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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Show previous replies

S

Sharkbait

Lyricist I

ok, so here’s a thing. take a gen 3 chromecast (£25), add an hdmi splitter (£8) , plug chromecast into splitter, plug audio cable from splitter into sonos play:5 , turn on autoplay

You can now cast to the chromecast, and play music on the speakers. You can also add each chromecast to a speaker group .

This may be the ultimate future for some of these devices unless Sonos get their act together.

I don’t have any legacy kit right now but I’ll be very annoyed if my 6 x Play:1’s are written off in the same way when the time comes.

Personally I think that a 3rd party will eventually produce a hardware solution/gateway that will process incoming feeds and then stream them to legacy hardware. Sonos really should be looking at doing this in the near future.

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P

ppiixx

Lyricist III

ok, so here’s a thing. take a gen 3 chromecast (£25), add an hdmi splitter (£8) , plug chromecast into splitter, plug audio cable from splitter into sonos play:5 , turn on autoplay

You can now cast to the chromecast, and play music on the speakers. You can also add each chromecast to a speaker group .

And with a little bit of lateral thinking you can cut the audio cable to each speaker to have only L and R wires active, so you have a stereo pair

So, for just over £30 you can “fix” your sonos 5 speakers to use the latest streaming tech.

Which begs the question - why can’t sonos produce such a device and keep the play:5 speakers working indefinitely - after all the “puck” wouldn’t cost *that* much to make. If they were to offer this at cost, I’m sure that most Sonos owners would be delighted at the forward-thinking and customer support of this premium brand and not the PR disaster it has become.

I have been responsible for my family purchasing 10k+ of sonos gear. I will not be doing so going forwards, and neither will they. Such a shame

This may be the ultimate future for some of these devices unless Sonos get their act together.

I don’t have any legacy kit right now but I’ll be very annoyed if my 6 x Play:1’s are written off in the same way when the time comes
Personally I think that a 3rd party will eventually produce a hardware solution/gateway that will process incoming feeds and then stream them to legacy hardware. Sonos really should be looking at doing this in the near future.

They could call it ‘boost’ or ‘bridge’

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D

DK_Madsen

Enthusiast II

ok, so here’s a thing. take a gen 3 chromecast (£25), add an hdmi splitter (£8) , plug chromecast into splitter, plug audio cable from splitter into sonos play:5 , turn on autoplay

You can now cast to the chromecast, and play music on the speakers. You can also add each chromecast to a speaker group .

And with a little bit of lateral thinking you can cut the audio cable to each speaker to have only L and R wires active, so you have a stereo pair

So, for just over £30 you can “fix” your sonos 5 speakers to use the latest streaming tech.

Which begs the question - why can’t sonos produce such a device and keep the play:5 speakers working indefinitely - after all the “puck” wouldn’t cost *that* much to make. If they were to offer this at cost, I’m sure that most Sonos owners would be delighted at the forward-thinking and customer support of this premium brand and not the PR disaster it has become.

I have been responsible for my family purchasing 10k+ of sonos gear. I will not be doing so going forwards, and neither will they. Such a shame

Will the chromecast speaker groups be sync’ed ?

This is what was so great about sonos, you could just add another speaker and it would sync up perfectly.

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G

Goodbye Sonos

Enthusiast II

ok, so here’s a thing. take a gen 3 chromecast (£25), add an hdmi splitter (£8) , plug chromecast into splitter, plug audio cable from splitter into sonos play:5 , turn on autoplay

You can now cast to the chromecast, and play music on the speakers. You can also add each chromecast to a speaker group .

And with a little bit of lateral thinking you can cut the audio cable to each speaker to have only L and R wires active, so you have a stereo pair

So, for just over £30 you can “fix” your sonos 5 speakers to use the latest streaming tech.

Which begs the question - why can’t sonos produce such a device and keep the play:5 speakers working indefinitely - after all the “puck” wouldn’t cost *that* much to make. If they were to offer this at cost, I’m sure that most Sonos owners would be delighted at the forward-thinking and customer support of this premium brand and not the PR disaster it has become.

I have been responsible for my family purchasing 10k+ of sonos gear. I will not be doing so going forwards, and neither will they. Such a shame

Will the chromecast speaker groups be sync’ed ?

This is what was so great about sonos, you could just add another speaker and it would sync up perfectly.

You can certainly group google speakers for stereo etc

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S

Sharkbait

Lyricist I

ok, so he

This may be the ultimate future for some of these devices unless Sonos get their act together.

I don’t have any legacy kit right now but I’ll be very annoyed if my 6 x Play:1’s are written off in the same way when the time comes
Personally I think that a 3rd party will eventually produce a hardware solution/gateway that will process incoming feeds and then stream them to legacy hardware. Sonos really should be looking at doing this in the near future

They could call it ‘boost’ or ‘bridge’

This may be the ultimate future for some of these devices unless Sonos get their act together.

I don’t have any legacy kit right now but I’ll be very annoyed if my 6 x Play:1’s are written off in the same way when the time comes
Personally I think that a 3rd party will eventually produce a hardware solution/gateway that will process incoming feeds and then stream them to legacy hardware. Sonos really should be looking at doing this in the near future.

They could call it ‘boost’ or ‘bridge’

I think the ‘Saviour’ might be more apt!!

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D

DK_Madsen

Enthusiast II

LOTS of sonos play 5’s for sale the Danish second hand market pages. Strangely there has been a massive boost in play 5’s for sale since about January 21.

