Tony Fadell Wanted Apple to Buy Sonos
I asked Tony Fadell and he confirmed to me it was him, saying it was back in the very earliest days of Sonos, when Sonos was set to debut with a device featuring an obviously iPod-like scroll wheel for input. Jobs wanted to sue (of course). But Fadell, after meeting with the founders, wanted to buy them, and made his case to Jobs, to no avail, several times circa 2003. Fadell said his pitch was basically “Seriously, we are all about music. Customers want this. I want this.” And Jobs’s response was, according to Fadell, “No one wants what they are selling.”
Needless to say, Apple is no longer all about music.
Previously:
- Playing Purchased Music on HomePod
- Sonos Apologizes for App Redesign
- Giving Up on Siri and HomePod
- CarPlay in the Age of Large Screens
- Music to No One’s Ears
10 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I agree with Steve. Whats the point of multi-room audio? If I'm working at the computer I play music via it's connected 2:1 speakers or headphones. If I'm downstairs I play music via the hi-fi whether streamed or YouTube or vinyl. Even for a party you want a room where people can go to get away from the music and cill-out. Maybe it's for psycopaths who insist everyone in a house should listen to their music(?)
@Niall Yeah, I’d be interested to know how many people use it for multi-room audio vs. just nice speakers with good integration. The marketing these days is more along the HomePod line.
@Niall "psycopaths who insist everyone in a house should listen to their music" — well, you've not considered that sometimes people do share (some portion of) their music taste and they genuinely enjoy sharing the same tune, talking about it, pointing out good moments as it plays. I use multi-audio regularly, mostly to have the same thing playing in the kitchen while I'm cooking and in the living room where the family is waiting for the food, but also when I'm listening to something at the office and my wife throws "this is good!" as she's passing to another room, at which point I just share what I'm playing with her. I suppose it's less useful if noone likes the music you like, but it's not a universal condition.
"Maybe it's for psycopaths who insist everyone in a house should listen to their music"
As somebody who often hosts parties at my place, I'm one of these psychopaths who thinks that the whole party should have the same music playing, that you should not hear two different tunes at the same time, and that the music should not change when you move from room to room. It's interesting, and perhaps telling, that this didn't occur to Steve.
Having said that, I never even considered buying a Sonos system, because it was so obvious that you'd be locked into an ecosystem that would inevitably turn to shit over time.
@Plume has it right. Parties is a good reason to have the setup and even my mom would like to be able to walk from room to room listening to her music as she cleans for instance. There's a few reasons to have this feature. Also Plume is correct that avoiding vendor lock-in was smart because inevitably all platforms turn to shit over time. Had Apple bought Sonos, same thing would have occurred just with possibly even higher prices and less focus on the product line because Apple tends to lose interest.
Who knows, maybe Jobs was already thinking about the feature that launched in 2004 as AirTunes (now AirPlay) with the AirPort Express base station.
kku, Plume & Nathan
Yeah there are potential uses and my comment wasn't meant to be taken too seriously.
I've usually had an actual hifi set up with an amp and speakers big enough to fill my entire flat or, in a house, the downstairs space but I get that not everyone has the same layout.
Never wanted Sonos gear or anything like it as I always preferred wired speakers that aren't capable of failing due to network or software issues.
Multi-room is useful for parties, sharing space, offices, and more — and it isn’t unique to Sonos, multi-room systems are a popular feature for other traditional receivers. Plus, you can do multi-zone stuff on Sonos even easier than you can on a traditional system if you want one type of music in one room and another elsewhere.
But the real beauty has always been that the speakers do all this and are wireless. And the most obnoxious audiophiles might prefer their wired systems but for most people — even people with high standards — Sonos has had the best combination of audio quality, ease of use, and wireless systems that don’t cost what Crestron, AMX, and Control4 cost.
The problem is the app update was awful and although people who primarily use their Sonos systems as high-end Alexa’s are fine — plenty of people had their experience go to shit.
I really don’t want Sonos to cease to exist but they are the most Apple-like audio company on the planet. And even with the terrible app, I’d still rather use an Era speaker over a HomePod.
That so many people are willing and apparently happy to spend $150-200 on wireless headphones that they know will be e-waste in a couple of years or thousands on a speaker set-up that could be bricked at any moment is on them I guess.
Full disclosure, my hifi set-up was purchased 2nd-hand from a family in Kilkenny for €350 and will last (hopefully) decades. My music headphones are Sennheiser HD497s bought new for £50 in London in the early 2000s - (even fuller disclosure I had to replace the wires once 10 years ago when I stepped away from the computer and forgot I was wearing them so that part had to be replaced for £8-12 and the ear-pads replaced for a similar amount £12-16?) I also bought USB-C wired EarPods for phone-calls with a newer iPhone.
I hope that none of what I use ends up in landfill any time soon. Everyone's definition of obnoxious is subjective.
> Yeah, I’d be interested to know how many people use it for multi-room audio vs. just nice speakers with good integration
That's what I bought them for and what I use them for. Going through the house in the morning and having the same thing playing in the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, etc is actually nice and was the selling factor. Too bad they messed up completely on the software side (not even the recent one, but v1 vs v2).