Sonos CEO steps down after app update debacle
reuters.com
reuters.com
Even Apple has never been that bad. They drop support for things over time but even their roughest transitions (x86, Apple Silicon) have come with extensive day 1 support for previous functionality.
People don’t realize sound was solved decades ago. How they could get the same stereo their grandfather could have ordered from the sears catalog and some cabinets from that sears catalog and that would be better sound than they are capable of ever perceiving, and how it would last them their entire life on that one stereo and probably the lives of multiple generations of family members. With IO that has always been a standard and always will be a standard. And a stereo like this isn’t even terribly expensive. A couple hundred up front for never having to make another home audio equipment purchase in your life is some serious savings.
Instead they are sold soundbars and other crap tiny speakers that are not built to last, and might use specific io to connect over open standards that have been around for decades. They end up spending quite a lot more money for a shit experience that they are none the wiser that there are even alternatives to, without becoming audiophiles themselves consuming hundreds of pages of relevant media in that niche.
What a cash cow of an industry.
Was looking recently at the power requirements of an amp + subwoofer + 5 5.1 JBL surround speakers.
The setup was done decade ago, and the power needed for it was nuts. Something like 500W for a Denon amp and 250W for a JBL subwoofer?
For reference something like a OG HomePod consumes what 45W? The Sony srs xg500 boombox can last 30hours and is a giant room shaking boombox.
The difference in power efficiency between these old and new setups are nuts. Nevermind compatibility with AirPlay, streaming etc…
I will say that the Sony upright boom boxes aren't to be slept on (and, if one is active, fat chance). They're quite good for their intended use cases (parties, and closed Best Buys during clean-up/inventory).
Amplifiers are quoted in peak output, not average (and play some games with other parameters e.g. resistance) to capture bigger-number-better sales. A 750w system will consume nowhere near 750w at typical listening volumes (just like your 750w PC doesn't use 18 kWh every day.)
Even with quite old and inefficient amp + speaker combo, 30W of sound is usually a lot(!).
Tube amps are an exception. They can be very power hungry, but it’s difficult to buy such tech today compared to class D etc.
Still rocking my early 90s system. Has required a couple of amp repairs (capacitors and sticky relay) but no big issue. Bought a Bluetooth DAC for streaming stuff. Job done.
The entire digital ecosystem seems to be heading this way. Even cars
I appreciate the value in a basic stereo system but there are some major differences in functionality to the end user.
https://www.sonos.com/en-us/shop/port
Although I laughed out loud that they're asking $450 for that little box. That's pretty cheeky. The BOM on that must be $15. Margin level: Apple!
I wonder if they make it $450 to discourage doing just what I'm describing. To make people consider that for that kind of money they could buy one decent Sonos speaker and "simplify." Even though the Sonos speaker won't have anywhere near the sound quality or longevity of a 40-year-old stereo amp and speakers.
Sounds great though. I’m just a bit hesitant to leave it powered on all the time which means I don’t use it much compared to my Bluetooth speakers. Old power supplies are not very efficient. They can get hot. There is also a decent amount of dust. And then there is the risk of some old cap blowing.
Neither a Sonos Port nor something like an Alexa Echo Dot nor the long-discontinued Chromecast Audio can awaken my stereo (whether from 1955 or 2025), select the appropriate input, and allow me to start playing music from my phone.
A Sonos speaker does allow that, though.
And so might a modern sound bar when combined with things like CEC and a regular-ass $25 HDMI Chromecast.
I did find this interesting comment, though:
> You can get a secondhand Sonos Connect (Gen 2) for about $100 these days; they are the predecessor of the Port and are functionally the same for your purposes.
Also if I wanted to make a product like the Connect/Port I think I would spend another $3 in materials to add both an IR blaster (like the Harmony hub has -- it's so powerful it bounces off the walls perfectly well even to devices on different shelves) for amps with remotes, and to also offer as a separate purchase, a simple relay switch module for old stereos that don't have remotes -- they could be left on and have their power controlled by the Sonos.
As far as I know that's not a thing with any Sonos or competing product, though.
THX introduced the trigger port to allow one amp to start other amps. Before that amps would have a 110V passthrough socket.
THX trigger is a mono 1/8th inch / 3.5mm TS plug. Each device usually has one 12V in and a 12V out. While it's on, it'll output 12V at up to 30mA[1]. Due to current fluctuation and the low max amp it's recommended to use an opto-electronic isolator at the input.
THX originally introduced it to allow for home cinema surround. At the time commercially available amps only supported 2 channels, so the first THX systems had one receiver decoding the dolby signal, providing a line level output that you'd connect to multiple stereo amps. Due to the currents required the 110V passthrough wasn't an option, so 12V trigger was born.
Before 12V trigger existed the IR/Remote port, which allowed you to connect an external IR receiver to TVs, VHS recorders and Amps. This used the same plug, but would modulate the IR remote signal directly.
You could also use this to connect multiple devices and allow them to send remote control codes to one another. But that feature disappeared quickly due to limited compatibility.
In computers 12V trigger and remote ports inspired the I²C based DDC standard for VGA monitors, which allowed turning them on or off or changing settings. DVI and DisplayPort kept DDC as is, while HDMI expanded DDC into the CEC standard, which also allows controlling volume or sending media controls in a standardized way. Nowadays 12V trigger is mostly being replaced by HDMI CEC.
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1. Some devices support up to 80mA, Sonos even provides 100mA
This would allow a Sonos Port to have a dedicated amplifier connected (for driving one big stereo pair of speakers, or maybe an array of 70v distributed audio speakers, or who knows what) and control when it is powered on.
But it won't turn on my AV receiver (it has 12v triggers, but they're all outputs), nor switch its input mode appropriately.
(Yeah, sure. I can hack something up with an ESP32 with IR or RS-232 or even Lego Mindstorms or something from Switchbot, but Sonos buyers and hardware hackers are naturally somewhat diametrically opposed: A person who buys Sonos gear wants stuff that just works, not a new hobby.)
Any old cheap plug tied to Home Assistant (or plain old Google Home in my case) for auto powering on my Cambridge Audio amp. (I'm not fancy enough to care about automated input switching between TV and music, I just get up and turn the knob, but turning off the hifi remotely I like)
Music Assistant supports streaming to Chromecast from TIDAL at the native (24 bit, 96khz, flac/m4a?) format. And TIDAL mobile app itself supports casting to Chromecast devices as you'd expect.
