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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Stuart_17

Enthusiast II

@Wkelkel

if I were a Sonos employee, I would be watching this (and other threads) very closely indeed. The next few weeks will be make or break for the company and potentially their jobs. It would be commercial suicide to do anything other but act on this overwhelming response from loyal customers.

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rwrgeo

Renowned Enthusiast II

If you bring modern devices along with legacy devices into a legacy build it’ll still be possible to add all Sonos products currently available for sale to a legacy system. They’ll all update to the correct legacy build.

Whoa Ryan, are you actually saying that a system currently containing Play:5 Gen 1 and Play:3 speakers (i.e. legacy and modern) will continue to work as it does at present even after May? If I understand correctly what you are saying here, I will have one system with a mix of generations. I understand that no further updates will be applied to the Play:5 speakers (and presumably to the Play:3 units as well).

What would I have to do to freeze the software level at that point after May?

@FarFromGruntled, that’s correct. From the original message above:

In May, when the legacy change comes, you’ll be able to set your whole Sonos system on the legacy build (both modern and legacy devices). Any existing modern speakers that come along with your legacy devices onto that build will work exactly as the have been, however the whole system (including the modern devices that move to legacy) won’t regularly update. Any new features that come to Sonos won’t be added to any of those speakers while they’re on legacy software. Over time, some services may require updates to keep going and we’ll do what we can to provide them, but we will be limited to do so by the hardware of those legacy devices.

This last bit does seem like a significant concession vs the original announcement and gives me a degree of faith that my system will survive this announcement and thrive for some time to come...so long as Sonos can ride out this self-inflicted crisis.

Unfortunately I’m gonna still have to put my planned Sonos purchases on hold until we have firmer details.

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andy_120

Enthusiast II

Why did you trade-up now? … you could have done that anytime, over many months, or perhaps years in fact.. Also the trade-up agreement is that you 'responsibly recycle' the devices, not take them to landfill.

although not the right thing to do, unfortunately human nature what it is many will end up in landfill. But even if recycled this takes energy and still a certain cost to the environment in various ways, that said it's not a reason not to do so, but is just a fact of life that the easiest option is taken.

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LemondixonUK

Lyricist II

Sonos is nothing without the loyal following of all of us …

Well I’m so, so glad you all spoke up and voiced your concerns and that this appears to have had an impact, even if the full extent of that remains to be seen. I too had and still have concerns but until now have not voiced them - I guess that’s indicative of how little confidence I have that my concerns (and everyone else’s) will make a difference.

I bought into Sonos a long, long time ago, when they only had offices in the USA and over here in the UK no one had even heard of them; in fact most people either wasn’t aware that it was even possible to have a multi-room music system, or if they had it was just so, so expensive it was only a pipe dream. I even had to talk my local Hi-Fi dealer into setting up a trading account with Sonos so that I could order thousands of £ of gear to kit out my entire house in one go! This included the beautiful and functional Sonos Controller units, in fact several of them so I could control my system from various places within my house - much to the sheer astonishment and delight of my friends when they first saw it, before exclaiming “Wow! That’s incredible. I’ve absolutely must get one of those. What’s it called again? Sono …?"

Ive lost count of the number of those friends who bought into Sonos, or their friends, and friends of friends … (you get the point). I even forgave Sonos when they made my many Sonos Controllers obsolete, despite having bought a load of lithium batteries to replace the ones that kept wearing out, but what REALLY pissed me off was that I didn’t feel as though I’d had any choice, nor been given enough information or advance notice of that happening (we all lead busy lives right?)

I was also pissed off when, now having to rely on iPhones and iPads to replace my Sonos Controllers that they suddenly made older versions of iOS incompatible too - sure they can’t keep bringing out newer versions of the Sonos App that support every version of iOS, but why couldn’t I just keep devices running old versions of the App too, why didn’t the system update come with a BIG WARNING that you were about to screw everything up, and yet again why wasn’t there better communication about this change in advance? Mmmm, it was beginning to look like this was the way Sonos went about things from now on - Now that they were a Global, very successful company with millions and millions of customers.

This irritation was further emphasised when I discovered that in fact it WAS ABSOLUTELY POSSIBLE to keep an older, different version of a controller running in tandem with my updated system, contrary to what Sonos told everyone - it was called SonoPad, a third party controller app produced by a one man band for very little cost, and it still works to this day, despite the very many, many system updates since then! So why would Sonos claim this was not possible? If a little third party developer could do it, why couldn’t I just stick with the old controller app on some of my devices and still have everything else work on different versions?

Sadly, it’s the same old story time after time; bright new innovative company comes along with great ideas but needs customers to believe in them in order to grow and survive. Company gets what it wants and becomes so big and successful that, some where along the line, it forgets what and who made it that successful in the first place and how to go about running their business in the way that made it so attractive to all those customers who made it what it is today. Communication, or the lack of adequate, thoughtful and appropriately timed communication both with its customers, and often within their now behemoth sized organisation, is always at the root of this.

Trust is hard to win, easy to keep, but so very, very difficult to get back when you break it. I do so hope that Sonos learns from this and goes on to be different to every other big company out there. Even giants like Apple haven’t managed this, but at least Sonos is nowhere near that big and so has a fighting chance of leading by example.

Fingers crossed (rant over)

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IJN

Renowned Enthusiast I

I'm going to be somewhat controversial here. If you spent £400 on Sonos speakers, and you've used them for 4 years, that's £100/year or less than £2/week for premium sound quality that is *so* much better than listening through paired Google minis! IMHO opinion, that's no worse than paying £10/month for a streaming music subscription. If I want convenience, I pay the subscription. If I want cheap music, I put flac/mp3s on my pc and/phone and stream from there.

