End of Software Support - Clarifications

Like many other long time Sonos advocates I’m disappointed with the announcement and not inclined to consider staying with the brand.  I will be selling what I have for whatever I can get and looking to invest my money in an alternative.

Best 

I am so embarrassed. I spent so many years recommending (badgering) family and friends to go the Sonos route only to receive so many ‘OMG’ and ‘WTF’ emails from them yesterday. Makes me so sick… 

After May, no additional controllers (unless a legacy app is created and managed) and streaming services will begin to stop. Spotify et. al. will make a simple change to a security protocol and poof...gone.

Sonos should clearly stamp an End of Life date on each product. Set expectations and be straight with people.      

If you think I’ll ever buy another Sonos product after you orphan my system,  you misjudge.  

As I said earlier, “Legacy” devices currently stream from other Sonos units, so why shouldn’t they be able to in the future -- unless Sonos doesn’t want them to!  So any claim of potential technical issues with keeping Legacy players in the same network is 100% Bull$$$hit.

Like a lot of people I have invested heavily in older and newer Sonos products over a period of time to enjoy a great product for my whole house. Hopefully with all the responses on the forum they will use some common sense and provide an alternative approach for the many of us in the same circumstances.  

Sonos - don’t destroy your loyal and supported customers, without us Sonos wouldn’t exist!

I have 1 x Playbar, 1 x Sub, 4 x Play 1, 1 x Play 5 (Gen1), 1 x Connect Amp, 1 x Boost, 2 x One SL.

The Connect Amp I only purchased on sale Summer 2018 and is now legacy! Along with 2 others (5 and Boost) and potentially more to follow. FFS!

Then offered £30 to upgrade something I purchased for around £375 only 6 months ago! Kick me when I’m down, why don’t you!

I have been getting peed off with Apple and their attitude to older products, thinking its back to Windows on the next computer and now Sonos come out with this shenanigans. Now they move in this direction, will they too gradually force the degradation in performance with their products as Apple have been found to do previously?

I absolutely loved the wireless attributes and lack of cables particularly with hard floors through out my Condo and like others recommending it to everyone, but now ceiling re-work to install a wired system would appear to be a much cheaper option.

I can’t afford to keep investing and upgrading with the possibility of it all stop working because one day someone sitting in an executive office somewhere decides that is the end of it and I am not allowed to listen to music anymore through my purchased products. 

Another thing concerning me is I am now reading articles about I have only bought a licence. No-one selling me the speakers ever told me I was only buying a licence, otherwise I would not have bought any of them. I bought a speaker to listen to music through without the need for cables to replace my other wired speakers.

I can only be grateful I held off on buying 2 new play 5’s. Time to go back to a normal wired hi-fi for my listening pleasures and normal wired surround sound for movies. I will have enough left over to buy a tape deck, cd player and rebuild my entire music collection! 

Bloody angry but also excited about checking out resourcing and purchasing the hard wired equipment!

Rant over!

I just wanted to put down this quote from the most-liked comment in the discussion section of this NYT article here…. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/technology/sonos-sues-google.html

It would be apropos that Sonos take a good long glance at the sentiment offered here… again, the most liked sentiment in the comments-wake of a piece which covers their current legal proceedings against Google. 

All the competing services coexist in the Sonos ecosystem. It's an old internet beauty of pluralism where you forge an independent path across multiple services listening for the perfect song or podcast. There are streamjng services if you want but there's old school channel surfing too. There was a pride in discovering a new artist that doesn't exist with algorithmically delivered music -- that wonder of discovery. Sonos has at it's core a clear-eyed mission that hasn't strayed; they do one thing right. They have kept on mission making fantastic smart speakers and supporting their old products. In stark contrast to Google, who has amnesia for last week's service or product. They are high-end speakers that play beautiful sound and work seamlessly and grow across technical generations without interoperability issues. I couldn't be more impressed. If Sonos goes under, despite having a better product, solid IP, and reasonable pricing, some big tech company will cannibalize them and make an inferior product that gets lost in their consuming vision and then later abandoned as a commodity. So you go get them, David! Goliath could be knocked down a peg or two.

-Chris, in Utah

This “clarification” just confirms everyone’s understanding, so things are not better.

You guys are just begging to get crushed by the ACCC, like every other product company that tried to pull a fast one.

It’s like you’ve never even looked at consumer protection law outside of the Santa Barbara enclave.

There is no rhyme or reason for this. Even to paint it as some hardware issue is wrong.

All devices are able to stream like they did since the start. If there are issues those are software related and if so desired there is a software solutions for it. 

It seems more like a bad marketing ploy to push new hardware to existing system owners

for a very bad discount

Create a Sonos “Lemon Law”?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_law