Those 3 things combined got me an old school hifi set up which I can include in my Chromecast groups of shitty sounding second-hand nest minis, so I get multi room audio where one room has the most audio :-) but I could swap out the shitty pucks for some more CC audios if I wanted to fork out for more amps and bookshelf speakers.
I trust Google to at least not intentionally brick their old devices and chromecast is built on mDNS and documented http endpoints enough that you can automate your own stuff in your LAN that you should be able to keep that stuff working in home assistant + music assistant should Google ever decide randomly they wanna sunset Google home (so, 50% chance of them announcing that in 2025).
Homebrew you can roll your own DIY multi room hifi audio using stuff like Hifiberry, too. Pipewire/PulseAudio/JACK on raspberry pi / NUCs should be able to get you surround sound over the network with minimal latency (although you probably want decent ethernet), since you can make a virtual sink that bridges the audio servers together.
You have one of those fancy hifis that has hdmi inputs and digital input selection and whatnot? Okay yeah you'd have to roll your own HDMI CEC automation again with a raspberry pi or whatever. Eminently doable.
There's definitely ways to get multi room audio of equivalent or better quality and at-least-equal user experience as long as you're willing to invest the time in doing loads of DIY shenanigans, but honestly it's pretty easy these days. For me, I think the "this is too complicated for me to implement" bar is not high enough to warrant buying Sonos
Seriously, this was a thing 10 years ago! I bought five, and they all still work perfectly. They do multiroom audio. They are compatible with the new Nest speakers. The only reason we can't have them today is corporate greed and rent-seeking MBA fuckers.
In the US, MSRP at launch in 2015 was $35.
With inflation, that's worth ~$46 today.
I see one on eBay right now (open-box, allegedly never used) for $60, delivered, in buy-it-now format.
$60 is not an ideal sort of price, but it's not something that seems extortionist or anything compared to the inflation-adjusted price from 2015.
A self-updating hardware/software combination from Google can never be a long term solution. Reliance on old units from eBay (or not!) cannot make that situation any better nor any worse.
(FYI, I chased that route, there is/was _one_ model that worked as an airplay2 device, but it still didn't feel as "native" as the modern HomePods ... icon was different, pairing was slower and slightly flakey... I moved to the belkin directly and have been happier. That and home assistant allowing single target airplay1 support to chrome cast / google nest devices sometimes is useful in a pinch)
I'm being serious. If it has nothing to do with Nintendo then it's terrible branding.
The upside is that they mostly seem to care about making good products rather than branding.
TBH, I didn't even know such devices existed. I thought that if I wanted to stream from Spotify without a PC I would need to go down the Sonos route, which I obviously don't want to do.
The problem with not having good branding is that potential customers walk right past your products. It's only chance comments in this thread that's made me take a second look. Thanks for the info :-)
- stream from a wide number of subscription services
- stream from your own DLNA server or samba share
- cast from Chromecast or AirPlay
- with multiple devices, you can do multi-room synchronized streaming
- apply parametric EQ, including (in the higher end models) auto room correction
- hook up a digital source (eg, TV) so you can apply EQ
- hook up an analog device (like a turntable) and stream it to the rest of the devices in the house
The app's surprisingly good, the firmware updated regularly.
The cheapest version is under $100. They're like Chromecast Audio's on steroids. When (eventually) they die or get superseded, it's easy to replace without needing to touch the rest of the system.
I have 3 at the moment, the main one hooked up my amp and speakers from the 80s, which I picked up used in the 2000s.
Like for example: My dad bought a hulking integrated Akai amp / cassette / turntable combo in the early 80s. Every user-facing component was brushed aluminum, the volume pot was the size of a Dallas church, and it probably would have killed any living organism you dropped it on.
My dad died over a decade ago and I guarantee that amp is still sitting in someone's living room heating the place up. I'm just mad it's not in mine.
I have a rather nice NAD amplifier that I bought about 29 years ago. It had to be repaired once at about the 6 year mark. Recently, it has developed a new electronic failure mode that I don't believe can be repaired.
So ... yes, but let's not overdo the "never have to make another home audio purchase" part ...
Speaker and amplifier design are vastly better than even 15 years ago, partially because of better engineering and mostly because of advances in electronics. An entry level receiver today would wipe the floor with consumer level equipment from the 80s.
Still, traditional Hifi is dying to the "crap tiny speaker" folks. The company that owns Denon and Marantz may go out business this year.
It is ironic because traditional Hifi is in an amazing place in terms of value. I recently bought a budget (<$300) setup for my PC and I'm blown away by what a couple of modest bookshelf speakers, a modern mini-amp and a compact subwoofer can accomplish.
Oh man. I guess I better stock up on the latest Marantz before the go out of business. The last one I had was my dad's and it lasted 50 years. Actually, it still works, it just requires you to manually power it on.
Let's break this down into the components:
Speaker drivers: very little change
Speaker chassis design: still changing, last major change was improved computational modeling
Amplifier: Class D was the last major change, not much since
DSP: Still evolving, getting better every day
AV Receiver control boards: Standards are changing every day, whether that's new HDMI standards, new bluetooth versions, or new AirPlay/Chromecast protocols.
TL;DR: Buy old speakers and a new receiver/amp.
I wonder if it also ties into living situations and customers that are in a separate house.
With my apartment-situation, I'm always using a headset (or bluetooth headphones.) Perhaps not crap tiny speakers, but not so big that making them good takes as much effort.
My desk setup is their AD-18 driving L/R bookshelf speakers and a compact subwoofer via its dedicated sub output. I love all the input options including traditional analog, toslink, BT/NFC, USB for high-res: https://www.smsl-audio.com/portal/product/detail/id/566.html
The home-audio market is consolidated into a tiny number of manufacturers masquerading under once-proud brands they bought. The crippling incompetence of the products themselves is depressing.
A few years ago my Denon A/V receiver crapped out and I decided to go "upmarket" and get an NAD T758. I accept a bit of quirkiness from a smaller name, but "quirkiness" doesn't come close to describing the design and functionality defects that plagued this thing. Everything from baffling menu navigation (not kidding: Pressing Enter did not select a menu entry; you were supposed to use an arrow key) to the fact that it would only pass 720p video because it reported erroneous EDID info to HDMI devices. It didn't pass the info from the connected display device; it just provided its own EDID blob to everything, which reported a max resolution of 720p.
