential phone, he says, want technology that works for them, not the other way around.
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) on the argument that better privacy will be a selling proposition. And so far it has been with professional builders. That’s one reason the official packages being put into new housing developments are HomeKit.