Sonos Will Stop Providing Software Updates for Its Oldest Products in May
“Without new software updates, access to services and overall functionality of your sound system will eventually be disrupted, particularly as partners evolve their technology,” Sonos warned in a blog post today. The company says customers can choose to either keep using these products after support ends — they should continue functioning in the near-term — or replace them with a modern Sonos product at a discount.
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Sonos is again stressing that these products have been stretched to their absolute limit, noting that many of them — the oldest were introduced in 2006 — predate the iPhone and streaming music services altogether. Sonos has said it’s committed to providing software updates for five years after it last sold a device directly.
Apple tends to be better at stuff like this.
It’s worth noting that there is a lot of ire among Sonos users. I follow a Facebook group, and there are a lot of people who bought devices just a year ago that are affected. I also heard from someone on Twitter who had hard-wired a bunch of Sonos stuff in a house, juts five years ago, and it will all be affected.
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I have a bunch of Sonos stuff and I use it only with AirPlay, but the company still doesn’t support music libraries over 60,000 tracks (if you point the Sonos app at a folder containing your music files). Yet in practice, this number is much smaller. When I tried – about five years ago – it only managed to see about 40,000 tracks. This is because a lot of my music library is classical, and has a lot of metadata. The library size is limited by the amount of text that can be stored in a database, and with classical music, you can use fewer tracks because the metadata is often larger. Seriously.
See also: Omar.
Previously:
Update (2020-01-24): Landon Fuller:
My “obsolete” Sonos hardware is only 6 years old. I refuse to pay them more just to stay on a wasteful upgrade treadmill.
Meanwhile, the company that made my 40-year-old smart lighting system is still selling replacement parts and upgrades along-side their modern products.
Sonos (via Hacker News):
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. […] 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.
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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.
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
> the oldest were introduced in 2006
2006 is just 14 years ago, essentially destroying perfectly good 14-year old speakers would be bad enough.
But some of the "legacy products" were manufactured until 2015. It's not unlikely that you can go to a store right now and still find a "legacy product" on their shelves. In some cases, it will be difficult to tell if you're buying a legacy product, because the legacy product and its replacement have the same name.
I used to admire Sonos, but never bought into their ecosystem because their stuff is so expensive. In hindsight, I'm incredibly glad it's overpriced, because that clearly prevented me from making a huge mistake.
