The first sane conversation on the topic as a whole I’ve seen.

Not even since the prices went up 12.5% last month. Bastards expect me to upgrade, sure no problem, I will upgrade to another brand.

Agree with the previous comments, the current price on the Sonos website is £499 and with a 30% discount I would still have to find £349 for each of the 3 legacy units I have. I won’t be paying +£1,000 to replace perfectly working products.

So I predict that the days of Sonos are limited, many cheaper alternatives available and the reason for continuing to buy Sonos products has disappeared. BUT!!!! we have a number of options:

1. Continue to buy Sonos, NO THANK YOU!!!!
2. Find alternative solutions
3. HACK our existing hardware and use alternative open source solutions.

Option 3, HACK is the most interesting option for us all as it allows us to reuse our exiting investment and at the same time say ‘up yours Sonos’ and probably more damaging for the Sonos business. Is this of interest and do we have people with the correct technical knowledge to explore reuse options?

Does anyone know how long other streaming devices will be supported, such as bluesound, as instead of upgrading, I’m looking elsewhere?

A few months ago my Samsung S5 became obsolete as a controller (Android 6).  Now this.  I have only had this stuff 5yrs and its all going to be in landfill in a few years.  I will not buy any more Sonos.  I have stopped recommending Sonos.. In fact the reverse - I now advise people to not buy Sonos.

What a shame.  5 yrs ago I was so impressed with the kit.  The customer support was second to none.  How can a brand turn its back on its original devotees like this.  Very annoying

I am very disappointed and angry about the decision to make my system, that includes 4 components that will no l be supported, obsolete. I was a (relatively) early adopter of SONOS in 2008 and have 8 devices in my home. In addition I have been somewhat of an evangelist for the quality and sustainability of SONOS products, as well as their customer care, which I know has resulted in many 10s of purchases by my family and friends.

The decision to render half of my components obsolete, when they are working perfectly well, is hard to understand. I have a number of concerns about SONOS’ proposed solution of offering a 30% on replacements, as follows:

1. I also have two Play 3s in my home. I am concerned that if I replace my Play 5s, the next announcement will be that the 3s will also be ‘obsoleted’. I think maybe it is time to move on entirely from the SONOS ecosystem to avoid this risk.

1. I understand that if I take up the 30% discount and buy replacements, the Play 5s will be remotely permanently disabled. This seems such a pointless waste of large, resource heavy, perfectly functional devices. How can it be ethical to do this?

1. The discount offered to the loyal customers who supported SONOS in it’s growth are being offered a deal little better than that offered to all customers during sales events, such as Black Friday.

Having been happy with the system for so long, I really haven’t kept up to date with the alternatives. Does anybody have recommendations on systems that offer the same sort of sound quality and useability as SONOS has done to date?

This is an interesting point. From it's inception SONOS is a music system the is capable of decoding mp3, Flac and APPLE equivalents. What new developments are going to change the legacy units abilities to do that?

Quote from Sonos Annual Report: Our product roadmap is largely focused on delivering products with voice control.

Might be a nice to have, but not what I bought into Sonos for and not something I’m particularly bothered about. And still not a reason legacy products should stop working - no-one expects them to miraculously become voice-controllable. 

The classic answer is ‘ How long is a piece of string?’

Don’t spend money on a closed proprietary system - upnp/dnla speakers are the least likley to be ‘scrapped’ (but be aware that some manufactuers implment their ‘own’ dlna standard - Bose for example - and you could be equally screwed at some point.

I am no longer confident in getting more Sonos products since I don’t know when the next product will be rendered useless. Bye bye Sonos.

 I personally like the idea of hack. Surely somebody will come forward with a method to keep all this equipment going in the future.

Youtube will be very interesting on that subject over the coming year.

Well done Sonos had just saved up to buy some new speakers but thanks to yesterday’s announcement, I will not be investing in Sonos speakers any more. Outrageous customer care

I have been a Sonos users for 10 years and own 2 homes running Sonos throughout. I own 5 Play:5’s, 3 sound bars, 2 subs, 2 Play:3’s, 3 Play:1’s, 3 One’s. I will NEVER buy or recommend buying a Sonos product. Why would anyone in their right mind pay so much money for a system that will be bricked within 10 years?

These speakers have an Ethernet jack, don’t tell me you’re not smart enough to come up with an add-on device to keep these devices powered for the future. This is a total money grab. 

I hesitate to suggest a solution as I’ve drawn fire from ‘fanboys’ for suggesting an alternative which doesn’t involve junking your existing speakers.   Seek and Ye shall find.

This is an official post relating to Node 1 introduced in 2012 (bluesound). Of course, things change but they seem to have a handle on it and I guess, the reaction to what Sonos has done is a bit of a warning to all others. 

“Thanks for the feedback. The original Bluesound NODE was released in December of 2012. We still to this day support it with our firmware. We currently have no sunset plans for development with it. Any discussions we have had regarding this situation have revolved around how potential hardware limitations with future models be alleviated so the older models can easily co-exist.

As for the sales part of your question, it has been passed along for review...”

 https://support1.bluesound.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360038542413-Sonos-Replacement-

You’ve got to be kidding me!!!! I haven’t spent as much as some of the others in this post on legacy products. However, I will lose half of my system due to this reckless greedy position you are taking. If you don’t change your tune on this soon. eBay will be getting my Sonos speakers and Heios will be getting my future thousands I’ve been planning to spend on future upgrades. 
 