Having said that, I too don't have hundreds of £s to spend on replacing what are (for now) working speakers, with more expensive speakers. I can't justify trading up, so I may trade down, *unless* Sonos comes up with a way to spread the cost of the replacements, or (say) partners with streaming music services and offers me some form of decent price reduction on subscriptions

Or something/anything that recognises their customers are in it for the long-haul. They may not buy kit every 3-4 years, but they are fans, and they - and their family and friends will spend £10Ks/£100Ks over the years.

What concerns me most about this debacle, is that Sonos appears to be *deliberately* chucking/breaking perfectly serviceable kit. In 2020, when we need to be recycling as much as we can, this is reckless ecological vandalism of the worst kind, and that's the main reason I may never buy Sonos kit again.

Maybe £2/week for premium sound quality doesn't puma facie seem too bad; but there are many, like me who have spent £8000 or so on kit, which doing the maths makes the cost £40/week…. not so palatable… accept that not all are junked, but unless there is still Whole House grouping, the use and enjoyment of ALL units, legacy and modern, is compromised.

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Paul St

Lyricist III

sm75382

Anything caught your eye that you think could replace a playbar?

I was just looking at the Denon Heos range, reviews give their sound bar a better rating than Sonos playbar, it has better connections, can be set up the same as Sonos with rear speakers and a sub, but if u shop around is a lot cheaper.

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amun

I can also bet that this thread will not be read or digested by Sonos employees..

Maybe skimmed over at best

Sonos directors should be meeting about this feedback Monday morning, thoroughly going through everybody's opinion and then feeding back with some constructive way forward asap shortly after.

If nothing comes back on this thread early next week then I think we all know the truth.

I think that we can all guess the way forward, from the tone and content of their SEC submission… They may come up with some further minor concession - they may not...

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Guy_19

Enthusiast II

what about those stuck with play 1 & 3 s

Should consider themselves warned and not happy that they have been left out of the cull; seeing the memory of just 64Mb in them, there is no place for them too in the Sonos Brave New World.

Those in the cull are actually the fortunate ones, they have line in jacks...but then there are those that succumbed to the Trade up stunt that used the 30% to get non line in products. But that is also not bad, those have 5 plus years left in them, perhaps even 10. Except for the financial hit they have incurred, but there is decent value received. Which would have been even better, if the recycled bricking nonsense had not been there as a condition for the discount.

From what i have seen, the electronics inside the IKEA Symfonisk is exactly the same as inside the Play 1, with the only difference being that the Symfonisk has 256Mbyte instead of 64Mbyte

So if you can operate a screwdriver, you should in theory be able to upgrade your play 1’s to still work as “modern” products, even if they are obsoleted by Sonos.

This upgrade will cost one Symfonisk at about $100 instead of the $199 retail price for a Play one. (With 30% deal for the Play 1, it will still mean saving $40).

Another advantage of the Symfonisk over the Play one is that the symfonisk does not have the spy-microphone.

I like the idea, but this is still consigning 90% of a Symfonisk to ewaste - still not sustainable. The logical extension of your idea is that Sonos should make the Synfonisk board available to anyone that wants to do the work on a Play:1, for a reasonable cost. (Sonos marketing peeps may need to google the highlighted expression).

IF I stick with Sonos, I might have a play with this hack, for a Move on a budget :thinking:

http://tiefenthaler.name/symfonisk/en/

@Ryan_S - Thanks for your updates; hope you feel better soon.

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7 rooms: One SL Stereo Pair, One SL x 2, Move, Play:5 Gen2 & Port into Arcam AVR with AE floorstanders, Port into Denon microsystem.

hilmur

Contributor I

Think Sonos have heard the customers speak - Nice letter from Patrick Spence - let’s see what happens now .

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rwrgeo

Renowned Enthusiast II

... For some of us who want to just purchase a few newer Connect or Connect Amps so we can get past this May shut-out/forced obsolesce/split system issue, There may be some economical options out there instead of the reduced functionality (and stupid expense) of the Amp and Port or the environmental disaster of the “trade-in” program. Of course Sonos isn’t clear about how much longer their so-called (Modern) units will be supported either...

@kassey22000, I know it’s buried several times in the pages of this thread and others, but we’ve committed to supporting our products with updates for at least five years after they’re no longer sold by us, after they’ve been discontinued. And as you all know, we have a track record of doing so for much longer than that. The 2015 Connect and Connect:Amps are only recently no longer sold, or in some cases still available at very limited stock levels. So you’re looking at at least five years worth of updates from when they were discontinued.

I'm sorry Ryan, but this was not what I was told when I brought into the sonos concept. It was sold as a hifi streaming system which could be added to make a truly remarkable system. But now products have an EOL policy, let me put it this way if I were to see a cake that cost £50 and I know that cake has a sell by date of a week. And there was another cake that costs £20 but has no use by date which one would you buy?? But again you have the £50 cake and the £20 cake both have no use by date, you buy the £50 cake as it a better quality but find out later it does have a use by date how would you feel about that.you would think I might as well got the £20 cake, this is exactly what sonos has done and frankly has killed the brand. Sonos may come up with this solution or that explanation of what will happen but non of the statementments returns us to the status que we had when we brought our systems. The sonos board ignore this fact at the company's peril but it's not to late to turn this around but I fear you won't.

To vastly overextend the metaphor, we always knew all cakes for sale have some best before date. We now know for Sonos cakes that is in theory at least 5 years from date of purchase, probably much longer for newer recipe cakes and the cake may in fact turn out to still be good to eat well after that best before date (but no more icing or sprinkles will be offered). Also I’ve had the enjoyment of both having my cake and eating it throughout that period!

I’m intrigued if there really are other brands of smart speakers or connected audio who can boast the same longevity of support and new features.

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