Sonos CEO Apologizes For Confusion, Says Legacy Products Will Work 'As Long As Possible' (theverge.com) 38
On Tuesday, Sonos announced that come May 2020, a number of its older products will no longer receive software updates. Naturally, this frustrated many longtime customers, prompting Sonos CEO Patrick Spence to issue a statement to try to clear up the confusion. The Verge reports: "We heard you," is how Spence begins the letter to customers. "We did not get this right from the start." Spence apologizes for any confusion and reiterates that the so-called legacy products will "continue to work as they do today." "Many of you have invested heavily in your Sonos systems, and we intend to honor that investment for as long as possible."
Similarly, Spence pledges that Sonos will deliver bug fixes and security patches to legacy products "for as long as possible" -- without any hard timeline. Most interesting, he says "if we run into something core to the experience that can't be addressed, we'll work to offer an alternative solution and let you know about any changes you'll see in your experience." The letter from Sonos' CEO doesn't retract anything that the company announced earlier this week; Spence is just trying to be as clear as possible about what's happening come May. Spence again confirms that Sonos is planning a way for customers to fork any legacy devices they might own off of their main Sonos system with more modern speakers. (Sonos architected its system so that all devices share the same software. Once one product is no longer eligible for updates, the whole setup stops receiving them. This workaround is designed to avoid that problem.)
Similarly, Spence pledges that Sonos will deliver bug fixes and security patches to legacy products "for as long as possible" -- without any hard timeline. Most interesting, he says "if we run into something core to the experience that can't be addressed, we'll work to offer an alternative solution and let you know about any changes you'll see in your experience." The letter from Sonos' CEO doesn't retract anything that the company announced earlier this week; Spence is just trying to be as clear as possible about what's happening come May. Spence again confirms that Sonos is planning a way for customers to fork any legacy devices they might own off of their main Sonos system with more modern speakers. (Sonos architected its system so that all devices share the same software. Once one product is no longer eligible for updates, the whole setup stops receiving them. This workaround is designed to avoid that problem.)
And People Were Surprised? (Score:1)
I didn't understand the confusion from the get-go, nor the perhaps over-reported reactions from consumers. A CEO telling you that a product with a software-based back end would no longer be receiving updates after, in some cases, 10 years on the market should be expected to some extent. He made no comment that the products were getting worse in any way, just that they wouldn't be expected to do much more tomorrow than they could today and that was unlikely to change due to hardware limitations. This is exac
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It's worse than that. If you have older products then you can't update the newer ones or it will break compatibility. From this announcement it's not clear if they are fixing that.
There is also their policy of bricking devices that are put into "recycling mode" which means they go to landfill instead of being reused. No word on that changing.
Re: And People Were Surprised? (Score:1)
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And I guess that you can't buy a new device (which has newer firmware from the factory) and connect it to your existing setup. This means that in order to add one new device, you have to replace all your old ones.
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Indeed, if you buy one with newer firmware then all the old ones must be updated to work.
Re:And People Were Surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not what they said, they implied the product would no longer work at all. I believe that miscommunication was intentional to drive sales of newer gear.
They should be apologizing for implying that the longest you should expect an audio product to work is 10 years. People have installed this stuff in their walls, though I wouldn't expect a 50 year life 20 shouldn't be unreasonable for something that's installed in the walls. If this stuff is dependent on something they don't want to support anymore they should open it up and allow the customers to self-support. Anything else is anti-customer.
I'd wager a large percentage of Sonos' Customer base is capable of self supporting their gear if Sonos opened it up and allowed them to do so. But this was as much about driving sales as it was about ending support on older products.
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Nowhere in their post did they imply or state that the product would no longer work. They specifically said, "Continue using these legacy products, recognizing that your system will no longer receive software updates and new features."
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Mine isn't 10 years old and certainly doesn't support the newest features.
I expected they would start breaking it soon to force an upgrade, but all I think that really would do is drive more people to decipher the sonos protocol.
I wouldn't be completely upset about driving it from the server in the garage.
Re: And People Were Surprised? (Score:2)
I am not aware of any in-wall sonos devices. Update: i just looked it up and they apparently now have one.
Its definitely not legacy products from the Play:5, Play:3, Play:1 era.
