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Comment by jnordwick | Hacker News Reader

I'll save everybody the trouble:

Curmudgeon likes his 50 year old speaker more than that new fangled tech stuff. Then rants about tech being in our lives too much. (I could only skim it as so boring and repetitive - already read this story too 1000 times).

Smart tech has issues around support, but it is so damn useful. I thought little of it until I started moving everything to it. It also has a network effect - the more you add the more useful it gets.

When I walk away from my building my the thermostat goes down, door deadbolts, lights go down, music and TV all go off etc. Pry it from my cold dead hands.

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Sounds more somewhat convenient than damn useful. For me adding a handful more companies to the pool of tracking my every move doesn't seem like a great trade-off for the experience of not having to turn off the lights. Also what happens when you come home and sketchy IoT startup X has gone bankrupt/their DB crashed and your deadbolt servers are down.

I think the take-away is that speaker technology is largely unchanged from the 70s. Sure, magnets are better, digital processing is better, and for sure, online services are better. But don't try to stuff all that into one box, for one fixed price. I've got 90s speakers, with a $100 hifi-berry, and Roon, and they sound way better than Sonos.

Microservices vs Monoliths. Don't put speaker, amplifiers, processor and wifi all in one box.

Put the slow-changing stuff (speakers, amplifier) over here and pay once for it. Put the fast-changing stuff (pandora! spotify! Tidal!) over here, and pay a subscription for it. I pay for Tidal and Roon. Tidal for content, Roon for updating software as iOS updates, linux updates, and SPDIF drivers need updating. As long as Roon supports SPDIF, I'm good.

you have a computer I assume, the greatest "monolith" ever invented

Not really, you can change your videocard, your processor, the connections(mainboard) your periphery etc...

most systems are laptops, tablets, and phones now and none of that applies.

but in application it does about everything, and most jobs it does haven't changed much.

HN is generally filled with other tech people who have turned luddite in their old age.

That’s why I have home built speakers and tube amplifiers hooked to an streaming device. The speakers and amp will be good 50 years from now. The streaming device will have long been in the dumpster.

Spot on take. Having a completely self-contained smart device has advantages in narrow cases, like portability. Otherwise, if you're doing home audio, there's no good reason to have in all in one box. Make the system modular and thus flexibily upgradable.

This is just false.

Any solution that requires receiver/amp/combo and wires is going to be limited where you can deploy it.

Before wireless audio like Sonos, most people have a stereo in one room in the house. Now many people have speakers in almost every room in the house.

I got rid of my Onkyo receiver and JBL studio series to go with Sonos because it is a better listening experience in the real-world. Audio being synced across your house is the real deal.

Having scattered several of the ikea sonos-compatible speakers around my house, I appreciate that perspective.

But I am a little concerned that when I move to the new iDroid Megapixel XXXL 3000 in late 2025, I'll have to replace them all if I want to be able to send audio from my phone to the speakers.

When having the sync across the whole house is the main reason you like the setup, it's even more galling to need to replace them all. I wish (and will be watching to see if they do, before I add any more speakers to their system) they'd come up with an upgrade path.

It'd seem like a smart thing for them to do. Surely they could come up with some kind of bridge gadget you could connect to your network between the old and new for the cost of about one speaker. That'd spare them having people angrily leave their ecosystem because, if you need to do 5 rooms at once anyway, you might as well shop around.

My dad had a stereo system to die for, but he also had Sonos, because he wanted to listen to music everywhere in the house. For a while Sonos was the only game in town.

They are no longer. The iPhone makes a great controller. Spotify and Tidal mean we don't need a local file store. Speakers from Bluesound, Amazon, Google and Apple compete at various price points at the low end. If you do want to spend on a local controller, then Roon, a spin-off of ultra-audiophile Meridian, has a better experience than Sonos, and is supported by brands like Meridian, Naim, Nad, Trinnov and $100 hifiberries.

I have Mission speakers in the bedroom. Meridian speakers and a hifiberry in the lounge. A 7.1 system with another hifiberry in the TV room. Bluesounds in the kitchen and dining room. And the bluesounds have battery packs, so I can carry them into the garden if it will ever stop raining. With Roon, they all play the same music in perfect sync. A new "remote" cost me $49 for a 7" Amazon tablet, but I can also use the phone in my pocket, or the iPad upstairs.

So Sonos is competing with Echo Studios, Bluesounds, Apple and Google, at the low end, and it's being beaten by a pure software company who is integrating with audiophile kit at the high end. That software company charges a subscription. It's not relying on hardware sales, just as those sales are getting killed by cheap competitors.

Meanwhile they've got legacy kit. IIRC the original stuff set up its own wifi network that it controlled in a proprietary fashion. Nowadays, competing devices just work on whatever you wifi you got, and I assume Sonos' newer devices do too. That can't be fun to sort out, hence the "two networks" solution. To be competitive, they have to cut the old stuff loose.

Yup. A speaker should have exactly two interfaces to the outside world: the red wire and the black wire. Everything else is a separate component.

We do (or did) have modular options. The Chromecast audio was almost perfect in this regard, a $25 dongle that could be added to any amp/speaker setup and do all the 'smart' you needed including multiroom. Google have pulled it though, presumably the margins aren't there for $25 dongles vs $150 integrated devices. Given nobody else has stepped in to fill the void left by chromecast audio, I'm guessing it just isn't commercially viable.

Same with Airport Express which had a killer side-feature of a AirPlay-able line out. When mine goes I’ll be searching eBay for another one.

I like the take, and I think the “separate things that improve at different rates” thought process. That said, I’m beginning to appreciate having _less stuff_. For example, I moved and decided to buy a few Sonos speakers instead of a bunch of loud speakers, and amps, and DACs, and a ton of wires to connect them all. Maybe I have to replace them in ten years, but it’s accumulating less in my life.

True but I'm also sick of buying things from an e-waste perspective. Now my thermostats, locks, faucets, bathroom mirrors, lightbulbs, etc can be outdated or vulnerable and need replacing?

Yeah it's very easy to just give in but the amount of things we toss in the trash that's perfectly fine but simply no longer supported is obscene, and getting worse by the day.

I can't bring myself to give in.

HN isn’t a community of luddites and articles like this get tons of people up in arms almost everyday. Same is true at most other tech sites.

The point is that bad faith actions (forced obsolescence, surveillance, no commitment to security, weak sharing of protocols etc.) are holding back smart home and IoT significantly. This technology has so much potential and is not THAT new but adoption is still hit or miss. It’s a bad sign that so many self described techies are comfortably waiting on the sideline or worse, afraid to have some of these devices in their homes.

I agree that smart tech is beyond useful but when the big IoT players ignore detractors and repeat the same mistakes over and over again it’s just flushing potential (and value) down the toilet.

It would be great to see industry take complaints to heart and begin to build trust in their ecosystems.

the issue, is what happens when your smart door lock decided that you need to upgrade to v2 of its hardware for it to get the next set of software upgrades?

what happens when it decides that it won't connect with next version of iOS/Android unless you upgrade?

This could have been largely mitigated if Sonos speakers just had an AUX port like any other speaker. Instead, hubris took over and led to a shitstorm.

My Sonos play:5 has an AUX port.

Interesting, I wasn’t aware. Thanks!

But that's more the exception than the rule. My 1 sl's do not have one.

It's from 2013. Much has probably changed since.

They really should make the IoT part a module thats easily upgradable. I2S + 5V power is all thats technically needed. Maybe i2c ontop, to make the speaker model autodiscoverable and volume adjustable. But again offering such upgrade modules will open Sonos tech for 3rd party and enable eg. highend manufacturers to cater to Sonos customers or hobbyists to cheaply build Sonos speakers.

>It also has a network effect - the more you add the more useful

This kind of seems like saying 'the more microservices you add, the more useful it gets' which only works up to the point where services don't encounter any integration issues.

What happens when your thermometer starts sending messages that cause your door to unlock when the temperature gets too high? Or if your TV ends up shutting down because of malformed packets being sent across your home network?

IoT is an integration nightmare that only gets worse as stuff fades out or ends up receiving no more support from the manufacturer. Those items you bought from 50 years ago will still work just fine even if the company goes under. But the same can't be said for modern technology we're filling our homes with.

And that's even without talking about the privacy issues. I'll take dumb items that I can make smart over smart items I can not make dumb any day of the week.

That's a lot of speculation and FUD. There's nothing inherent about IoT that requires it to be reliant on remote services.

Isn’t that academic until IoT devices being tethered to cloud services stops being the dominant practice?

There are plenty of devices where this is the case. For example, the ikea devices.

Generally, most HomeKit devices are LAN or Bluetooth based, and theoretical should work without needing to phone home. (Some might stop if they can’t, but that’s an implementation issue, and i haven’t experienced it yet)

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