The NAD also featured Dirac processing, which I shelled out for to get the full license and spent hours with a test mic profiling my room and speakers. Then... it would just lose the entire configuration. Deleted off the receiver. "We haven't been able to figure out why this happens," said NAD. In fact, in several years they never fixed a single one of the crippling defects I encountered and reported.
But NAD isn't the only shitshow in town. Let me address the biggest impediment to whole-home audio (or even multi-zone audio): manufacturers' bizarre conceit that anyone can use secondary zones that only play ANALOG sources. The NAD was crippled by this stupidity, as is the top-of-the-line Pioneer I bought to replace it.
In the case of the NAD, I addressed this defect by running RCA cables across the back of the receiver, from its preamp outputs to a CD-player input; and assigning that input to Zone 2. Why the hell didn't NAD just do that internally with a switch?
On the Pioneer, it's actually worse. There ARE no preamp outputs. It has THREE zones, one of which I can tie to the main one but the third, yep, can only play analog sources.
All I want to do is play the same shit on ALL MY SPEAKERS. My living-room ones, my patio ones, and my backyard ones. All I need is A, B, and C speaker switches. But NOPE. As far as I can tell, nobody makes this. Nobody addresses the 99% use case for multiple "zones." There are at least NINE AMPS in my receiver, but I can't play the same source on three pairs of speakers.
BTW, I did build a patch bay with switches, to wire the secondary zone in parallel with the first... but this overloaded one pair of amps in the NAD and destroyed the entire receiver. Yep: NAD doesn't have a simple overload breaker. They just burn the entire amplifier board up; that's the breaker. Unfuckingbelievable.
But back to the main issue: Who is seriously going to dick around trying to select sources and adjust volume to each zone (with what, by the way, an app?) on one receiver instead of simply buying a bookshelf system for every remote room you want to play music in? I sure as shit wouldn't, and I'm the kind of person who ran digital cables under my house to an equipment closet so I could have a proper surround setup in my living room. I have a projector and home-built screen, but even I would never bother with the stupid usage scenario Pioneer, NAD, and the two other makers envision:
This scenario revolves around nonexistent people who are going to put on a RECORD or TAPE, then go to the other side of their house or down to their rec room for half an hour... and then come running back to the other side of the house to flip the record or tape over. WTF.
It's the absurd design defects that I will never excuse. I mean... incompetent MENUS? A modern receiver that doesn't support even HD video?
My burned-out T758 is gathering dust in my office; I'm keeping it in hopes of using the chassis for a project case someday.
I would replace my stupid Pioneer too if anyone made a stand-alone surround processor with preamp outputs. Then I'd get separate amplifiers and that would be that. But nobody makes such a processor, as far as I can tell.
What you’re looking for is this.
https://emotiva.com/products/basx-mc1-13-2-channel-dolby-atm...
Also I hate the new app with fiery passion
Too bad they messed up the app so badly. I've written some hardware-control applications and they're not necessarily easy, but... well, that's the job.
Meanwhile I've had my time stolen on numerous "ghost job" postings. Maybe someday, somewhere someone will take a lesson from Boeing and Sonos and other companies that have suffered from grossly incompetent software engineering and put a halt to the despicable disrespect for our time and knowledge.
Maybe a smart speaker switch like an Audioflow[0] is up your alley?
"This three way switch has Zone A and Zone B in Series. Zone C is in Parallel with A+B."
Important info that they provide up-front, which I like.
There's quite a rise in Chinese HiFi companies that are making some great equipment. I've found audiosciencereview.com an excellent resource for getting back into hifi and avoiding much of the nonsense. I recently picked up a Fosi amp which, to me, functions at least as well as my NAD from the 80s. It cost me half of what I just spent on getting the NAD serviced.
> All I want to do is play the same shit on ALL MY SPEAKERS. My living-room ones, my patio ones, and my backyard ones. All I need is A, B, and C speaker switches. But NOPE. As far as I can tell, nobody makes this. Nobody addresses the 99% use case for multiple "zones." There are at least NINE AMPS in my receiver, but I can't play the same source on three pairs of speakers.
Look into WiiM streamers. Cheap and quite impressive IME. Multi-room streaming from digital or analog sources, PEQ, room correction etc.
Actually that's what Denon's HEOS does, might want to take another look at their mid-level X1800H or the bigger ones if you need more zones from a single AVR instead of multiple devices.
Out of all the receivers I've owned in the last 20 years, I liked Denons the best.
It was a massive pain to put out all the cables, adjust the system manually little by little (the setup mic kinda helped, but wasn't that good).
Then I got a Sonos Beam and that set of "crap tiny speakers" with a fancy DSP brought so much more dimension to movies that it wasn't even funny. Upgraded to a Sub and it automatically offloaded those frequencies to it and the Beam got even better now that it didn't have to cosplay a subwoofer.
For setup all I had to do was walk around the space and wave my phone around and the difference was clearly audible even to my non-discerning ears.
Later I upgraded to an Arc + got two rears and everything got a lot better.
The v2 app is utter crap, I haven't had to use it for anything else than Trueplay adjustment when we moved a while ago. The v1 let me debug what the soundbar was receiving (my TV was sending data in the wrong format and I was just getting fancy stereo instead of Dolby Atmos). V2 doesn't have any power user features at all.
I'm not going back to a wired setup with a separate amp unless I get a dedicated theater room I can sound proof and manage the acoustics. I _am_ considering switching to a brand that doesn't need an app to setup, but it's slim pickings in the upper tier of soundbars.
I’m sure things can get better, but I’m pretty happy with my setup as-is. I’d probably splurge on an OLED TV first. I have an 85” Sony X91J that I quite like, but I can’t deny the absolute inky blacks of OLED (just couldn’t justify the price at the time at that size).
Just a basic sound bar instead of the shitty rear-firing TV speakers is a complete game changer for few hundred monetary units.
This really isn't true at all. HiFi has an obscene amount of snake-oil and non-rigorous design decision making.
Audio Science Review (https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php) has documented this very clearly and well.
Custom solutions with, like, snapcast and raspberries (like mine), works and you don't need to deal with any of this, but then you need to deal with software setup annoyances. It get's technical.
