End of Software Updates for Legacy Products

Thanks SONOS could you please explain why we would purchase your new products if we are to go through this again in another few years! This is becoming an expensive process. If I buy other premium hi fi components they tend to last longer than a few years considering one of the items becoming defunct was a sonos bridge purchased 4 years ago. Not impressed!!!

This smacks to me of the Apple approach to their customers where they openly admitted they degraded performance on older products to make the consumer purchase a newer unit. this is just a form of corporate blackmail or high seas piracy, not sure which.

I have invested in my home system and have sung the praises of sonos products much like several others in this thread, but after reading the mail they just sent to me  I am appalled at the way they are coercing customers to upgrade. I have just purchased two 'one' speakers and there is no way, even with the trade in, can i afford to purchase a new five speaker to replace a perfectly good unit that is working and sounding fine.

I will accept that this system will no longer be updated and as an effect I will no longer purchase any sonos products and as they become unusable I will move to another product.

Sonos seem to be crapping on their customers from a great height just for profit.

very SAD.

Sonos can and, it appears, will brick any part of my system whenever it chooses.

My conclusion is that I made a bad mistake buying all this kit and will spend no more money with this company.

Enforcing all this waste of perfectly serviceable equipment in the face of the current concern for the environment is unforgiveable.

I was thinking of purchasing the beam, but after reading this I think I'll look elsewhere.  Also I have 2 older play:3 no upgrade route for these so I can't even upgrade them if I wanted to.  I have a connect:amp I purchased December 2019, and I get prompted to upgrade to the latest hardware, 30% off isn't an incentive. At least that is going to be supported for a little while longer, but only if I ring fence this on the network from my other older generations of speakers.

Going to start looking for a replacement setup, that doesn't include sonos.  Hope there is some legal loophole somewhere that can make sonos pay for not having customer loyalty.

Absolutely fuming about this. I only discovered this yesterday when their email popped into my inbox. Several months notice to inform me half my system will be dumped from updates and may have problems talking to the others. 
 

SONOS want me to replace half my system at a cost of £1000s just because they can’t be bothered to produce a software solution. Never mind the environmental impact!

Long time SONOS user who now feels totally betrayed and let down. Disgusted by the corporate greed as that’s all it is. 

This will be nightmare for me as I have power management on all units and do only activate them when in use! 

As someone who has owned Sonos for many years and seen how it has matured and grown , I find this approach to legacy very disappointing.  I do understand that memory inserted some years ago will be of limited size and may be filling up.

HOWEVER, we live in a world where just recycling a perfectly serviceable product is not acceptable.

Is it not possible to have the memory replaced by suitable people?  I have read your sustainability report , but it strikes me that this is just green wash, you have an opportunity to really be sustainable and it strikes me you are missing it….

What a bunch of twats..... I have a £500 play 5 That is 5 years old that is linked to 12 play 1s and a beam and a £600 sub.... how long before they trash the rest of my system too? 

Even apple give more notice and provide longer support of hardware than this.... and they are bandits.... as a sonos lifer I'm checking out..…

Sonos are basically encouraging you to expand and invest in building a system and then tearing out the foundations which underpinned it's construction..... causing it all to fall down.

The functionality of my Sonos 5 Gen1 has sysematically been taken away from me. I can no longer play my iphone music library through it which is essentially why I bought it. Now Sonos are saying that further functionality will be withdrawn.

I cannot think of any other product purchase to which this happens unless it develops a fault. You wouldn’t buy a car, a vacuum cleaner, a mobile phone etc etc only to find the producers take away its functionality after a relatively short period of time.

My Sonos cost me a lot of money and I cannot afford to upgrade. If I could I would not buy another Sonos as they would probably do this again. How do we know they wouldn’t?

Disgraceful Sonos! Has your country not got Trading Standards?

Hi everybody,

I think this is not only very bad news, it is even worse and very customer unfriendly !!

Sonos should at the same time come out with an offer with, offers you like

30% discount on a new device when you hand in your old device !

That is how you keep your OLD customers satisfied and how Sonos should act 

in order to save the environment !!

And not give them these odd Choise to slowly die if you do not buy new.

I have 2 systems with ca. 30 devices in Total 

I might as well change brand !! I am very pissed off !!

MINUS 100 Points SONOS !!!

I was more at ease with all of this earlier today, but I’ve stewed on it more and more throughout…
This is just largely unprecedented in many ways.

1. 30% rebate to upgrade to current gen units, effectively sledgehammering the existing device into landfill, unusable to anyone as the device promised at the onset. GARBAGE
2. Leave everything as-is and be excluded from all product updates and improvements that were promised as part of the ecosystem at the onset. GARBAGE
3. Silo your modern devices away from your legacy devices so that they cannot interact with one another within the ecosystem that was promised at the onset. GARBAGE

Time to take out the garbage. (note: in this case “garbage” roughly translates to “hundreds or thousands of dollars”)

# boycottsonos take it to twitter they can't edit posts there 

As of now it appears that you will have to leave one legacy unit powered on all the time to prevent the rest of such from being bricked via an update that slips past unwittingly.

Like so many here, I bought into the Sonos system in the very early days and have sold the company to several friends.

Like so many here, I have several items that will become bricks in a few months.

Like so many here, unless they change what they are doing I will no longer be a Sonos customer, nor will I recommend them to anyone.

I do not understand the thinking behind offering a miserable 30% on trading up - a (much) larger percentage might have made a difference.

Sadly, like so many here I will be looking into alternatives over the next few months.

£2500 effectively written off in one email! I first started buying Sonos components early 2000 and have never had a bad word to say about them until a recent purchase of the new AMP which was a complete failure along with their initial attempt at support. Thankfully the product was replaced and my faith restored along with it, just a shame it was so short lived.

