End of Software Support - Clarifications

End of Software Support - Clarifications
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I
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To quote melvimbe

“I think that lesson should be that anything with software/firmware in it is going to have a shorter life than something that doesn’t.  You’re correct that when that software/firmware is tightly integrated in a system, it could easily shorten the life of your whole system.  In some cases, like Bose, the whole product line could be shutdown.”

Why can’t the system be designed with a central software/firmware device that is replaced when necessary,  that transmits a bluetooth signal to permanent components located where desired?  When my phone requires updating,  I don’t throw away my car,  I change my phone.

H
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Gotta confess I LOL’ed as they say when I received the Sonos announce.  I am so touched!

Frankly I do not care if you don’t provide updates to my legacy gear.  Indeed I am thrilled by this that you will quit bricking my gear and interrupting my dinner parties with cloying “Let’s Do This!” impossible to escape updates.  Which by the way 95% of the tie those updates not only provide any benefit to me, and again, I tremble in fear of what is going to be harmed by them.  Leave my 12-zone system alone thank you!

Cross-compatibility between old and new gear?  I care not because I stopped buying Sonos gear long ago, and advise my tech advice seeking followers to do the same.

Sonos has never, for years now, acted upon requests for features from myself and lots of other community members.  Sonos seems to have this egotistical. narrow and rigid idea of their customer profile, and that has been a total PITA.  e.g. Not everyone in my household has a smart phone, and the ones we do have, we do not carry around from room to room at all times.  Oh, and they must be fairly new ones, so the idea of using older iPhones & iPads as controllers was a tolerable workaround… well it was until Sonos wrecked THAT.

And the really sad part?  I’ve noticed in the past few years the family use of the system has been slowly diminishing due to the reasons described, plus a few more that Sonos has chosen to ignore.

Too bad.  So much potential here.

 

 

W
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There appears to be a school of thought that we should have seen this coming. Why? I’m not aware of Sonos themselves highlighting the fact that their product would cease to be a “Whole Home Sound System” at some point. I don't think it unreasonable that as a purchaser of a SYSTEM I could expect that the system components should continue to work together. Although I’m more than a little disappointed at what is going to happen - and lets face it, its going to - the main learning point for me is that I was probably too trusting of this supplier. That’s likely to be the biggest issue for Sonos as a company - some (possibly many) of their long established customers no longer TRUST the company. I’ve had Sonos products in my home for years (and many of them are about to be designated legacy). I’ve been a strong advocate for the system - but not any longer. I think its unlikely I’ll ever buy another Sonos component again or recommend anyone does so. The only good thing to come out of this, I’m now looking at all my potential ‘smart home’ purchases in a new light!

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”


Yeah, this school of thought pops up here and in media outlets. It's wrong and it conflates Sonos' ecosystem with a smart speaker IoT ecosystem.

But the core and original Sonos consumer did not buy smart speakers in the IoT world. They bought multi-room audio components, which were virtually future proof. They were advertised as such -- as long- term purchases and future proof. They were sold firstly in audio stores, not tech stores. And, no, there was no reason to think that music streaming tech fell in the category of fast-evolving IoT tech with likely obsolescence.

The problem is simple: Sonos was an audio component company, but it is now trying to be a smart speaker IoT company. And more recent Sonos consumers, and many in the tech media, view Sonos as a smart speaker company, so they conflate this outcry with any outcry that will occur when a smart IoT device later demands more computing resources.

Folks here are mourning the surprise death of a beloved company that decided to abandon its business as an audio company.

R
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Just seen this about email addresses inadvertently been exposed on a Sonos email response on this issue. Not cool and more bad press unfortunately.

Anyone get an email and want to share the contents?

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51315460

H
Userlevel 3

My opinion (maybe I’m wrong), but it appears I’m beginning to see a shift of some opinions of Sonos since their “Your system requires attention” email we all received on 1/21/20.  

While a number of us loyalists have decided we’ll no longer purchase nor recommend Sonos because they changed their business model and decided to put profits ahead of their customers and landfills, I see that others are giving up and are willing to drink the Sonos Kool-Aid by upgrading their components. This is what the Sonos Executives were hoping for and their plan is working as expected.  

Quite interesting. 

U
Userlevel 1

I would be fine if the dual-sonos platforms would co-exist. All I ask is it everything work together in sync. For that, I have to go into legacy mode. Great. 

We, the sonos eco-system, have been dictated to. The rug has been pulled out. I personally have 15 devices of which only 5 or non-legacy. This has been a substantial investment for me over the years and Tossing out my old legacy devices is not an option. I am bent over and put into a bind just as the sonos brass has calculated. Has anyone noticed a rush of sonos posts on ebay and offerup all the sudden? Well I have. Thats the giant sucking sound of the sonos eco-system jumping ship.  