Not wireless transmission, and not uniform spatial distribution.
AFAIK, Sonos was about those two. They didn't solve them either, there's still plenty of space to make a dent there.
For me, it is the removal of x86-32 bit software support. The removal wasn't needed at all and broke all the steam games.
A) it would have been huge news if Apple bricked all iPhone 7, and
B) it makes no sense to brick iPhone 7, but not the ones before it.
People will think what you’re saying is hyperbole; however, I was on a walk with the family, and I saw a Sonos speaker in the trash. It looked like new and a fairly recent model. I lugged it home, and it was a $US500 Sonos Play:5 speaker system [1].
Once home, I plugged it in, and it powered up.
I tried to pair it with my iPhone using the new Sonos app, and it didn’t work (the app never found the speaker).
I then tried the same again using my development Android device, and it instantly worked!
Once it was set up with the Android app, I could access it via the iPhone version of the app.
I can only imagine some iPhone owner literally threw it in the trash because he couldn’t get the iOS app to work. Bonkers…
[1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/pb-BfEVPbWlDe-hkxfK0.png
EDIT: Whoops, here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeIk-4ItQ70
They (Sonos) basically willfully attempted to brick their consumer devices, and since many sonos customers were prosumer enthusiasts but not technical (hw or sw) it really did signal EOL for the products. Bananas. I still have a my Play1/3/5 infrastructure operating through Home Assistant and AirBridge that turns them into Airplay devices. It's not perfect but still gives them utility. Considering how much they f'n cost..
Funnily enough, I own an electronics company and Dave is just down the road :-)
[1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/pb-BfEVPbWlDe-hkxfK0.png
I decided to sell them because they still have some value but I don't really want them, especially with what the company has done recently.
However, I wanted to set them up again to make sure they work. I spent hours trying to get them to set up again with no luck. I'm sure this is exactly what other users are experiencing. The old app was so nice and reliable. I don't have an opinion on the new app because I just literally can't get it to connect.
And I know they're not dead. One has an audio-in jack and still plays. It works great. There's no reason any of them shouldn't be fine. The only thing that changed was the app. I just want to get them set up so I can sell them on Marketplace for a good price as fully working.
Yet people will still buy Sonos!
Depending on which software is in use for streaming operations, you could also use ‘standard’ WiFi-enabled speakers like something from KEF (LS50) or dynaudio.
Just from top of my head. Maybe someone else has a comprehensive liste at hand.
They just had a 30% sale for the holidays though, so might not be worth getting them at full price
I am very annoyed at the planned obsolescence that Sonos has been pushing for a while now. I stopped buying new Sonos hardware, I'm still using all my old hardware, just not with the terrible Sonos apps, but with Roon.
I also took to aggressively repairing very old hardware that was actually failing (ZP80 players), because of the Sonos planned obsolescence policy. Recapping the PSU did the job, and I intend to keep them going for as long as I possibly can.
As a fringe benefit, it lets me use all of my old Sonos devices (as well as a modern Denon). And lets me listen to my FLAC music in a reasonably decent phone app as well.
In other words, I think the value proposition is sound. Importantly, their goals are aligned with mine: I want to listen to music and I pay them to maintain software that lets me listen to music. They want to get paid, so they maintain software that lets me listen to music. This is a very different relationship than most.
Works for me!
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/5/21166777/sonos-ending-recy...
> Sonos suggests that after bricking the device in Recycle Mode, users drop it off at a recycling facility or give it to Sonos to do the same.
https://www.engadget.com/2019-12-31-sonos-recycle-mode-expla...
Apple has done a good job of supporting old devices with new OS releases; they also subset old OS’s. That seems like a fair trade.
My own MBP from the same era as yours succumbed to a logic board long before then, and I replaced it with a late 2016 MBP, which came with a touch bar + butterfly keyboard, had terrible performance, stopped receiving updates after Monterey (2021), no longer receives security updates, and (obviously) can't run modern ARM-based Mac software. (Incidentally, it was also the single most expensive computer I ever bought, even to date!) Not a very solid run, I'd say.
Personal anecdotes aside, I don't think it's too disputable that Mac has never taken backwards compatibility or computer longevity anywhere as seriously as Windows or Linux have.
Ah, yeah, I do recall the horror stories about the butterfly keyboard ones. Sorry to hear it. I was able to skip that entire generation because mine ran like a champ.
> Personal anecdotes aside, I don't think it's too disputable that Mac has never taken backwards compatibility or computer longevity anywhere as seriously as Windows or Linux have.
I think this is probably true. Unfortunately, the reason I moved to MacBook's in the first place was because I had a terrible run of Windows PCs & laptops. I think I had 4 or so between 2002 and 2012, but only 1 between 2012 and 2021. I suppose that's why I'm partial to Macs.
Please don't do anything security critical with them.
Other OS providers do support the devices longer. At least for core OS updates.
9 years of OS support seems pretty good to me.
Microsoft is abandoning 63% of its user base later this year, with an untold amount of those users unable to update to Windows 11 due to the requirements of a processor released after 2017. Keep in mind that with how the average Windows user buys their device, it's common to see brand new computers with two years old CPUs. With the pandemic having forced everyone to scrape the bottom of the barrel for laptops, there are so many people getting bitten by Microsoft right now.
My iPad is too old to upgrade to the new OS, but yet no software is available for it in the store, because all new apps are encouraged to be re-released for the newest version of the OS.
My device is completely frozen in time from whatever software was installed on it when it went out of support.
However, I do suspect app developers don't want to be on the hook for supporting old versions, should they continue to serve things in need of security fixes etc etc. I don't entirely attribute it to malice.
https://appleinsider.com/inside/ios/tips/how-to-get-apps-for...
Your link is very helpful, but also notes some of the limitations. Namely, this doesn't work if the software has been purged due to not being updated recently, and it doesn't really work to find new-to-me software (that I haven't purchased previously).
Even if it's technically possible to reinstall software that I've previously purchased, it is very limited in its ability to install new-to-me software.
That's the deal, pray Apple doesn't alter it further.