Wasteful. Greedy. Thoughtless. Annoying. Mean. Greedy. Wasteful. Environmentally thoughtless. Horrible PR move. Oh, and down right mean. 

I am not pleased with this move and not pleased with your company. Own up. Take some responsibility for a bad call and figure it out. This is unacceptable. Oh, and just mean. I’m mad at you Sonos. Really mad.

This is an official post relating to Node 1 introduced in 2012 (bluesound). Of course, things change but they seem to have a handle on it and I guess, the reaction to what Sonos has done is a bit of a warning to all others. 

“Thanks for the feedback. The original Bluesound NODE was released in December of 2012. We still to this day support it with our firmware. We currently have no sunset plans for development with it. Any discussions we have had regarding this situation have revolved around how potential hardware limitations with future models be alleviated so the older models can easily co-exist.

As for the sales part of your question, it has been passed along for review...”

Edit - I would add a link but it looks like it would result in the whole post being deleted. By the way, the, “Sales” issue is about the question raised by a Sonos customer asking whether they’d consider a discount for Sonos customers if they moved/replace Sonos gear for Bluesound gear due to this recent Sonos Scandle.

No point investing in a company that does not respect its customers particularly at the price point they sell their equipment. How do we know they will not cash in again in 5 years time? 

They never wanted to add Bluetooth, they never want to add Atmos, they never want to add HDMI. and for what. So we are lock-in and now they stop supporting it and making our investment useless

We need to boycott this money-making driven company and find an alternative. Bring back John MacFarlane ( Sonos founder and former CEO) He had principles to loyal customers

Best alternatives to Sonos

https://usa.inquirer.net/18732/the-best-sonos-alternative-for-a-wireless-home-sound-system

Strange, I’ve not seen any announcement that a legacy product will suddenly stop working. Just no more updates for them, post May 2020. 

It seems a rather classic case here of that popular game called “Chinese Whispers”, me thinks.

I don’t think that you should bother with any product that has a proprietary design, although newer products like Bluesound shouldn’t have the hardware constraints of the older Sonos kit.

I’d look at cheap, easily replaceable means of getting a signal into a speaker, and then spending more on the speaker - preferably digital, as they can be tuned to the room’s acoustics.

I have persuaded 11 other individuals to upgrade their audio systems to Sonos. I now feel totally ashamed that I have persuaded family and friends to spend their hard earned cash and adopt Sonos.

Fortunately there does seem to be an alternative to Sonos; Bluesound. Check them out. Admittedly more expensive but a far superior sound from a company that seem to value good customer relations.

I spent 15 minutes last night writing polite, balanced but ultimately strongly negative reviews for the Symfonisk, Beam, play 5 and play 1 speakers that I own on the Ikea and Amazon websites making clear to future renters (sorry, purchasers) of Sonos kit exactly how fragile and short term their investment may be. 

I have also emailed the various family members who have Sonos kit to make it clear that they should not invest further in this ecosystem.

Everyone on this thread should be doing similar. 

Here’s a question - is it really technically infeasible/economically burdensome to continue support of legacy products?  Legacy products just need to sync with the system and stream music.  That is it.  Your customer base is upset because its pretty obvious that Sonos is doing this as an attempt to bolster its bottom line and not due to some technical hurdle.  I understand why a PC or a mobile phone or a game console must be replaced after a period of time; but, not a speaker that streams music.   

One recommendation:  In the future, perhaps the senior leadership at Sonos can just break into our homes and steal our legacy components.  Its effectively the same thing.  And I’ll at least have the chance to act in self defense if I catch them!  

I’ve got an amp+speaker from 1984 still doing what they did when I bought them. 
Sure, 36 years later they won’t have gained any new functionality but it’s not expected. The original functionality is still there just as before.

I’ve got a Dell printer with lots of moving parts from 2007 still working with 3 operating systems after 13 years of regular use. Sure, it doesn’t support wifi or any new mobile printing. But insert the same USB cable and there’s a printed color sheet delivered. The original functionality is still there just as before.

Sonos now lacks a well-designed compatibility layer between older and newer systems. This seems to me like just a deliberate move to save money by not investing the necessary Engineering resources into designing and coding this into the software.

I’m waiting and also expecting a turnaround on Sonos’ position well before May. What I can’t for my life understand is why nobody at Sonos was able to spot and stop this PR disaster on the drawing board.

Hiring engineers would have cost a fraction of what you now need to spend to try to compensate for the overnight lack of a loyal recurring customer base.

And for voice control: “Hey Sonos: <blip> There’s no more money coming from me. “

SONOS, you need to explain WHY FROM A TECHNICAL STANDPOINT these are considered legacy products! They are speakers. THE SPEAKER PART WILL WORK FINE FOR A 100 YEARS. Exactly what technical issue is it that can not be overcome? There are lots of music apps which will work with sonos. 

All you are talking about is music ‘bits’ being sent to a receiver built into the speaker. 

EXACTLY WHAT IS THE TECHNICAL ISSUE?

UNTIL YOU ANSWER THAT QUESTION, YOUR COMPANY IS FOR INTENTS AND PURPOSES DEAD.