R
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I would be fine if the dual-sonos platforms would co-exist. All I ask is it everything work together in sync. For that, I have to go into legacy mode. Great. 

We, the sonos eco-system, have been dictated to. The rug has been pulled out. I personally have 15 devices of which only 5 or non-legacy. This has been a substantial investment for me over the years and Tossing out my old legacy devices is not an option. I am bent over and put into a bind just as the sonos brass has calculated. Has anyone noticed a rush of sonos posts on ebay and offerup all the sudden? Well I have. Thats the giant sucking sound of the sonos eco-system jumping ship.  


I was kindof ok with the concept of legacy or modern networks (since various clarifications that there will still be some essential  support for legacy) and possibly even a split network as my newer devices are on a different floor. I am unsure what happens when my Play3’s go legacy. Do I end up with 2 different legacy networks or have to downgrade them to 2020 software? I suspect the answers may not exist yet. Either way I’m neither upgrading or ditching devices yet, May’s still a long time away, but my Move purchase is on hold for now. 

B
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Dear Customer,

 

We want to apologize. As many of you noticed, the recent email we sent with the subject line “Your question to Sonos”, exposed your email address to the other recipients. That was not our intention, and we apologize for this.

 

We understand you may have concerns about your information being shared. We did not disclose any personal data beyond your email address. Separately, we have taken steps to put in controls so that such a mistake does not happen again. 

 

Again, we apologize for this, and if you have any questions or concerns please contact our customer care team.

 

Please find relevant contact details here: https://www.sonos.com/support#contact

 

Best,

Sonos Europe

 

unfortunately the personalised response was addressed to Sarah rather than Steve this leaves me slightly doubtful about the effectiveness of the Company’s data protection and control.

 

 

K

 

unfortunately the personalised response was addressed to Sarah rather than Steve this leaves me slightly doubtful about the effectiveness of the Company’s data protection and control.

 

 

LOL. Made my day!

D
Userlevel 7
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I would be fine if the dual-sonos platforms would co-exist. All I ask is it everything work together in sync. For that, I have to go into legacy mode. Great. 

We, the sonos eco-system, have been dictated to. The rug has been pulled out. I personally have 15 devices of which only 5 or non-legacy. This has been a substantial investment for me over the years and Tossing out my old legacy devices is not an option. I am bent over and put into a bind just as the sonos brass has calculated. Has anyone noticed a rush of sonos posts on ebay and offerup all the sudden? Well I have. Thats the giant sucking sound of the sonos eco-system jumping ship.  


I have yes

Looking at the local second hand market pages in my country, there has been a surge in the number of sonos for sale adverts.

 

Especially the Play 5, it is incredible how many are up for sale at “stupid high” prices for what is essentially an obsolete product.

There is even someone wanting to buy tradeup-bricked sonos play 5’s, he offers to pick them up at people’s home in his area and pay 20USD for them.

My guess is that he has found a way to reactivate them and want to sell them for profit as functioning legacy devices or maybe just reactivate them enough to be able to stick a echo dot on the back, hook it up to the jack port and sell it as an echo device.

 

Was actually thinking of doing something similar, but maybe only one or 2, so that i have spares for my “not deactivated“ play 5, if it fails me at some time in the future.

Or even as a device that i could take apart and inspect. Maybe read out the flash and see what’s inside.

 

Would be very interesting to do a complete readout of the flash of a working device and then do a tradeup and then, when it is bricked, read out the flash again and do a compare. Might give some insight into what they are actually doing to brick the devices, besides blacklisting the serial….Maybe it would even be possible to alter the serial to something that is not bricked.

chickentender

This analogy sucks. In many ways. I know that.

Offcourse the analogy sucks, because you try to make “Things that break, due to wear” the same as “Things that work but is still being disabled”.

 

Imagine you put your car in for it’s 8 year service and when you get it back the rep. tells you that there were a security update they had to install for your car, because of some software fault that could affect the cars driveability.

Oh and that since all the car’s ECU’s must have the same firmware version, they have had to disable the climate control, because that could not be updated to the new firmware and thus had to be disabled for the rest of the car to work.

I bet you would be LIVID and DEMAND that they undid this.

 

Honestly, that extension to the analogy sucks just as much. :) 
Yes, I’d be livid. But if my car was out of warranty it wouldn’t be in taken to the authorized service center in the first place, in keeping this hybrid analogy at least somewhat congruous, nor would a firmware change to ECUs affect the climate control if it were in warranty.
(This is fun and all. But I’m legitimately sorry I opened another analogy can o’ worms.)