Music assistant is getting baked into home assistant, and can provide a control plane: https://www.music-assistant.io/
You can use squeeze lite to make servers it clients: https://github.com/ralph-irving/squeezelite
You can install it on an esp32: https://github.com/sle118/squeezelite-esp32
And there's a decent wiki full of stuff about it: https://wiki.lyrion.org/index.php/Main_Page.html
The remaining device has mechanical issues (as old speakers sometimes do). This one is disappointing, but at least it isn't irrational.
Funny thing is, we thought it was silly when we moved in - then we grew to love it. Now I hate them!
I have two Play 5's that I have had for a decade and they're still currently set up working completely fine on an Apple device. That's a speaker that was released 16 years ago and still works through the Sonos app, still allows me to play Spotify, still works natively with the Playbar to watch movies and TV.
That sounds pretty good to me. If people want to throw out their hardware and buy new that's fine, but they haven't needed to throw out their Play 5's.
If I was still using an Apple iPhone from 2009 you can bet it would be a terrible experience
Every other device, Play 1, Play 5 (Gen 2), AMP, Play 3, Playbar, Playbase, Sub all of these products were made compatible with both S1 & S2 apps.
Outside of the Play 5 (Gen 1) there weren't really many other products people were buying that were left out.
I will never ever buy a speaker again that demands I enable precise location in order to "discover" the speaker on my network. Approximate location is not enough. Sonos demands your home address before it permits you to use your speaker. Even aux line-in.
I will never ever buy a speaker again that requires I log-in before I can set certain things unrelated to online use, such as the volume limiter.
I will never ever buy a speaker again that has an obscene amount of delay even when using the aux line-in. And yes I toggled the setting in the app to "reduce delay" and followed all the steps to reduce the delay as much as possible, but the delay was still there. Forget about using a Play5 gen2 for home theatre or anywhere you need low-latency. Rant over!
Any app that uses direct bluetooth could theoretically get your precise location from a Bluetooth geotag, so Apple requires apps to get "precise location" permission before being allowed to use bluetooth.
I confused it with the "Access Wi-Fi Information Entitlement". If an app wants to scan for nearby Wifi networks, it needs the "precise location" permission [1], because the names of Wifi networks can be used to determine precise location.
Maybe the Sonos app wants to scan for Wifi networks?
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkextension/n...
Honestly, if they had a checkbox saying "do not share my location with Sonos" it would have eased my anxiety. But they don't, they default everything to "we collect data".
Relying on an unread "privacy policy" as the pinky swear for protecting the data they force users to give up, is bad privacy. You can't even delete your own Sonos account, the "delete account" button doesn't actually perform that function.
But it won't matter saying that because some people refuse to believe that some companies genuinely need to use that.
But they don't need to [use location services]. I only wanted the 3.5mm line in on the Sonos Play5, but was denied unless I jumped through their app "onboarding" routine.
It's essentially a loudspeaker with 3.5mm input. But you must complete the mandatory Sonos induction dance before the input signal is permitted the path to output. Like I said, never again.
It's a shame because I quite liked the sound of the Play5. It's bright, but the wide dispersion is good for certain types of listening at low to medium volume.
Line in is an additional component of the speaker however the entire ethos is controlling the speaker over WiFi by anyone in the home.
As a Sonos purchaser, ironically product longevity was the reason I bought so much of their stuff!
While other similar systems would drop support for old devices eventually, I could be confident with Sonos that I was investing in stuff that would continue to work.
… until now! I’ve started to lose confidence. Which is a shame - I’m moving into a new house and wanting a sub, but now questioning if that’s a sensible decision given I don’t know how long my older speakers will work for now they are going glitchy. Real shame!
What does this refer to? Did Sonos drop support for products? When was this, which products?
I like to reverse decisions further back. The connected speaker is basically a commodity at this point. Sonos does have some nice features, but they are very expensive. I think the ceo saw the down sales and lack of new products and rushed out the app hoping it would work and boost sales. Obviously it was a disaster, but I’m not sure if sticking to the status quo would have led to any different outcome in sales.
Catalina literally just dumped half the software that ever ran on MacOS overnight to make the transition to Apple Silicon seem smoother than it actually was.
The app update they're talking about is the one that got released last year which is terrible, it keeps crashing, doesn't work with time zone and a bunch of other stuff
The key technical change that broke Sonos was abandoning their reliable UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) system for device discovery in favor of mDNS, while also shifting from direct device communication to a cloud-based API approach. This new architecture made all network traffic encrypted and routed through Sonos cloud servers (even for local operations), adding significant overhead and latency, especially for older Sonos devices with limited processing power. They also switched from native platform-specific UX frameworks to a JavaScript-based interface while moving music service interactions through their cloud instead of direct SMAPI calls, resulting in slower performance and reduced functionality.
For a more extended discussion, see this excellent LinkedIn post from Andy Pennell, a principal engineer at Microsoft with a deep technical understanding of Sonos systems. He created one of the most successful third-party Sonos apps for Windows Phone and worked directly with Sonos on their official Windows Phone 8 app.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-happened-sonos-app-techn...
We got a sales-oriented CEO who knows when to listen to us developers. It has worked very well for our company.
Being more sales-oriented he's found good business models and knows our customers well, and hence what our products are worth to our clients so we're not selling our products too cheap. This was the case before he took over from a more technical CEO.
While a CEO with an engineer background can certainly do well too, I think it's probably easier to find a good sales-based CEO that simply knows when to listen to their technical team. At least in theory...
You think a salesperson is suggesting mDNS and frameworks?
My job now is to deal with the aftermath of failed design choices at my company. It only took a couple of guys to impose their deluded design, because noone stood up to call their bullshit.
It wasn't so much what but why. The constraints of why led to risky anti-customer product decisions. Decisions the CEO had no choice but to own.
But, they developped the linux devices as it was a desktop computer, the biggest latency hogs we have are multiprocess architecture over dbus, and event based UI which fetches live data. The result is a slow and hanging UX, which gets slower after each update, and is irritating customers. The lower end devices we sell are bare metal, and they are liked by our customers due to their swiftness. They just have a different architecture that focuses on end result (monolith, and a cache of data to display).
The problem is the fundamental disconnect between what's good for users and what's good for the company. The company wants you to have to pay them money every month and control how you interact with the product, so that they can be a services company with recurring revenue.
The consumer wants a device that they buy once and it just works.
