Retired Sonos Staff

End of Software Support - Clarifications

Dec 8, 2022 11:29 AM UTC
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We announced yesterday that some of our oldest Sonos products will be moving into a legacy mode in May of 2020. Our commitment is to support products with regular software updates for a minimum of five years after we stop selling them, and we have a track record of supporting products far longer.

Here is some public information we’ve shared, gathered into one place to respond to some of your questions in one easy thread, so that people can find the correct information easily.

Beginning in May, software updates and new features from Sonos will only be delivered to systems with only modern products.

After May, systems that include legacy products will continue to work as before - but they will no longer receive software updates or new features.

Sonos will work to maintain the existing experience and conduct bug fixes, but our efforts will ultimately be limited by the lack of memory and processing power of these legacy products.

We don’t expect any immediate impact to your experience, but access to services and overall functionality will eventually be disrupted, particularly as partners evolve their own services and features.

Customers with both legacy and modern products have time to decide what option is best for them. You can continue to use your whole system in legacy mode - in this case, it will stop receiving updates and new features.

You will also be able to separate your legacy products from your modern products, so that the modern products can still receive updates and new features, and legacy products can still be used separately. We’ll have more information on how to do this in May when you can take that action.

Another option available to all customers with legacy products is to take advantage of the Trade Up program, which allows you to upgrade older Sonos products to modern ones with a 30% discount. Trade Up will be open to customers at any time should they decide to upgrade.

We recognize this is new for Sonos owners, just as it is for Sonos. We are committed to help you by making options available to you to support the best decision for your home.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate with asking.

Update 2/22: A message from our CEO

We heard you. We did not get this right from the start. My apologies for that and I wanted to personally assure you of the path forward:

First, rest assured that come May, when we end new software updates for our legacy products, they will continue to work as they do today. We are not bricking them, we are not forcing them into obsolescence, and we are not taking anything away. Many of you have invested heavily in your Sonos systems, and we intend to honor that investment for as long as possible. While legacy Sonos products won’t get new software features, we pledge to keep them updated with bug fixes and security patches for as long as possible. 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.

Secondly, we heard you on the issue of legacy products and modern products not being able to coexist in your home. We are working on a way to split your system so that modern products work together and get the latest features, while legacy products work together and remain in their current state. We’re finalizing details on this plan and will share more in the coming weeks.

While we have a lot of great products and features in the pipeline, we want our customers to upgrade to our latest and greatest products when they’re excited by what the new products offer, not because they feel forced to do so. That’s the intent of the trade up program we launched for our loyal customers.

Thank you for being a Sonos customer. Thank you for taking the time to give us your feedback. I hope that you’ll forgive our misstep, and let us earn back your trust. Without you, Sonos wouldn’t exist and we’ll work harder than ever to earn your loyalty every single day.

If you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Patrick Spence
CEO, Sonos

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daja62

Lyricist II

Its a shame that spending $1000 plus for a set of speakers is now really going to cost a total of $1700 (your first purchase plus the new ones)as you still only will have two speakers not four of which you will have paid for! Basically to just keep your speakers working with the latest updates .Hmm I was a HUGE advocate for Sonos got many people to plunk down there hard earned money for these speakers not knowing they had a "limited life"If not for the "Legacy people" Sonos would not be around today.But Sonos being really sympathetic is willing to give a 30% discount on new speakers and take back your working ones.Well sorry guys you frickin blew this one and to show your respect for your core customers you should be giving a 70 % discount in appreciation of your customers not a laughable 30% which is a slap in the face and you definitely will loose many
customers old and new!RIP

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TCT67

Contributor I

The fact that MusicCast is just a tiny fraction of Yamaha’s business portfolio only makes it easier for Yamaha to segment older generations of equipment (as they’ve already done and just like Sonos is doing now) or to abandon MusicCast altogether if its no longer profitable. Anyone who thinks Yamaha will never do to them what Sonos is doing now isn’t paying attention.

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NO MORE SONOS

Trending Lyricist I

Then, each feature that is supported has capabilities that it requires. It is simply then a matter of matching capabilities when a feature is executed.

For example
Play:5 Gen1, Capabilities: A, B, C

Play:5 Gen2, Capabilities: A, B, C, D, E

If I want to execute feature "D" (maybe Atmos?), then the app only shows "D" as the speaker that can be used. If I want to say, just listen to music off a network drive ("A"), then both are enabled for use (in the 'grouping' function).

Exactly

A = My Music Library - YES

B = Spotify - YES;

C = TuneIn Radio - YES

All I have ever used an needed - across all rooms

As to the newer features

D - Voice Control by Applazonagoogle -Siralexablahblah Nope

E - Home Automation to turn off my smart lights when I press play - Nope

F - IFTTT Integration so when I ring the doorbell music starts - Nope

G - Etc Etc Etc Nope

The Connect goes to a 30+ year old hand-built amp, and 20 year old high-end speakers - all of which show no signs of forced obsolescence.

Sounds like you just need legacy mode. It’s people who want both that are screwed.

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#BoycottSonos

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ScottKC

Lyricist II

Since this announcement a few days ago the share price has dropped 6.5%.

Thats a billion dollars wiped off the company value. A fair few “trade ups” would need to be sold to recover that.

Hows about just going back to plan A and not treating your existing customer base like a cash cow adn expecting them to just suck it up that their home sound system which has been added to over the years is about to get ripped apart.

Good thing Nicholas Millington, Chief Product Officer, sold 30% of his shares on January 2nd for $500,000.00 before the share price started going down. Shrewd trader that Nicholas :wink: .

http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001314727/5e4c0a01-abfa-4ea8-bf30-6a97f31fb24d.pdf

Insider trading I think.

It’s not insider trading. They announced all this would happen back in Nov (I think) with an SEC filing. They knew that it would destroy their loyal customer base and make everyone upset and said they likely would lose money because of it.

LOL. This was all planned folks. 100%. They are not idiots like we thought they were. This was done with purpose. They figured the cost of supporting the old hardware was more than they would lose by taking this action.

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hedrict

Lyricist II

My letter (very repetitive to what others have said)

Mr. Spence,
I, along with many other customers were very early adopters of your products. It took me many years to build my current system (10 items) and I never minded paying the premium price because I felt the quality justified the price. I have also been a brand ambassador since the beginning talking these things up to friends and family and even giving them as gifts.

I found out about these changes from a sales associate at Best Buy as I was putting 2 of the new Moves into my buggy that I was adding to my collection. he told me I might want to rethink that and explained the changes. I immediately put them back on the shelf after confirming what he told me via a google search.

I feel like I’ve been completely screwed over. Even after your apology letter, it’s clear you don’t care about the customers who helped to build your brand and my trust for your company is gone. I frankly don’t care whether you support the legacy products or not as I plan to sell off my speakers on Craigslist in protest.

As others have said, years from now, this will be a business case study in how management missteps can quickly destroy a great brand and possibly a company. I hope you are proud.

Sent from my iPad

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user_end_of_lifed

Enthusiast II

It is unclear to me why it is necessary to insist that the SonosNet would have to be split or legacy systems and newer systems can't coexist together. I am a software developer, so my background is primarily software, not hardware, but taking a page out of something I've seen Azure do, why not have each device have a list of capabilities that it supports? Then, each feature that is supported has capabilities that it requires. It is simply then a matter of matching capabilities when a feature is executed.

For example
Play:5 Gen1, Capabilities: A, B, C

Play:5 Gen2, Capabilities: A, B, C, D, E

If I want to execute feature "D" (maybe Atmos?), then the app only shows "D" as the speaker that can be used. If I want to say, just listen to music off a network drive ("A"), then both are enabled for use (in the 'grouping' function).

This is entirely obvious to anyone who works in technology and is indeed the sort of principle that’s woven throughout 99% of everything that’s plugged in to the internet. It’s the basic concept that allows a 10 year old smartphone and a brand new top end PC to access the same internet at the best level each can experience

The reasons Sonos are doing this are not technical, they’re business. I would imagine that there are plenty of technical staff at Sonos quietly raging about the situation the profiteering short term management have pushed them in to.

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andyd1302

Enthusiast II

Hi all employees and the CEO at SONOS, the past days has been turmoilf us and for you, CEO has halfway withdrawn the statement made earlier in the week and I have felt resentment to SONOS, totally losing trust in you.

What SONOS must do in order to earn back the trust is to prove words with rock solid actions and promises, not a single vague reservation will be accepted by your customers anymore, your wording will be analyzed and interpreted by us all.

All of us have and still enjoy your products, you thought that you could make us accept the first message and you have with your anlysis late 2019 shown that such statements would damage your brand and still you went along instead of finding an better option. This falls on all the management and employees that has been involved in this mess.

I’am looking into my options and currently I have no intention of expanding my current SONOS stable with further products from you, until you prove to me that you deserve to get my money again.

So prove yourself to me and the other customers with real promises and actions, you probably need to show the roadmap for us in this matter (and for your competition) in order to acheive this.

You have envisioned yourself as a premium brand-being one of the more expensive solutions, that leads the market, continue to behave as such and in this you need to consider that your speakers are speakers not computers, your tech platform must always be ocmpliant to that so your customers continue to buy your products.

If you choose a tech platform solution that is inferior from cost perspective ( I mean 4 GB of memory wasn’t unobtainable when you started building your units-costwise, lessons of memory need has bee around since the 90s), then you need to have another track for upgrading that tech platform than you have today.

Do anything else and I can promise you failure

I have a feeling the entire company is in turmoil. I was working with some great support folks over the last 2 weeks to nail down some Sonosnet issues and now I can’t get anyone to respond. The engineer/hi-tier folks are booked out over a week now and I don’t dare contact their offshore-contracted support. Maybe they are all at an emergency offsite meeting trying to right the ship. Hope they do because like so many, I invested not only a lot of money but a lot of personal time over the years building out my Whole-Home-Audio system and while I absolutely hate this management debacle I want my system to continue to work TOGETHER, not split!

It looks when the new leadership moved in they didn’t pay attention at the briefing about their customers and community.

In reply to this post, if I had a message for Mr. Spence it would be this:

Firstly, stop playing political games with your loyal customers and accept your company has been found out (below).

https://www.channelnews.com.au/retailers-move-to-dump-sonos/

Sonos is trying to get dealers to force an upgrade on a customer “When an upgrade is not needed as the current Sonos speaker is working perfectly”.

Pete Pedersen VP, Global Marketing & Communications at Sonos who is believed to be behind the program to force consumers to upgrade to a new Sonos speaker due to the Company struggling to compete up against superior speakers from both Google and Amazon has not explained what he will do when consumers vent their anger with Sonos by buying another brand of speaker.

Secondly, instead of trying to cover your tracks & buying yourself time by requoting the previous Sonos statement with a bit of extra flannel whilst failing to acknowledge what your Global Marketing Dept. have been up to, sort this mess out by putting the legacy units out to pasture by taking a short-term hit this one time by offering to swap out "at cost" to attempt to salvage the goodwill you've lost by pursuing this course of action but recycle the components wherever possible.

If this is too unpalatable, offer a much more generous trade-in to put an end to this scenario Sonos has created, and at least try to restore faith in your damaged brand before it goes the same way as the dodo.

An IT company wouldn't expect their customers to pay for their computer upgrade (which is effectively what this is), so show how serious you are about tackling the problem head-on by treating your loyal customers the way you would expect to be treated.

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andy_120

Enthusiast II

The fact that MusicCast is just a tiny fraction of Yamaha’s business portfolio only makes it easier for Yamaha to segment older generations of equipment (as they’ve already done and just like Sonos is doing now) or to abandon MusicCast altogether if its no longer profitable. Anyone who thinks Yamaha will never do to them what Sonos is doing now isn’t paying attention.

True, hence why I will never invest in these type of systems as I have done with sonos to the same extent, I'm not being held to ransom again. happy to right off £500 every five years as opposed to £4000 every five years.

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2000Z3M

Lyricist III

It’s been a mostly good ride (other than numerous sh*tty software updates and 2 or 3 hardware failures) over the past 15 years, but at this point I think I’m done with Sonos; Denon HEOS here I come:

https://usa.denon.com/us/heos/wirelessaudio/wirelessspeakers

I plan to donate my Sonos system to charity for resale and just take the tax deduction.

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SWJS