I think the analogy is a very good one.  When an analogy is made,  there is always some leeway as to the points you make. If you change the action as postulated,  your not referring to the same point being made.   In this case,  the assumption is  that the car is taken to the authorized service center,  not anywhere else.  And you must assume for this car,  the climate control is affected by the ECU firmware.  With that as a given,  point made.

The problem is that my initial analogy was reframed above as needed, recontextualized because “Things that break due to wear” isn’t congruous to “Things that work but is still being disabled”… This, when the entire point of my analogy was about expectation of service, and never had a prayer of being entirely congruous with the Sonos situation we find ourselves in (not a prayer on many levels, as I was sure to point out to begin) any more than the reframing does. What follows are rhetorical questions framed as legitimate ones and they lead down a rabbit hole of “what if’s”. 

Again, my only real point was about reasonable expectation of service/support, and I accept that the analogy breaks down quickly, just as any other does. (Which is why I wish I could delete it, frankly.) 

S
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Why are there 125 pages when yesterday there was over 170?

they have been moved to the legacy section of the forum. 

C

I was waiting for the Sonos headphones. I decided to go with Bose instead because of the way Sonos are treating their (heretofore) loyal customers. 

I'm now finished with Sonos. 

baconator
Userlevel 2
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Just seen this about email addresses inadvertently been exposed on a Sonos email response on this issue. Not cool and more bad press unfortunately.

Anyone get an email and want to share the contents?

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51315460

Thanks for posting, this needs more views because they don't know what they are doing. I'm in IT and this is a big deal. Get ready for SPAM and phishing emails people. Could look like an email from Sonos as well. Read before you click.

D
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I was hoping Sonos would release a “New plan forward” this week after so much negative feedback.

The cold shoulder towards their customers this week is sad.

Did the email that leaked everyone’s email address address any new changes to their Legacy plan?

Ryan S
Userlevel 7
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@Danos1, we’ll be sure to share any new information in here, don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything new. The email was sent in response to a number of customer inquiries letting them know that the support team was working to answer their questions but were working through a lot of contacts and that it’d take longer than normal to get responses.  No further information on the legacy process was included.

We apologized to those affected by this error and have put in place processes to ensure it does not happen again.

Mark good posts by pressing the like button, and select the best answer on questions you've asked to help others find solutions.
T
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Being in the tech industry myself, I can tell you any vendor that has survived the last 20 years has ensured new products are backwards comparable and legacy products work to  the same level as when they were purchased. 
 

Your up sell is the new product range and how it has improved over the previous so it entices the customer to expand or upgrade plus the added sale of replacement and damaged units. You don’t do this by limiting the previous model and expect to stay around - I have seen many try.,.,

The legacy announcement just gives the client the motivation to move brands. 

A
Userlevel 1

Hi,

I am sorry if the following has been discussed earlier.

As I understand now and read between the lines from the most recent Sonos announcements, Sonos now suggests to partition the network in "new" and "legacy" groups of devices to allow different software versions within a home. More or less like parallel tenants or homes, by just implementing this functionality in the controller software.

 

I also assume that those device groups would not be able to interact with one another, like it would not be possible to output synchronous multi-room across both groups of devices.

If this is correct or likely, I do understand that the "legacy" devices are lacking RAM, CPU power and maybe other hardware such as modern WiFi etc. to do everything planned in the future. But there should be a better solution than this "partitioning", such as:

- a "slave" role for legacy devices so they cannot become a "master" and never have to interface with Spotify, Apple Music and all the other services

- this could be a special limited software image which certainly can be implemented with the resources given on legacy hardware

- such "slave" roles are already there with the surround speakers of the Playbase or maybe even with the second speaker of a stereo pair

- this of course would imply at least one "new" generation speaker in your system

- it would be also possible to limit "legacy" devices to Ethernet connectivity if a new WiFi 5GHz mesh network is planned in the future and so on.

 

For me, some new limitations with "legacy" equipment are perfectly acceptable and maybe necessary to be able to modernize the system. The networking part of Sonos is quite old now and also early devices may lack enough resources to implement functionality like AirPlay2. But losing essential functionality such as "synchronous multi-room sound" is not acceptable for me, especially if there's no reason for it - other than limited investment in software development.

 

Maybe it's just greed, but then it obviously backfired...

A.

G
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Ryan could you answer my question about rental speakers?

Ryan S
Userlevel 7
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Ryan could you answer my question about rental speakers?

Sure, it seemed rhetorical:

I know it’s bad form to reply to myself but I wanted to share this link, I was taking the mick But a quick google search popped this up! Think I just saw the future……

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7547409/Sonos-letting-customers-rent-speakers-16-month-service-expand-worldwide.html

Wow Sonos is ALREADY renting speakers on a monthly contract!!! 

I wouldn’t personally ever rent durable goods.