Give a good salesperson a handwavy outline of something to sell, and they will sell it. They don't need technical accuracy for success. Yes, this is bad for customers, and makes life harder, and results in ridiculous, counterproductive, infuriating situations for IT staff, engineers, and other people who have to deal with the technical realities of every day business.
A salesperson can just mash psychological buttons in manager's brains, and they'll make the sale. The consumer, in enterprise level markets, is hardly ever the team or individual in charge of operating the technology. The consumer is the manager, or managerial team, looking to check boxes and shuffle numbers and spend $X on Y department, for which they get rewarded for a wide array of arbitrary outcomes, almost none of which have anything to do with the practical impact of the product in question on the people who end up most affected by the purchase.
If an engineer with a solid understanding of the product being sold is in charge, he's in the best place to rein in the sales and marketing teams, and to direct development based on customer reality. This probably results in lower profits, overall, but a better product, and a better reputation in the long run.
The ideal case is having leadership who uses the product, or at least is willing to walk in the shoes of an end-user. Plenty of engineers do not do this either.
I assume you are an engineer? I am too, not judging :-).
Everybody tends to think that they are in a better position to know how the product should look like, I think it's a normal bias.
Not that salespeople are better. I hate the direction Sonos chose. Just saying that engineers are not always the best at understanding what customers want and need (if you asked me, I would say that everybody needs Yubikeys, and yet people actively fight to keep their right to reuse the same weak password everywhere :-) ).
This is one of the key competencies of UX professionals, specifically UX researchers.
Just like some engineers want something that's technically impressive more than they want what's good for the user.
Why do you say that? My gut reaction is that the opposite is true. Salespeople must understand their customers' wants and needs in order to effectively sell! Engineers are generally a step or two removed from the customers. This may be an unpopular take on HN but I'd wager the people who spend time directly with the customers have a better chance at understanding what they want. Taken a step further, customer support probably has the best understanding of their markets' needs!
I've worked with a few developers AND sales people that didn't give a hoot about what their customers thought. In the case of Sales, they only cared about making their targets. In the case of the devs that didn't care, they spent 99% of their time doing silly (in my opinion) arguments about frameworks, design patterns, and whitespace and formatting rules in CI. Not that things like design patterns are inherently silly. But if they don't result in a better customer experience (via more stable and maintainable software, for example), then it's a waste of time.
I'm a developer by trade but have ALWAYS had an attitude of "it only matters if it's useful to the user" – and have butted heads sometimes with developers on which features to prioritize.
People working in customer support, from my experience, sort of see the anti-survivorship bias working in action. Not many people call up to say how well something works. I would agree with you though on good Salespeople (ones that do try to understand what customers need and all that, not necessarily ones that sell the most) knowing what the customer wants/needs.
I used to see this all the time at an old job where my team worked on open source client libraries for using the main product that our company sold. A decent number people seemed to think that an increasing number of tickets being filed against one of the libraries was a sign that users weren't happy with it, but it always seemed obvious to me that you couldn't easily conclude that; you might have 99 happy users with no issues for every 1 unhappy user who filed a ticket, or you might have literally only unhappy users and nobody without issues. On the other hand, getting literally zero tickets might mean that you have plenty of happy users, or it might mean you have basically no users at all.
I'd often talk to younger engineers who were interning on the team or recently joined full-time about how this dynamic informed how I approached my job; usually, we'd only hear from users who had issues, so the "goal" in some ways to was to make the software so good that you'd never hear from them. If you did hear from a user, that was a valuable opportunity where you might learn something you could do in the future to make things better the first time.
Yes. There are people who talk about product experiences that delight or whatever. Nah, the ultimate experience is one that's so flawless, so frictionless that it's completely forgettable. The user doesn't want to remember anything. They have a problem a/o need, the goal is to make it disappear w/out a trace.
Good sales, ethical sales, aren't parasitic. A vast majority of sales in todays markets, especially in enterprise markets, are parasitic. The salespeople are interchangeable. The ones that make the most money are the ones most willing to be parasitic. The sales script is targeted and tailored to the intended audience, which in most large companies, is several degrees of separation from the eventual user of the product. You don't need to know what the end user needs. You need to know what the person in charge of buying wants, and that's ultimately emotional validation, hope, a sense of "innovating", a feeling of victory in pricing negotiations, being respected and treated well, and so forth. You can run them through the wringer with sales engineers and migrations after the contract is signed, and even if the end user and the product engineers recognize that your product is the wrong tool for the job, that won't matter if the buying manager is emotionally satisfied with the transaction. People will bend over backwards to justify what they know is "right."
A salesperson CEO will make more money, but will make the world a shittier place, because they're the cotton candy of management. They'll burn credibility and reputation in exchange for profit, kick the can down the road for someone else to clean up the mess later.
Sure, in a healthy, respectable, ethical, functional company, you'd be right, and the CEO would also be the best salesperson for the product, because they'd know it, and the customers, inside and out, and be able to explain and demonstrate exactly what was necessary and why, and justify all the costs and benefits.
This is a world that has Goodharted the measure of success - profit - and empowered people in the execution of shitty behavior. The market rewards higher profits and punishes "failures," often completely out of sync with quality and merit.
We don't live in a good world - companies that behave like you describe would be wonderful. We live in a thoroughly enshittified world, and a whole lot of people "earning" a whole lot of money are in between you and any meaningful change.
From Apple and Microsoft on down, companies want endless, infinitely increasing returns year over year, and they will do anything that isn't explicitly illegal to get it. They'll also do illegal things if the cost of getting caught is less than the profit earned. Alignment with end user needs, benefit to the consumer - these are far down the list of things meaningful to the systems and people making decisions on how money is spent. The job of a salesperson is to understand that system, and exploit it for the benefit of their company.
I agree with your assessment, except that an engineer has the incentive to make the product work as specified.
A salesperson is given their goals by management, and they are compensated on achieving that goal - not necessarily what the customer wants.
As a dev I strive to talk to sales and support for this reason. It's not seldom I can do a small change that drastically improves the user experience for one or more clients, be it existing or potential.
Unless engineers spend time directly with customers, something is broken in the organization to begin with. If salespeople and customers dream up solutions and then hand the task to produce this solution over to engineers, then that business is frankly doomed.
I think you have that backwards. Sales people absolutely need to understand what they customer wants and needs, or they won't buy it. Engineers just know what they want to build because it's what they want.