Sonos is expensive. Prohibitively so. If you think the Play:3 is costly look at their soundbar + surround sound setup. OMFG. You could build a home theater with a bunch of recliners with the sort of budget that surround setup costs.
I have 1 sonos device. It was that Sonos Connect Amp. I feed its line-out to a amp that then feeds a di
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Personally, I think Sonos have made a major mistake here, but mostly with their communications.
The thing I really, really objected to was that the original announcement amounted to "we want you to upgrade your old stuff, and we're holding all of your gear hostage until you do". They've since clarified a bit, but it's not really enough and it's a bit late now. How the original announcement got through the communications filters is beyond me. It's basically amounted to "doing a Ratner" (go look up Gerald Ratn
Re: And People Were Surprised? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sonos are breaking compatibility between old and new products.
Les say you bought some really nice speakers with your house. Had them mounted and cabled into the walls. This is like JBL telling you that those speakers would no longer work with any JBL product released after today.
It is totally unacceptable and shows just how stupidly overcomplicated we have made things for ourselves.
These devices are supposed to play music. Any smart shit should be contained in control units and the devices that emit the sou
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Should have been obvious when you bought speaker that didn't have speaker terminals on it ... Believe me, I thought long and hard before buying one on the very concern that someday I wouldn't be able to use them if something happened to the company.
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No they aren't as is bloody obvious if you've got a passing familiarity with them. Most Sonos products are self-contained so if it just played a signal sent from elsewhere they'd be pretty useless. Anyone buying a smart speaker expecting 10+ years of updates was naive.
What Sonos have done that is much more dubious is that some of the devices no longer getting updates were bought considerably less than 10 years ago, and the restriction of updates is to your entire
Re: And People Were Surprised? (Score:2)
Except for their home theater shit. Those were not music centric. Extremely costly to get a 5.1 setup going with them. Then what do you do when the next HDMI standard comes out? Its bad enough that Im on my third yamaha amp because of HDMI standards changing. Im still on a version running HDMI 1.4 just because im still using a Panasonic TC-P65VT25 plasma tv. All that investment into active shutter glasses, 3d, all that fly-by-night shit. When I finally decide to get that 70in plasma-killer it also means a n
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Re: And People Were Surprised? (Score:2)
Well eventually the API for those services will change. Perhaps new command names with different command arguments. So no updates means one day pandora is going to break for you.
Another thing to consider is the App store. Its not currently feasible to install a legacy version of an App, and you cant side load. That means a new sonos app very well could one day stop communicating unless they deliberately throw in backward compatibility.
The fork may be a big benefit here! (Score:2)
I imagine our use-case isn't that typical? But in our house, I started out putting in a few Sonos devices I obtained from a company that went out of business. Later on, my wife bought a Sonos speaker so she could stream her music from her phone to it. Problem is, everything really wants to be managed under ONE login that "owns" everything in the house.
My preferred setup would be letting both of us have individual logins for Sonos's app that give us full control over everything - but remember our preferen
Self interest and right to repair (Score:1)
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Then I installed Volumio and got pretty much everything a Sonos system can do.
It belongs to me, and does not rely on some company supplying me firmware that might brick anything. If Volumio go out of business, I can carry on using what I have, or switch to one of the any alternatives.
Nothing I did was particularly clever or difficult. I can't see why anyone would want a Sonos device.
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The benefits of using an "open" system such as a Raspberry Pi are well known, especially with regards to vendor lock-in. However, it cannot do everything a Sonos system can do... for instance, synchronisation accross multiple speakers. For some they may be must-to-have features, and for others useless features.
Maybe not, but piCorePlayer [picoreplayer.org] can. As my ancient Slim Devices / Logitech Squeezebox [wikipedia.org] hardware is starting to fail, I have been migrating to piCorePlayer. Nicely, the new stuff will sync just fine with the old stuff.
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Ease of use, i.e. not having to buy several parts, built them into a working system, install a Linux OS onto SD card and then configure it mostly manually.
Seems that people do make something like that which is ready to go: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HiF... [ebay.co.uk]
I wonder how many they sell and if with some marketing they could compete with Sonos.