Most dont say anything about the discontinuation and still try to get pretty high prices but a few has mentioned the obsolete program.

One seller writes directly

Please stop bidding like this is a defective product, It’s not defective, it will just not receive new features after may 2020.

Which is offcourse also a lie, as no updates will pretty soon make it “defective” because the core functions will stop working when streaming providers change something in their streams.

Also quite a lot of “I have decided to sell my entire Sonos setup”, some even only have modern devices for sale.

Seems like a lot of people are “abandoning ship” while there are still a bit of money to be had on the second hand market.

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J

jwinther

Lyricist III

This is the problem I am having in researching a alternative to SONOS. I like the way my products look. Most of what I am seeing and either just plain ugly or they are too much over the top for my taste. I like the simplicity of the design I have now. The Amazon Echos come closest in that department in my opinion. But they don’t have a equivalent to a “sonos connect” right?

Denon Heos is not that different in design i think.

I am leaning toward replacing the 5 i have with a Heos 5 when my “modern” products stop working and i need to seperate the 5 from the rest to keep them updated.

Only problem is...When is Denon then going to obsolete my heos speaker

Maybe the best option is to just accept that every speaker will be obsoleted, be it cheap or expensive, and act accordingly and only buy the cheap speakers.

Still means that i need to replace them more often than is really needed from a hardware perspective, but the price will be a lot cheaper atleast.

I for one, am FINISHED, paying premium prices for speakers that needs scrapping 5 years down the road.

It looks like it could make sense to not go all in on one proprietary product line - and then, even when following standards and buying only such things that could be replaced by similar things from other vendors - then still expect to replace it all from time to time, as this is the plague of industrialism: we must sell, and sell more, and grow the business and sell even more. For this to happen, technologies need to be phased out and others phased in, all the time.

The patent system works on these conditions and often the next wave of tech is ready to be rolled out when some major patents are about to run out - look at cassette tapes, video tapes, CDs, laser discs, DVDs, mini disks, and a lot more - things that did have a high sales volume but were replaced with others.

In these modern times the product is often a service - maybe your Sonos device is nice and functional but what distinguishes it from the competition is the software and their updates, the availability of streaming services and the ease with which you can start using them, and so on. Probably you could imagine running the whole set of Sonos services on one of the competitors’ hardware, and it wouldn’t even take too much effort to make it happen.

When Denon and sister brands cannot sell enough Heos devices, or when they can see more money in moving on to the next version or a completely different technology, they will probably do it. It is unlikely that they will continue forever, and how long would be reasonable if not forever - 10 years? 20? 50? Which end to it would be acceptable? There would always be some that would get problems from a discontinued product line.

I have now, after experimenting with a Yamaha MusicCast device and finding it more or less impossible to use (as the app doesn’t work), just bought a Denon receiver with Heos and Airport 2 and a lot of other features, all for a price lower than what Sonos wants for a trade-in AMP. And people claim that the Denon has a good sound and that it can group its 7.2 channels as a 5.1 + a 2.1 zone (or something like that), to be controlled individually through Heos, meaning that this in fact corresponds for me to two AMPs.

Personally, I believe in such a device to be valuable over a long period, even if Heos should end its life - in that case some other technology can be added to one of the ports and it can still control the attached speakers and whatever else is connected to it.

I plan to add the Sonos ZP90 to it as well, since I like the mobile user interface and the Windows app, and nothing prevents me from mixing technologies this way. For additional rooms I will consider carefully what to buy, so that it will not all become junk if offered technologies should change.

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“This is a chance now to come up with a system that doesn’t cause massive planetary damage in exchange for disposable stuff,” Proctor said. (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8dpn/sonos-makes-it-clear-you-no-longer-own-the-things-you-buy)

B

Beagle

Enthusiast I

ok, so here’s a thing. take a gen 3 chromecast (£25), add an hdmi splitter (£8) , plug chromecast into splitter, plug audio cable from splitter into sonos play:5 , turn on autoplay

You can now cast to the chromecast, and play music on the speakers. You can also add each chromecast to a speaker group .

And with a little bit of lateral thinking you can cut the audio cable to each speaker to have only L and R wires active, so you have a stereo pair

So, for just over £30 you can “fix” your sonos 5 speakers to use the latest streaming tech.

Which begs the question - why can’t sonos produce such a device and keep the play:5 speakers working indefinitely - after all the “puck” wouldn’t cost *that* much to make. If they were to offer this at cost, I’m sure that most Sonos owners would be delighted at the forward-thinking and customer support of this premium brand and not the PR disaster it has become.

I have been responsible for my family purchasing 10k+ of sonos gear. I will not be doing so going forwards, and neither will they. Such a shame

I’ve often wondered why Sonos don’t produce the option of “control boxes” which would do all the processing for audio formats before transmitting audio to each speaker. They could even do one with multiple HDMI inputs……….like so many of their competitors now offer.

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R

Royally_shafted

Lyricist III

Incidentally - SONOS share price down almost 3% again today in the first 90 minutes after the market opened, Down almost 10% in the last 5 days. I see it going further and it has gathered pace each day.

now down almost 4% today

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J

Johnas

Enthusiast II

Personally I think that a 3rd party will eventually produce a hardware solution/gateway that will process incoming feeds and then stream them to legacy hardware. Sonos really should be looking at doing this in the near future.

There is software already that can do this, aggregating Sonos, airplay, upnp and others so that you have a single control point and features not offered natively. There's some compromise though and probably not what most Sonos customers want. But it would be interesting to see if more products come to market.

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