Unfortunately Sonos don’t publish a hardware roadmap and you only really know about new products when they are released. The FCC website might give you clues about upcoming products as do rumour / technology sites.
Personally I have two streaming devices at home with displays. Whilst they are aesthetically impressive looking the screen for me is not such a selling point now they are in the house. I sit around 6/7 ft away and yes I can see the artwork but little else as the screens are small. As for the touch display, getting up out my seat and then bending down to “fiddle” with the screen is quite painful.
What I do however find useful is the WiiM app for Apple TV (fire also available) which can display artwork and text that I can see. Still use the remote or phone / tablet for pulling up music as and when but using the big TV for me works well as I am not tied to my phone / tablet or squinting at a small screen to see what’s playing.
A. CR-100 v2 would sell at least three devices to me.
I'd pay extra for real buttons too, ones that are friendly to older hands.
A streaming DAC with a screen ( touch or non touch) whatever along with a beautiful remote with tactile buttons. How about that ?
Currently I am using couple of Ikea SYMFONISK sound remotes for the different SONOS products that I have. Its simple and effective.
Over the years I’ve used and enjoyed the SONOS controllers. However, not long after the CR200 was introduced iPhones became popular and there were reams of complaints about needing to purchase a SONOS controller: “Why can’t my iPhone control the system?” Also, the display manufacturer went out of business a little while later. Further, there was a bad production run of displays. SONOS was replacing these until SONOS ran out of stock.
Originally, the SONOS controllers were a very specialized design, manufactured in relatively low volume. Therefore, unit cost was high. Now there are very low cost phones that could easily be customized as SONOS controllers, but I’m not sure how many would sell. We’d still have the “Why can’t I just use my phone?”.
After seeing CR 100 and CR 200 in this forum, I googled a pic for them and after seeing, it reminded me somewhat of Logitech squeezebox. Good ones.
I think we should have some kind of display on products. Maybe an LED light, maybe it can be a song name display or even album art if it possible.
Imagine VU meters on a display, they look cool and not necessary that it need be touch screen, at least a display, I think it only adds flora to any device.
Not only audio, look around us, there are displays all around.. microwave, refrigerator, door phones, washing machine, dish washer, routers and of course tablets, televisions and mobile phones. Now a days beyond hubs also have touch screen displays in their chimneys. Even CD, DVD and media players had displays.
:-)
I would love to keep my phone away and not use it to see album art information or change tracks and just use a physical RF remote instead to see the album art on the product change after pressing the next button on the remote.
We still use remotes for our TV don't we :-)