Ryan - is this new future for Sonos? The article says its going to be a worldwide scheme - is that the case?

No, this is not the “new future for Sonos”. We have no plans for this to replace purchasing products and bringing them home. The article is from October when we started testing out a new way for people to try Sonos in their homes. Only some Sonos devices are available through the Flex program, and it’s only available in the Netherlands. Some people would rather pay smaller monthly fees for a limited time instead of purchasing them outright, or building a system over time. This is the test of an option to see if people are interested. 

Mark good posts by pressing the like button, and select the best answer on questions you've asked to help others find solutions.
K

Actually, renting is an excellent idea; for a known cost one gets a known service result. Why get hung up on ownership? Industry follows this practice for many utilities like captive power plants, where the plant supplier gets paid for units consumed, not for plant delivered. As is done with cars under company leases.

And in the home this is exactly what is now being done to play music via Sonos - why buy the CD when the liked tracks can be heard on a pay per use basis? Why not the same for the upstream equipment that plays the music?

This is also good for the user in the way it forces the supplier to a 24/7 service delivery standard instead of being able to sell the kit and then run away when it gets inconvenient to support the product, having already pocketed the money due for such support.

K

The more I think about this renting idea, the more it makes sense to me - based on actual experience of running a building automation business with a performance contracting division in it. Most of the business was involved in selling, as an example HVAC control systems, while the performance contracting guys were selling the provision of temperature maintenance to specified standards for a defined space. 

The selling guys used to conspire with consultants to force ever “better” products on customers - I have personally been guilty of promoting a 16 bit controller over an 8 bit one. The performance contracting guys had to deliver their promised outcomes at the least cost, and refused to use our 16 bit controllers when the cheaper 8 bit ones served their purpose just as well.

Easy to see many comparison points with how the entire industry pushes audio products on to us - for 8 bit and 16 bit in my case twenty years ago, substitute 16/44 file formats and 96/24 ones. The more things change, the more they stay the same as the French say, a lot more elegantly in French.

And in such a model, competition would deny speaker makers like Sonos the chance of passing on all the costs of obsolescence to us, because they today have no incentive to hold back a move to the “better” product, as they would have in a service/outcome provider model.

W
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Being in the tech industry myself, I can tell you any vendor that has survived the last 20 years has ensured new products are backwards comparable and legacy products work to  the same level as when they were purchased. 
 

Your up sell is the new product range and how it has improved over the previous so it entices the customer to expand or upgrade plus the added sale of replacement and damaged units. You don’t do this by limiting the previous model and expect to stay around - I have seen many try.,.,

The legacy announcement just gives the client the motivation to move brands. 

 

Best Buy had an almost-half-price sale this week on a Sonos Amp, speakers and controller bundle -- precisely what I had in mind for expanding my Sonos system onto the patio. That was my next planned upgrade and had the deal come up during Black Friday i would have definitely bought it without hesitation  But considering what we’ve seen in the past few weeks, I passed on it. That $700 stayed in my pocket.

The announced deprecation of Sonos products has made me re-think my strategy. I no longer think it makes sense to invest in expensive pieces of equipment that are so dependent on the manufacturer to keep them working. It’s far more sensible to spend that kind of money on traditional high-quality amps and speakers, and then use less costly devices to feed the multi-room music to each of them. The Chromecast or Amazon Dot/Input come to mind, but there’s rapid growth happening in that sector right now and I think we’ll be seeing more and better multi-room options in the next little while. I’ve just been reminded that good amps and speakers should be able to stand the test of time, and replacing the music source component instead of deprecating or bricking the whole integrated system whenever it’s time for an upgrade is the only way to go.  

In hindsight, I should have known better. I own some wonderful vintage audio gear including 50-year-old AR speakers that still outperform many of today’s highly rated models. In fact, I'm feeding them with my Sonos Connect which is the one part of my Sonos system that actually conforms to this strategy, just to illustrate my point.  But the rest of Sonos product line does not.  Luckily, I’m not too heavily invested in Sonos gear yet. I only have 5 components, most of them being Sonos One speakers which can still be sold without taking too much of a loss. So as Todd accurately predicted, I’ve already been motivated by this to move brands and change strategy.

K

@Winter S : I suggest that time invested in reading the linked thread will be a good investment.

https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-software-228995/the-sonos-brexit-and-pragmatic-ways-past-it-6836056

A

But losing essential functionality such as "synchronous multi-room sound" is not acceptable for me, especially if there's no reason for it - other than limited investment in software development.

Couldn’t agree more

Maybe it's just greed, but then it obviously backfired...

I don’t think that I’d class it as ‘greed’, although it’s certainly financially motivated. Revamping the way that Sonos works would be a big undertaking, although IMHO this should have been undertake a number of years ago - in which case we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all.

 

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