Contributor I

Answered

All Sonos products will continue to work past May

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I wasn’t one of the customers who complained about Sonos’ earlier communication this week. However, I initially had the same reaction as many others who wrote in anger or disappointment in this customer community.

I commend Patrick Spence for his quick reaction, for correcting course, and for the tone of his letter to customers today. I completely understand Sonos’ internal drivers to urge their customers to upgrade their systems. However, as Patrick well said, customer experience and their loyalty is paramount and trumps anything else.

I plan to remain as a loyal Sonos customer and will continue to expand and upgrade my home sound system when it makes sense to do so.

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M

mark690Answer

Lyricist I

I think people are a lot more surprised than they ought to be, this strikes me as being a fairly predictable issue with any ‘connected’ devices in modern times. You used to buy an amp, which might run for decades, but you only got a 12 month warranty - no ongoing service of any kind. Here we are asking a company to continue delivering a service indefinitely, for no fee (save being baked into the cost of the product). It was probably hubris to imagine they could do this in the first place, it’s not a scalable business model. Maybe we will see a shift towards subscriptions for connected devices in future.

Yes, as another poster said, impossible is a very strong term in software… the core technology of value here is the SonosNet bit that syncs all the devices so well, and it is hard to imagine that needs to change much. New products might want to support higher bitrates or codecs or somesuch, but they could also be designed to support the older protocol and continue to work, albeit by downgrading themselves to the lowest common denominator in any given system.

However continuing to support increasing lists of legacy devices in a single codebase does become harder, more error prone, and less fun for the people doing it. Software definitely has a shelf life.

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skyschemer

Enthusiast II

I think WIkipedia has a pretty good definition of EOL:

"End-of-life" (EOL) is a term used with respect to a product supplied to customers, indicating that the product is in the end of its useful life (from the vendor's point of view), and a vendor stops marketing, selling, or rework sustaining it. (The vendor may simply intend to limit or end support for the product.)

Seems to fit here.

jgatie

Then you should run on legacy mode for that year, and upgrade as you get the funds.

Well, obviously. That doesn’t mean 4 months lead time is customer-friendly.

On the upside, they are committing to bug fixes and security patches. That does make this less of an issue than it was when the first announcement came out.

Ideally, though? I’d like a service mix, so that old and new can co-exist with new doing its new things, and old supporting old things, and the two capable of grouping together. That isn’t what they are committing to. Which implies that if I buy new things, my new things will only run the old things. Will that be a problem? I don’t know--I can’t predict the future. But given that the post-4 months period is not coming with any guarantees beyond bug fixes, it’s still pretty crappy service.

Defend it all you want, but there is clearly a disconnect between Sonos and its oldest customers. If there wasn’t, we wouldn’t be seeing this much commotion.

Not defending their PR nightmare, disconnect, or lack of communication, or anything else, except from software standpoint. Many of us who know software engineering looked at the hardware and predicted this years ago. Quite frankly I’m surprised they got blood out of the well wringed stone for this long.

pwt

Virtuoso

Not defending their PR nightmare, disconnect, or lack of communication, or anything else, except from software standpoint. Many of us who know software engineering looked at the hardware and predicted this years ago. Quite frankly I’m surprised they got blood out of the well wringed stone for this long.

Do you know whether the ZP80 and ZP100 have the same memory/storage/CPU as the ZP90 and ZP120 that succeeded them? One of the things that surprised me was that it wasn't just the original hardware that is included in the legacy list.

I was also caught out by buying used Connects that appeared identical to the Connects that were still being sold by Sonos until recently.

4 x P:5 | Sub | 4 x P:1 | 3 x Connect | 2 x Boost | Connect:Amp | 2 x One | Amp | Move | Port | Era 300

jgatie

Do you know whether the ZP80 and ZP100 have the same memory/storage/CPU as the ZP90 and ZP120 that succeeded them? One of the things that surprised me was that it wasn't just the original hardware that is included in the legacy list.

I was also caught out by buying used Connects that appeared identical to the Connects that were still being sold by Sonos until recently.

Every model given legacy status has the same RAM and SD storage (not sure about CPU). I imagine that was the deciding factor. It appears they just couldn’t fit the application and data in 32 MB anymore.

Plus look at things like SMB v1. The old kernel from 2005 didn’t even know what it was, and there was no way you are going to fit a modern kernel, plus the application, plus the data in 32 MB. Which is one reason they couldn’t go to v2. There’s probably a hundred other things also.

