End of Software Support - Clarifications

When can we get a clear, simple roadmap for future products? i love the play 5’s and 1’s and do not want to invest in obsolete or soon to be obsolete devices. I upgraded a 5 to the Move and IMO the audio quality is not near the old 5. The mobility is nice, but not necessary. IMO. The voice is nice with Alexa but a security issue, so again not necessary, IMO.

Sooner or later everything gets obsolete, 

i dont think sonos Will announce a new play5 this year maybe not even next year, its not even 5 years old, and the ram and memory is good enough for many more years to come, the 11 year old play5 lasted 11 years with 32mb

i dont think sonos Will stop update the gen2 after 5 years just because theres a new gen3, they dont want another ****storm, i just bought myself another gen2 and i love them, and i believe they have enough to last 10 years from now, or maybe longer, look on the brightside you get 30% discount when they stop updating them so you can buy new ones, i dont know any other company that does that they way sonos do

Moderator: edited for profanity

It's not that hard to understand: what will happen when Spotify - for example - updates its app? If Sonos doesn't check those updates to make their devices compatible, or you don't have those new Spotify features, or worse, you won't be able to play Spotify on Sonos at all.

Please let everyone who doesn't understand this know at once!

I think you made a mistake if you thought the Move was an upgrade to the 5, at least from an audio quality perspective. The Move is more like a beefed up One, that you can easily move around, than a 5. The price kind of reflects that too… the 5 is still the “best” Sonos speaker, again in terms of audio quality.

I was going to expand my Sonos collection with Home Cinema for my living room… I had the decision made and the money ready, and now I'm probably not going to do it.

I can't understand and my wallet supports that a self-powered speaker like the Play 5 (580€) should be replaced because it has stopped doing EVERYTHING it could do. And I mean directly to stop playing Spotify.

If I spend that money it's because I buy speakers for "life", just like when I buy HIFI speakers.

Someone will say, "The product you're buying is a mix of HIFI and Soft/Hardware."

For God's sake, it's the year 2020! Software should NOT be the cause of a technology product's defection.  

As a long-time Sonos customer, I would only understand one thing, for Sonos to say publicly:

“Product replacement has been motivated by lack of memory and storage. When Sonos started manufacturing and selling their products, we didn't consider that this problem could occur.

We've already planned for the new X Gb memory and storage models, and we guarantee all of our customers that this replacement process will be the only one, and it won't happen with the new Sonos. Your equipment may be outdated in its design but never in its current performance.”

However, looking at the hardware capabilities of the new models, it doesn't seem that they have taken it very seriously. And that's something I don't understand. The hardware may have been priced higher than it is today, but with the current costs and the price of a Sonos product, why have they been provided with 0.5GB and 1GB only?

@ursula1000  You state “I can't understand and my wallet supports that a self-powered speaker like the Play 5 (580€) should be replaced because it has stopped doing EVERYTHING it could do. And I mean directly to stop playing Spotify.” The current Play 5 (Gen 2) will be supported for years to come, because it is still in production. It wil not stop playing Spotify. The old Play:5 might in future have less functionality, but no one knows if that wil hit Spotify playback. All soundbasr have more memory than the current Play 5 so no worries in that area.

You state: “For God's sake, it's the year 2020! Software should NOT be the cause of a technology product's defection.“ I would say that we are facing this problem (not only with Sonos by the way) just because it is 2020. Look at your phone, you Chromecast, you Hue Bridge (v1). All hifi manufacturers are running in to this. I owned a Marantz receiver, that was updated for two years aftre I bought it. Aftre that nothing - not even sucurity updates. In this respect Sonos is very much ahead of the competition in stille attending to legacy devices in the coming S1 software.

If you want all that Sonos offers you but you do not want to be bound to their hardware, Sonos caters for this: you could buy a couple of Ports and an old fashioned (not internet connected) hifi-system for every room in your house.

I understand that people are afraid to buy into sonos gear, hopefully sonos Will explain everything next month, i just hope they update modern speakers that they stop selling in the future for more than 5 years, and really do their best for their costumers, you cant ask for more than that, but theres probably always going to be that feeling, what If, what If i buy today and they release a newer 1 next month, i am however not worried about the ram/storage, but i am worried that they stop updating lets say play3 just cus 5 years has passed even If they can squeeze out more updates, i just gotta believe in sonos...

> I am referring to Play 5 (gene 1) and its 32 Mb.
Regarding Spotify. Despite having a large collection of music on my NAS, I've only been playing streaming music on Spotify for years. When they make changes to their system, if Sonos not updated this changes, I will lose functionality and in the worst case there will be playback errors or you will not be able to play them at all.

> We're not talking about a single device (a cell phone, a roku, a laptop..). We're talking about an ecosystem with many devices and lots and lots of money. Also, Sonos hardware is limited (small processor, storage and ram). If you take into account an extended lifetime and add to the new models a processor, ram and rom enough, we should not change our systems in the next 30 years.

> I've already thought about replacing the whole system with a few HiFi speakers and many Ports.

I have Sonos in 6 different rooms (kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedrooms...), total budget: 6 port x 449 = 2,694, -30% = 1,885 To this we have to add the most important thing, to buy 6 new self-powered speakers !
Moreover, taking into account future replacements, each Port is 449€, a price too expensive as it is neither a speaker nor an amplifier.

I feel with you that anything you buy should last longer, though I think a lifetime expentancy of  30 years for connected devices is a very, very long time. It would even be considered long for non-connected devices. If you stay on S1 software you wil not immediately run into trouble, so there's no end to your Play:5 (Gen 1) yet.

I agree with you that the Port is expensive. As the Port is fairly new (introduced last year), I would not consider replacements yet. At least you would “only” need to replace the Port and not the whole system. 

Perhaps see this sonos document link below about running your sonos products in either ‘S1 Legacy’ or ‘split’ mode, which should mean you do not need to change your existing products at all, as they can work, exactly as they do now.

Sonos S1/S2 Overview
 

Hope that information proves to be helpful to you.