Even more so that I’ve been a big promoter of Sonos products amongst friends and colleagues claiming that their support was second to none. I now find myself sat at work with a bunch of p!$$ed of colleagues and not so many friends after that little bombshell!

I completely understand the need for improvements / continued development, and working in a technology role I know that at some point products need to be deemed legacy and phased out, however there’s a right and wrong way to do, unfortunately Sonos, you’ve chosen the wrong way on this occasion.

After seeing so many enraged customer responses maybe you’ll consider putting more effort into developing the App, surely individual zone players could run in a ‘legacy mode’. I’m sure customers wouldn’t have an issue with running half their systems components within a mode that offers reduced features.

And for customers who have purchased these legacy products within the last few years, a free replacement should be offered. For the rest of us, 30% off RRP is an insult.

I assume that if you buy a new iPhone (with the latest software),  which will be the controller for Sonos, then these so called ‘legacy’ customers will find their systems no longer work?

Great that Sonos have single-handedly created so much uncertainty and annoyance.  Who on earth is responsible for their strategy here??

I'm sure I read somewhere that they try and support products for at least 5 years after they stop selling them. You can get the original Play 1 on their website as of today (although I could only find a refurbished one on the UK site but the New Zealand site still had new ones).

Assuming they stick to their guns, they should be ok until at least 2025. I doubt Sonos will commit to any time frame though. 

Trade in: 30% is insulting. 75% is reasonable.

Bitterly dissappointed by receipt of that email.  What makes it worse is that I’ve strongly recommended Sonos to friends and colleagues who now have a load of worthless kit destined for a “Pit and the Pendulum” demise.  I’d been under the illusion Sonos was a forward thinking organisation - clearly a desperate error given they couldn’t  plan for memory or processor upgrades to avoid rapid obsolescence of what’s by any standards a very expensive system.  Unless they come up with a better solution It’s hard to imagine the major sound from Sonos will be anything other than the death knell of the company!  Without a better solution I for one will never purchase another of piece of Sonos kit again.

Quote from August 2018, just after Sonos became a listed company on Nasdaq...

“People are used to buying commodity tech that needs to be replaced, but we’re differentiated because our product persists,” Mike Groeninger, Sonos’ vice president of finance, told Marketwatch.

Well that noble attitude didn’t last long did it? Once Sonos cashed in with a public offering the game was over for us long-term customers. Sad but true.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/04/speaker-maker-sonos-goes-public

Absolutely disgusting this is, on so many levels! 

I reckon you need to address this issue or you are going to lose a lot of customers, maybe that doesn't matter to you for some reason though, because I’m sure if it did, no one would think this move was a good one. 

Who in their right mind will ever buy into this product again unless they have more money than they know what to do with.  People will have saved up hard earned cash to get in on what was such a great product.  You have not only ruined what they have worked hard for, you’ve also made it so that the resale value of anything they own will drop unbelievably! 

I get that equipment gets old, but its not like this stuff is even that old.  Granted I bought it second hand but i only just got my play 5 last year.  The 2nd gen only came out around 2016 didn't it, so before that people were still buying play 5s brand new!?  Surely you can come up with some better way than this!?

As others have said i will definitely not be trading anything up off the back of this, and i certainly wont be buying anything again if this is the way you treat your customers.

I’ve not seen anything that suggests that units will be ‘bricked’, under any circumstances. What’s your source for this?

The danger, I believe, is that non-outdated components of a mixed system get inadvertently updated, and will then no longer work as part of the same system with the outdated devices.

It would appear. That the real danger is that Sonos may not survive this! What happens if the company goes under?

I had been considering buying a Sonos sub, but there is no way I’m going to waste my money on it now.

It is brutal to simply disregard what is supposed to be a premium product by forcing users to abandon them. This is not normal for home appliances, since when did a fridge, washing machine, amplifier etc become legacy. Sonos knew from the beginning that there would be some upkeep, but that should be fairly minimal.

When we went to John Lewis and bought the Sonos we weren’t told - “and by the way, at some random point in the future we’ll make sure that it stops working, but don’t worry - it’s a brilliant product”. I am not impressed and I am sure there are solutions here, but they would require effort from the people at Sonos.

1. One of the arguments is that there isn’t enough storage space to install the software on the older devices. There are so many streaming services, I only use a handful of them. I see a simple solution here whereby users connect to the streaming service with an account, which automatically installs the streaming module onto the speakers. This way, space isn’t wasted with software for streaming services that are not used.
2. Open Source the software so that the online community can continue development of the software, maintaining compatibility. This would take the pressure off Sonos’s development of future products.

I think Sonos needs to seriously think about their announcement and the impact. It will soon make their “premium” product into just an expensive ornament. That’s not cool.

The upgrade offer is a joke too, 30% is a fair amount of money, but the replacement is still expensive. The other issue is that this is blackmail - if you don’t pay up, we’ll ruin your sound system. Absolutely no way am I going to do that - it’s utterly detestable. We upgrade and then how long are they going to support those newer products? I’m not going to take the risk as in a number of months they will ditch that line of products too.

When my existing Sonos products fail to function, it will be good bye to my Sonos ecosystem. It will be interesting what the speaker market does, I do hope that someone will come along and find a solution that fills this hole made by Sonos.

Too late now, the damage is done. When spending large amount of $’s on something you need to trust the company will support it. They have demonstrated that they are quite happy to drop their customers in it at a drop of a hat.

Even if they spin a different story now, tweak their plans etc I’ll always have this in the back of my mind… for me, I couldn't bring myself to spend £x,xxxs of on a company like this. Maybe if their gear was dead cheap I’d take the risk but not at it’s current sale price.