As to the “one of these Connects is not like the others” thing, they admitted they were caught with that, which is why they have used the generation designations on newer units.

jgatie

Oh and one more difference between legacy and modern, all legacy models pre-date the 5 GHz standard, all modern devices have 5 GHz capability. What the significance of that is, or if it is significant at all, I don’t know.

pwt

Virtuoso

Oh and one more difference between legacy and modern, all legacy models pre-date the 5 GHz standard, all modern devices have 5 GHz capability. What the significance of that is, or if it is significant at all, I don’t know.

Interesting. I have a non-legacy Connect:Amp. I thought it lacked a 5GHz radio because it can’t be used wirelessly to drive surrounds.

4 x P:5 | Sub | 4 x P:1 | 3 x Connect | 2 x Boost | Connect:Amp | 2 x One | Amp | Move | Port | Era 300

jgatie

Oh and one more difference between legacy and modern, all legacy models pre-date the 5 GHz standard, all modern devices have 5 GHz capability. What the significance of that is, or if it is significant at all, I don’t know.

Interesting. I have a non-legacy Connect:Amp. I thought it lacked a 5GHz radio because it can’t be used wirelessly to drive surrounds.

Whoops. Forgot about those. Amend that to say “speaker models”. That’s what I get for overthinking, LOL. :persevere:

D

David_366

Enthusiast I

What about a low cost bridge type device they could sell or give away at cost that connects to the legacy speaker via the ethernet port and then that becomes its new modern brain?

Or:

- legacy only ecosystem - carry on as before

- modern only ecosystem - carry on with updates

- legacy and modern coexist - a modern device always becomes the master and the legacy always a slave? Create a light weight firmware for the legacy that strips out all the master bloat stuff as it will never be needed and create some “space” to keep it going a bit longer.

if the legacy gets sold or added to a legacy only system it just need to get its old legacy firmware back!

caveat to this mode is it always needs a modern device online...

jgatie

What about a low cost bridge type device they could sell or give away at cost that connects to the legacy speaker via the ethernet port and then that becomes its new modern brain?

Or:

- legacy only ecosystem - carry on as before

- modern only ecosystem - carry on with updates

- legacy and modern coexist, a modern device always becomes the master and the legacy always a slave? Create a light weight firmware for the legacy that strips out all the master bloat stuff as it will never be needed and create some “space” to keep it going a bit longer.

if the legacy gets sold or added to a legacy only system it just need to get its old legacy firmware back!

Already discussed. In short, it won’t be low cost. The Bridge is low cost because it is just a network device with a WiFi card. No different than an access point, but with some mesh logic.

Sonos players stream using a proprietary timing/syncing/communication protocol, and that is subject to change (which is why a legacy system won’t always be compatible with up to date systems). In short, each unit must speak the same language or nothing gets played, nothing gets grouped, nothing is synced, etc.

The “Bridge” you speak of would have to process the streams and control protocol, translating up to 32 simultaneous streams from legacy to modern or modern to legacy, which requires far more processing. Those processing requirements would probably price it out of the reach of a sensible resolution. There is also the issue of this additional processing causing timing errors and loss of sync.

That’s just a couple of things off the top of my head.

D

David_366

Enthusiast I

What about a low cost bridge type device they could sell or give away at cost that connects to the legacy speaker via the ethernet port and then that becomes its new modern brain?

Or:

- legacy only ecosystem - carry on as before

- modern only ecosystem - carry on with updates

- legacy and modern coexist, a modern device always becomes the master and the legacy always a slave? Create a light weight firmware for the legacy that strips out all the master bloat stuff as it will never be needed and create some “space” to keep it going a bit longer.

if the legacy gets sold or added to a legacy only system it just need to get its old legacy firmware back!

Already discussed. In short, it won’t be low cost. The Bridge is low cost because it is just a network device with a WiFi card. No different than an access point, but with some mesh logic.

Sonos players stream using a proprietary timing/syncing/communication protocol, and that is subject to change (which is why a legacy system won’t always be compatible with up to date systems). In short, each unit must speak the same language or nothing gets played, nothing gets grouped, etc.

The “Bridge” you speak of would have to process the streams and control protocol, translating up to 32 simultaneous streams from legacy to modern or modern to legacy, which requires far more processing. Those processing requirements would probably price it out of the reach of a sensible resolution. There is also the issue of this additional processing causing timing errors and causing loss of sync.

That’s just a couple of things off the top of my head.

Thanks. So what your saying is that they probably have actually explored and exhausted all avenues and they didn’t really have a choice? At the end of the day the equipment is old and reached its limit. Guess they knew this was coming for a long time and dreaded the day they had to announce it. But they should have given more than 4 months notice.

Also May is a strange month to chose considering I bought my Play 5 Gen 1 from Sonos direct in August 2015 so you would expect their 5 year support would be August 2020?

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