Ah yes, The IoFTfSP (Score:4, Funny)
The Internet of Fucky Things for Stupid People.
A bit late.. (Score:2)
It's a bit late isn't it ? The original announcement completely trashed the companies reputation and pushed away potential customers.
Weeks later they suddenly realise that the backlash might affect their business ?
Wankers.
In other words (Score:4, Insightful)
Folks didn't buy speakers, (Score:1)
You're welcome (Score:2)
I'm just going to assume my commentary [slashdot.org] helped ...
Reputation (Score:4, Insightful)
Designed for obsolescence! (Score:1)
Profit? (Score:1)
2. Announce deprecation of older lines.
3. Announce undo of 2.
4. Profit!
One firmware to rule them all... until now. (Score:4, Interesting)
There was a time when Sonos was the comfortable market leader in a niche that was quite profitable. They pioneered a simple-to-setup home HiFi system that could read content off a NAS, eventually stream also. However, there was one glaring flaw in their corporate strategy, the insistence on one firmware for all devices. Here are some of the events that would require you to upgrade all local devices to update their firmware: initial setup, add a device, factory reset, updating the desktop or smartphone App.
As you can imagine, firmwares evolve over time, as do the hardware needs to run them. No matter how much you over-provision on the front end, the hardware will eventually reach its limits, especially if you lay off the teams that developed it in the first place. So sonos has hit a wall, repeatedly, and past experience suggested that they would, once again, resort to mass-bricking, just as they did with the CR100 when they released firmware 8.5. What was different this time is that the company did a better job of communicating the changes in advance and tried to soften the blow by offering a 30% discount on a full-price "upgrade" in return for the user bricking their functional extant device(s) on the euthanasia list.
As usual, this is being done via firmware, i,e. locking out devices from the server once brick mode has been enabled. Without server authorization, these devices can never be setup again. And that is my biggest issue with Sonos - no control over firmware leads to the company effectively dictating what I may or may not do with property I allegedly own. So, while this transition by Sonos away from force bricking is commendable, it still will not allow me to use my CR100's again should my gear need a firmware refresh due to flash corruption. As Sonophone and like Apps have shown, controlling multiple Sonos' devices sporting different firmwares is not a problem. Yes, it will take some additional work, but it can be done.
No, this whole effort to "upgrade" the Sonos fleet while bricking older devices smacks of desperation. I suspect that Sonos is trying to get sold to one of the big three muscling into their turf with smart speakers (i.e. Amazon, Apple, Google). The margins are dropping because the big three are subsidizing their hardware sales while leveraging their AI data centers. The thinking must be that the only thing that will "save" Sonos shareholder value is a quick sale to pimp out their user base to the highest bidder seeking market share. Hence the need for interoperability and voice-enablement for most of their new gear.
I suggest the following to current users: do not trust Sonos. I have a dedicated HDD hanging off a Apple Airport Extreme serving files because Sonos never upgraded their SMB stack beyond SMB1 NLTM v1. Similarly, Sonos.com and its sub-domains are DNS black-holed *and* port-blocked for the fixed IP range that my Sonos gear sits in. Even though sending metrics to Sonos is turned off per the Sonos preferences, every piece of Sonos gear attempts to contact the mothership hundreds of times per day. The company simply cannot be trusted. It's a pity since the company once made the best connected gear - easy to set up, easy to use, and functional.
Not even TFA says what Sonos is or sells (Score:2)
I read the summary, then TFA, and neither says what this company sells. Apparently they have "modern products" and "legacy products".
"Confusion" (Score:3)
There was no confusion - everybody understood that forced obsolescence was being enacted on them.
The CEO still hasn't apologized for Sonos being a bag of dicks.
"As long as possible" (Score:2)
Don't care. If it requires your lordly munificence to keep working, I don't want it.
I'm watching.. (Score:2)
I've been kind of late to the "home automation" and "smart speakers" party .. but my girlfriend who recently moved in is dragging me screaming and kicking into the modern age... and I've been looking at solutions that will work for both of us (she's an Apple user, I'm an Android and PC user, and neither is ready to jump those ships) so we need solutions that work with both.
I was interested in Sonos offerings as they seem to have support for various protocols.. and in theory, I'd be buying newer products..