But really, Product Managers are the ones who are in the best position to figure it out. They get input from sales, customer service, and engineering, and produce competitive research, and then prioritize from there.
A good CEO is going to listen to their the PMs.
There's no reason to believe an engineer would understand the customer needs more than a salesperson. I know a lot of engineers who would do literally anything to avoid dealing with a real customer. At the companies I've worked for, engineers don't even talk to customers if there isn't a specific, technical issue they need to be there for. Meanwhile, salespeople actually talk to customers, probably more than anyone except support.
This is why programmer-driven open source projects are a paragon of usability and have taken over 90% of the mobile phone, desktop, and app market.
As an engineer, I had no idea about:
- what the utility companies wanted when I was working for a SaaS company that printed and processed bills
- what the field service techs wanted when I was writing software for ruggedized windows ce devices
- what the railroad car owners or repairmen wanted when I was working for a company creating a SaaS (https://public.railinc.com/sites/default/files/documents/CRB...)
- I knew nothing about what the healthcare industry needed in the three SaaS companies I worked for including software for health care workers dealing with special needs kids
- the various “enterprises” mostly in the edtech or state and local government space in consulting.
But while superior products at a price point can capture a bunch of share, after that they grow at the rate of the market. Those markets have “matured”.
For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied.
This is where ideas like “growth” and ideas like “useful” diverge: raise your hand if you like Facebook or Google in 2025 more than 10-15 years ago.
Sonos (and I’m aware of the structure) “grew” right out of a sustainably profitable business with happy customers.
That reason is people like more money than less money. No one logs into their brokerage account and invests in Sonos because they have a great product that is growing (or shrinking) at the rate of the speaker market.
People want to see their year end report at least equal the broad market returns.
The directive for all business leaders is to hit those benchmark returns, not pump out a solid speaker for however many years.
And if a private business owner operates their company in a way that lags the market’s returns, then they are basically doing charity work. They’re going to have to pay a lot of cash compared to their competitors who can use RSUs to incentivize employees.
Clearly everyone likes money. We could pay them for good things rather than the transient illusion of good things.
Yes it would be imperfect. No it wouldn’t be worse than this mess. Bell Labs didn’t invent the transistor on this model, JFK didn’t send us to the moon on this model.
This “privatize the commons of a century of effective public/private partnership” model is going rather shit in fact.
Every publicly listed business already does this, in the form of stock grants and options with various targets to hit at various intervals. See bottom of page 51 for an example:
https://investor.apple.com/sec-filings/sec-filings-details/d...
It’s where all those rage bait headlines of extreme executive compensation come from, from maturing equity granted before the stock appreciated a good amount over the course of a few years.
I hate to be aggressive but it’s really pretty godawful that people let absurd, corrosive claims like this fly. There is a creeping normalcy to weird Art Laffer talking points and weird Milton Friedman Freak Offs with no evidence. Things suck for the typical person since Dick Cheney and Art Laffer started “cutting taxes”.
You’re wrong in a way that demands a complete ignorance of everything from news to history to human empathy.
This mindset needs fucking therapy and where therapy fails the legal system for a fucking change.
This is not
> There is absolutely no basis for the sweeping, extraordinary claim that “every publicly listed business” is managed and incentivized around sustainable long-term value.
There has been plenty of research into figuring out how executive compensation can be tied to longer term performance, but “sustainable long term value” is such a nebulous term, I have no idea what it could mean other than a fantasy where people are able to magically measure everything they want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_compensation
I only meant to highlight the fact that it is standard practice at publicly listed businesses to hire consultants whose job it is to figure out how to align executives and reward them for achieving long term goals.
Maybe you think the current timetables are not long term enough, or the measures are not correct, but it’s not as if cash is being handed out Willy nilly.
We’re handing out trillions in cap for press releases.
What on God’s green earth the fuck are you talking about?
Willy nilly? Will Wonka with a chocolate factory is closer to earth.
My Google Home costs $30 second hand, don’t sound as good, but I’ve not spent a single cent on it after setting it up. What is SONOS doing?
I'm sure that at some point, Samsung or Google or Sony or some upstart will catch up, but it will be a long time before someone eliminates SONOS from contention despite this multi-year setback
It just did’t evolve very far or very fast, or even adapt pricing to better fit a rapidly changing market.
They switched away from a focus on multi-room hi-fi (or at least mid-fi) audio and users with their own hoard of digital audio to focus more on streaming services and chase the trend of little monophonic speakers. The higher-end devices remained good but became ever more niche.
Then they broke everything, particularly customer trust, with the app update.
[0] I have no idea what it is actually
So while it's maybe neat that they solved fringe use cases, it's unfortunate that they failed at the basic use case of "just easily play audio from my phone"
I think that's the kicker. It was revolutionary when it came out, and it's a solid technical solution, but Sonos was novel over a decade ago.
The reason is tax law and it applies to all companies not just tech. Removing the double-taxation of dividends would fix so much of our economy.
If you run a stable, no-growth but profitable company, and each year return the profits to the owners (shareholders) in the form of a dividend, that's bad because the income is first taxed when the corporation declares it as income and then again when the shareholders receive the dividend.
If instead you don't issue the dividend, but re-invest to grow the company, then the value of the shares can increase without creating a taxable event for the shareholders.
We could avoid a lot of the boom-bust cycles, enshittification of products and other economic problems if we just structured tax law to encourage stable, profitable companies issuing boring predictable dividends instead of our current system that requires infinite growth.
Why is that bad? The first case is income to the corporation and they pay income tax on it. The second is income to the shareholder and they pay income tax on it. How is it different from the corporation's employees paying income tax on money received from the corporation?
>If instead you don't issue the dividend, but re-invest to grow the company, then the value of the shares can increase without creating a taxable event for the shareholders.
That's true as long as the shareholders never sell their shares. Once they do, it's a taxable event like the dividend.
The money paid to employees is only taxed once.
We (pretty much everywhere) tax companies on their profits, but individuals on their income. It seems unfair, it leads to some weird but accepted inequalities (like the cost of renting a house vs buying), but no alternative seems to work.
While sometimes criticized as "executives juicing the stock price because that's what their incentives are tied to", in fact investors recognise that buybacks are economically equivalent to dividends, but tax-advantaged (for exactly the reasons you gave, they don't create a taxable event for the shareholders).
