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
4 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.
