What’s frustrating to me about this is how obfuscated it is.
If Sonos were a dongle I plugged into an existing stereo system in order to use the service I’d be fine with them asking me to upgrade. Instead though they sold people multiroom high end audio systems for several thousands of dollars that people went through a lot of trouble to have installed and are now being told won’t work anymore. People are right to be angry.
Stay tuned for all this to be repeated with self driving cars
My 2008 entry-level Honda is starting to show signs of its age, and that makes me unhappy. It’s still got a physical tumbler using key, no fancy entertainment/navigation system, and no network connectivity. Anything I replace it will is likely to fail on all of those.
I was going to make a smart alack remark about my old stereo system never needing an update, but then I realized that I do bluetooth my phone to the stereo and it gets updates all the time.
I regret that I have but one like to give to your awesome analysis.
As I understand it, some of these products were still sold 2 or 3 years ago, so it’s not as long as that.
Also I wonder: if people want to keep using them as-is, will they just keep doing their thing? I’ve never had any Sonos gear but wonder what the interfaces are and what significant new features people expect.
Audio is a relatively low-bandwidth application, so… what’s the newness in updates that people expect and will miss?
I was curious about the same thing. Here’s their release notes:
Some are just interface improvements but there’s a fair number of changes to the integration of services. For example they added Google Home a couple of months ago.
I’m probably not in their target market, I much prefer to buy things at the thriftshop, but given these shinanigans I’ll never ever buy anything from Sonos, and I’ll even laugh just a little at people who do.
What would you have them do? Support old hardware forever? That’s not really realistic. Refurbish them? That would likely be more costly both in materials, time, and money than it would be to replace with something newer. Their trade up offer where they will e-cycle your old hardware and give you a discount on new hardware is pretty typical in the industry and seems like a responsible thing to do. Apple does the same thing and gets accolades for it. This isn’t a heirloom product that’s meant to last decades or centuries, it’s a tech product made with cheap materials provided by the lowest bidder.
Oh, FFS. This is a ridiculous and specious (at best) argument. This isn’t a simple set of speakers with banana plugs (just listen to them) – it’s a complicated tech product that happens to have speakers built into it. Using this logic, just take the speakers out of the Sonos and put them into an enclosure. Boom, there’s your speakers you can pass down from generation to generation. (Or, rip out the guts and put in a Raspberry Pi for an alternative streaming box.)
Wouldn’t that be nice? Unfortunately that’s just not plausible. These are unfortunately the risks you take when you’re buying into someone else’s ecosystem.
New streaming services.
I don’t expect that Sonos has had to grapple with this, but a lot of video players don’t have audio jacks anymore. It’s HDMI or nothing. (and because hdmi changes as new video formats are introduced, this will render new amplifiers obsolete.)
But a speaker? A speaker is a box with a crossover and drivers.
Yay, more internet of shit things.
None of this stuff is that special or complicated, just artificially complex enough to lock you into a single ecosystem. These things could be designed modularly to allow upgrades (real ones, not the forced update/throw away/buy new cycle foisted upon people suckered into buying this crap).
It seems like a (BAD) business decision to cut off backwards-compatibility, but if things will keep working as-is… I dunno.
I never bought in because stuff was so pricey, and it all seems like something that should be a tiny, cheap thing to plug into whatever amp & speakers folks want to use.
For DIYers, a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W and a Pimoroni hat ($15 pHAT DAC or newer $25 Pirate Audio) can keep your old gear pumping out the latest tunes from your disposable digital gear…
Edited to add links, enjoy…
I think my daughter’s Sonos speakers fall under this, although I will say that Sonos did update her (everybody’s) firmware to no longer need the “bridge” so that they could rely entirely on regular wifi.
Late last year I was looking into buying wireless speakers but had been previously frustrated by all the various speakers on the market with microphones inside, and was surprised to find that Sonos had a new speaker offering (Sonos One SL Wi-Fi) which does NOT have a microphone in it. I bought a set and am happy with them!
Sonos has a plan to stay relevant.
Agreed. I’ve been using these guys for everything, couldn’t recommend them any higher, amazing sound and cost all of $23:
They also go by “Breeze Audio” on eBay (which is where I get them for $23). They can be powered on 12v to 24v, highly recommend to use something in the upper range which, conveniently, is most laptop power supplies… They’re also hacker friendly, on the recommendation of the folks at diyaudio.com I upgraded the capacitors in one of them, but I didn’t notice much of a difference.
Mated to some good thriftshop speakers they blow people away. Leave the thriftshop price tags on for extra style points.
It would be nice if they came with bluetooth but it’s easy enough to add, this one is my personal favorite and ol reliable.
But still, the idea behind the Sonos is the multi room syncing. That can probably be solved with some hackery but it’s not easy to make that seamless. Searching for “raspberry pi multi room audio” there’s a few projects though:
It’s a good point, but 5 years, or for some people just 2, strikes me as far too short. It’s obviously a complicated system, but someone paying hundreds of dollars per unit times however many rooms they install them in should at least be made aware that their system is disposable and will only last a couple of years…
Many years ago, Onkyo released a upgradeable receiver. It didn’t last.
My old Onkyo amplifier has a DB25 aka parallel port on the back which the manual proudly proclaims “makes it future proof!”.
You can run scsi over a DB25 connector, too-- it’s not necessarily parallel. Not the most reliable scheme, but it’s what old macs used.
But in this case it was probably an 8 channel analogue input port.
Yup. Which would of course never ever be obsolete… But hey, at least the amp still works, and Onkyo hasn’t placed a bounty on it.
Probably, at some point, a security patch to avoid people destroying your hearing and maybe your home:
