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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C

Catalyst

Lyricist I

I’ve seen the emails on this and I must say I’m extremely disappointed.
I’ll be putting my Sonos products on eBay and moving to a different platform...

I assume this is being driven by smart speaker technology. Well I don’t care about that, all I want is for all components, new and old, to work together regardless of age..

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kimgsriver64

Trending Lyricist I

1. The idea of deliberately scrapping a functioning speaker and stripping it for parts horrifies me.

2. The trade up offer doesn't do it for me. After the 30% discount, the newer products are still expensive. And there is no clarity at all on what enhancements will come when Sonos is freed from the constraints imposed by the need to maintain backward compatibility. Based on enhancements over recent years, I'm not sure that the planned improvements will be of any interest to me. Voice control for example feels mainly like a gimmick to me, but one with serious privacy concerns. Removing the 65,000 track limit on the other hand would be a positive for me. So financially it makes sense to continue using what I have until it stops working. And when that day comes, I will look for the best replacement, which doesn't have to be Sonos.

3. I'll wait and see how things develop. I have a Connect and some Play:1s. I don't need to group the Connect with the others, so the separate systems setup may work ok for me, although I can appreciate it's a showstopper for many other users. I had toyed with the idea of getting a One so that I could play things like BBC Sounds from my phone to any of the other speakers. I also thought about upgrading to a Play 5 in the family room. Both of those ideas will go on hold now, maybe even indefinitely. After this week, the level of new sales to existing customers is surely going to take a hammering. But then I suppose Sonos has the statistics and knows what percentage of those existing customers did or didn't get this week's email.

4. There is quite an amount of anger on here. It's very understandable, given people have made big investments. A number of users seem to be making a big effort to hurt the company with bad ratings on Amazon and elsewhere. But from the many reviews I've read over the last few years of Sonos and the alternatives, it does seem to be that in terms of audio quality and reliability, Sonos is still one of the very best products in the wireless speaker market. And it looks like most or all of the competitors' control apps are poor. If Sonos were to be bought by Apple or Google, or to go out of business, the end of life date for all Sonos products would be much earlier than if Sonos continues to grow. And then we'd be forced to switch to a poorer setup.

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Albion

Avid Contributor I

Maybe they lack the ability to develop the software? It's not impossible but maybe they just can't do it reliably and decided to segment for stability?

The hardware has always been solid however I've had Sonos for about 3 years and it feels like I've been on a beta release the whole time. I suspect they are rushing things to market to complete with bigger brands.

It isn’t just “develop the software,” that part is simple, the hard part is “fit it in 32 MB of memory” which is why Sonos has had to drop features to add new ones and had to skip adding ones they would really like to have added.

Sadly the hardware, while being solid, wasn’t designed for the way the music industry changed. Sonos realized this fairly early on and added memory to the products to reduce the bottleneck for the newer stuff.

That leaves us where we are today with the oldest Sonos tapped out on resources and holding back a lot of stuff folks want. I’s say Sonos could have gone at this in a far better way but it had to happen at some point or it would be the end of new features and fixes for problems that just won’t fit in the 32 MB.

This sounds like an excuse.

nothing has changed the way you play sound files or streams.

Maybe part of the future heavy lifting shouldn’t be on a playing device in the first place because earlier or later you going to run into the same issues. If you keep it on the devices you produce expensive throwaway gadgets with a very limited lifetime. Might be time to restructure how the software is working. But the way it looks the new model seems to be planned obsolescence to sell more units. For a single device this might be OK. If you have your house outfitted with multiple devices I would assume there is a local server in play one way or another with all the computing power you need. From multi room audio to throwaway gadgets … :wink:

I agree. I don’t dispute that 32mb limits the ability to introduce new features not envisioned in the past and that are required to be in place to meet the demands of the future. I get this. However, the technology model of the speaker needing these features, as opposed to a dongle feeding to the speaker, allowing the speaker to be agnostic, seems to be where the legacy products have met their Waterloo and are creating the bottleneck and Sonos and its loyal users a headache. I don’t know if a suitable solution can be found, when the actual hardware is the limiting factor. Hindsight tells us we all should have purchased ZP90’s and hooked them up to our favourite speakers and then we would have only needed to replace the ZP90 dongle as it became obsolete. We fell for the marketing hype and now technology and the demand for newer innovations in a competitive market have shown the fallacy at the heart of this Sonos model. Their speaker products are more than just speakers and they are time limited in terms of ability to absorb developments, as a result. They are more akin to mobile phones and pc’s and are sensitive to the same demands that those products are. Their situation is more compelling, because of the whole home audio requirement. If these were stand-alone products and not part of an integrated environment, then the impact would be significantly less and software solutions could be found, however requiring both old and new hardware to operate together in grouped situations, I suspect is also one of the fundamental issues creating technological solutions. It will be interesting to see what Sonos do here and if in fact they can keep limited memory legacy and higher memory new products together.

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sambeny

Lyricist III

What I find hard to accept is that they kept selling me more Play1s when they knew the limitations. Maybe I will keep the Connet amp, and 6 Play1s, return a recent Play5, sell a Beam. That way I will be all legacy mode with not much regret.

How does this sound?

I will look for a simple old fashioned alternative to rebuild a reliable system.

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Dean Stenner

Contributor I

I've just received the email update. Glad to hear your now clarifying the situation.

I do wonder what has happened to sonos as a company who I assumed was focused on the needs of their loyal customers.

I fear you've done an awful lot to damage that reputation and I'm not sure if the majority of your previously loyal client base will trust you anymore. This may be the most damaging decision sonos board never properly thought through before imposing.

If like you say previously, you wont know until may if the questions can be answered as to if the legacy and new equipment can work together etc then it shows the level of contempt sonos holds for its customers by announcing the changes before you've got the answers to the questions.

You have given yourself 5 months to get the answers when this should have already been considered and a solution found. Theres a very god chance your going to see a knock on drop in new sales as your no longer trusted until that's resolved. I your customers actually stay loyal at all.

Poor decision making at the top guys. Have a word with yourselves.

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Cisume

Enthusiast II

This sounds like an excuse.

nothing has changed the way you play sound files or streams.

Maybe part of the future heavy lifting shouldn’t be on a playing device in the first place because earlier or later you going to run into the same issues. If you keep it on the devices you produce expensive throwaway gadgets with a very limited lifetime. Might be time to restructure how the software is working. But the way it looks the new model seems to be planned obsolescence to sell more units. For a single device this might be OK. If you have your house outfitted with multiple devices I would assume there is a local server in play one way or another with all the computing power you need. From multi room audio to throwaway gadgets … :wink:

I agree. I don’t dispute that 32mb limits the ability to introduce new features not envisioned in the past and that are required to be in place to meet the demands of the future. I get this. However, the technology model of the speaker needing these features, as opposed to a dongle feeding to the speaker, allowing the speaker to be agnostic, seems to be where the legacy products have met their Waterloo and are creating the bottleneck and Sonos and its loyal users a headache. I don’t know if a suitable solution can be found, when the actual hardware is the limiting factor. Hindsight tells us we all should have purchased ZP90’s and hooked them up to our favourite speakers and then we would have only needed to replace the ZP90 dongle as it became obsolete. We fell for the marketing hype and now technology and the demand for newer innovations in a competitive market have shown the fallacy at the heart of this Sonos model. Their speaker products are more than just speakers and they are time limited in terms of ability to absorb developments, as a result. They are more akin to mobile phones and pc’s and are sensitive to the demands that those products are.

It seems they are more focusing on the mobile/gadget market. A market with a lot of competition and cheaper options. Just look at Amazon and their nice discounts on a regular basis.

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Graeme_6

Contributor I

Will go cancel the deactivation for those that bought a new speaker under the trade in scheme as a result of your email.?

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AlistairF

Contributor I

If i was offered 50% - 60% discount on a new product, this would be a position i would feel was a benefit to the Sonos company and the customer, however at the moment with 30% upgrade, i am stopping building my system and looking at alternative options. Sonos should use this experience to build loyalty and encourage customers to ‘buy into’ new product, make the offer ‘so good’ we all buy in!. make it a sales point that as a customer you will receive amazing discounts on upgrades. Come on Patrick, build the company loyalty, make more units, reduce production cost via volume manufacturing.

How about an annual upgrade offer, when a product is purchased at £500 you can take out an annual upgrade package, £40 a year for 5 years then Sonos replace the unit FOC. Good for the customer, good for Sonos and the only company to do this?. Just an option to the perfect solution of making all units work until they fail due to old age.

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chickentender

I agree. I don’t dispute that 32mb limits the ability to introduce new features not envisioned in the past and that are required to be in place to meet the demands of the future. I get this. However, the technology model of the speaker needing these features, as opposed to a dongle feeding to the speaker, allowing the speaker to be agnostic, seems to be where the legacy products have met their Waterloo and are creating the bottleneck and Sonos and its loyal users a headache. I don’t know if a suitable solution can be found, when the actual hardware is the limiting factor. Hindsight tells us we all should have purchased ZP90’s and hooked them up to our favourite speakers and then we would have only needed to replace the ZP90 dongle as it became obsolete. We fell for the marketing hype and now technology and the demand for newer innovations in a competitive market have shown the fallacy at the heart of this Sonos model. Their speaker products are more than just speakers and they are time limited in terms of ability to absorb developments, as a result. They are more akin to mobile phones and pc’s and are sensitive to the demands that those products are.

This is unfortunately true of IoT as a whole unfortunately, but we’re seeing it here and now as Sonos is effectively the biggest and fattest canary that effectively flew to the bottom of the mine years ago. I think consumers are waking up and realizing this fact. Many are all-in and gung-ho but that is for one-off devices that are high-dollar (tablets, mobiles), or collections of devices that are relatively inexpensive (power outlets, light-bulbs, door-bells). Sonos is a collection interconnected light-bulbs that cost as much as a premium mobile, each. This approach was flawed to begin with, but to be fair difficult to predict accurately.
IoT has another think coming… it’s coming soon.

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matthew.bacon

Lyricist III

If i was offered 50% - 60% discount on a new product, this would be a position i would feel was a benefit to the Sonos company and the customer, however at the moment with 30% upgrade, i am stopping building my system and looking at alternative options. Sonos should use this experience to build loyalty and encourage customers to ‘buy into’ new product, make the offer ‘so good’ we all buy in!. make it a sales point that as a customer you will receive amazing discounts on upgrades. Come on Patrick, build the company loyalty, make more units, reduce production cost via volume manufacturing.

How about an annual upgrade offer, when a product is purchased at £500 you can take out an annual upgrade package, £40 a year for 5 years then Sonos replace the unit FOC. Good for the customer, good for Sonos and the only company to do this?. Just an option to the perfect solution of making all units work until they fail due to old age.

I do not want to pay a premium price only to pay a premium subscription fee on top. To me that is not a solution.

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