One problem with buybacks is it's socially difficult for companies to replace dividends with buybacks - by convention, dividends are usually issued on a regular schedule and buybacks are ad-hoc, so "cutting dividends" is seen as a sign of a company that no longer has reliable profits. But that really is just convention and it would only take a few companies switching to normalize this.
The fundamental problem with 95% of companies, and 99% of publicly listed companies.
Being selfish is common in human nature.
Yes! This pervasive trend has nerfed so much consumer tech. I simply won't buy any more hardware that relies on proprietary clouds
Nothing Apple is shipping seems to be for me, the user. Rather it’s a grab bag of crap “AI” for Wall Street, ways to make it harder to run software of my choosing, and wholesale trashing of perfectly fine UX to cram in whatever useless feature some PM landed for their promotion.
I could say a few hundred things much worse about the direction of windows 11, which is even more obnoxious than Apple, but then I’d have to relieve the horror of being forced to submit my email address to Microsoft to install the damn OS.
Day by day I feel the devices I’ve spent a huge sum of money on no longer belong to me. I’m getting really fucking tired of it, and something has to give.
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200318153/get-connected...
(Note: there are "EPMs" but it's a totally different thing.)
Or, some times it's plain simple cartelization, making sure no competitor is better. That seems to be the case with smart TVs for example.
It's good to have a word for the impact it causes, but focusing on that novelty makes it looks like it's a new phenomenon that we don't know the causes or how to fix.
home screen icon theming hit like an empty bus
(Not a fanboy of either; use both.)
“Pin” the categories you want access to.
Absolutely nothing has changed about mail if you turn off Apple Intelligence and Image Playgrounds is just an app that you don’t have to use.
I have a 90/10 rule when it comes to new products/features these days: they're 90% benefit to the company and 10% benefit to me.
Well yes, the user.
all it takes to install Windows 11 without an account is to press SHIFT + F10 on the "Connect your internet"-screen and execute this command: OOBE\BYPASSNRO
never in my life have i linked an MS-Account to my personal windows, i always use a local account.
ever installed Linux? takes exponentially more knowledge than this windows-local-only workaround.
i'm sure that management is aware of this feature, as it exists for years now and can be trivially found, it's not like this is hidden somewhere in a vault, you know. Same as MAS.
i'm not even a defender of Windows and only use it at home because i game, but if i see that someone has never installed a windows just because they don't want to give M$ their e-mail address (hope they don't have a github or linkedin account, but, you know...), then i want to give them the hint they need :) i use them same functionality to install windows for my parents etc., as they want to have local-only accounts as well. even without this weird work-around, i would still be the one installing windows. OS installation is not hard, but already too difficult or confusing for lots of endusers.
not sure why you chose to reply in such a snarky tone :(
Well, that does not really look very user-friendly, does it? Which probably only underlines the point of the parent.
i see posts on here of people reverse-engineering firmwares, hacking together new things, finding and using exploits etc., not sure why installing a windows seems to be a huge topic, then.
I would be very wary. That instruction sounds like an “unsupported” hack that’s likely to lead to future problems.
It makes total sense for the Windows engineers to have this kind of feature flag.
And i dont think they are going to rip out the code that runs and supports local accounts.
Step 2: make online login the default option
Step 3: make online login mandatory, leave an escape hatch for technical users
<we are here>
Step 4: remove the escape hatch
At some point they integrated spotify and other similar services, which risked what you talked about, but was fine. There are even third party controller frontends available on linux.
But recently (mid 2024) they delivered an absolute stinker of a new app which routes everything via their cloud, fails to load half the time, barely responds, and looks suspiciously like that grab for control you imagine
But as much as I dislike the "new" app, it doesn't push subscribing to this service, so I'm not sure they absolutely want device customers to become subscribers.
I hate the slippery slope fallacy but this is how was gonna end
I don’t know about that part. UPnP is exactly the HTTP-abusing XML-laden layer-spanning horrorshow you expect from 2000s Microsoft where it was mainly supported, mDNS is a fairly compact and neat set of independent extensions to preexisting Internet protocols born during Apple’s short period of flirting with open standards. In a greenfield project, you’d need to show me some really impressive tooling to make me choose UPnP, because five minutes with the specs are enough to tell implementing or debugging the thing is going to be a nightmare.
(No experience with Sonos or their implementation of either.)
The literal Chromecast itself seems to be exceptional device that just works.
UPnP generally or just UPnP IGD (frequently referred to as “UPnP” in consumer router UIs)? I’d imagine the primary reasons a smart speaker would want to use UPnP are largely unrelated to punching holes in firewalls and NATs (what IGD is about). And however distasteful RPC over XML over jury-rigged HTTP over IP multicast may be, it’s hardly inevitable that it must create a security problem.
Even if we’re speaking about holes, though, I feel like I must object to the broad description of that function as a security vulnerability, as any instance of that moves us that much farther away from a true peer-to-peer Internet.
But it wasn't just a move from UPnP to mDNS with everything else remaining the same. They also moved to HTTP/WebSocket instead of UPnP eventing, added encryption.
While most complaints in this thread about the app all say "it's sluggish", with the initial release of S2 many had their systems that worked perfectly fine with S1 undiscoverable with S2. At the time all the advice on Sonos forums, Reddit, etc was "First check your router and make sure mDNS isn't disabled". Which caused a lot of people to have a kneejerk reaction of "wtf is this mDNS shit and what was wrong with the "old reliable UPnP"
Comedically, UPnP was also HTTP, but not as stateful as websockets. Often httpu, http over UDP. And for service discovery, httpu over multicast, pretty much like mdns. I'm surprised that s2 would have broken, given that I'd expect s1 to also need multicast. Maybe Sonos setup a pinhole router via upnp-igd, so devices could talk to each other inside the network, even if multicast was off? It's be interesting to know if any upnp-igd rules were created in s1.
Just once, I’d like to see a leader actively refuse these kinds of arguments when the process they have is objectively better.
Never once have I ever experienced an Electron-ified version of an app and thought, “oh yeah, this is better.”
I'd even suggest that the fact that it's JS based has significantly changed the tech world because the editor itself will run in a browser so it's here https://godbolt.org/ , and here https://codesandbox.io, and here https://www.postman.com/, and here https://aws.amazon.com/pm/cloud9/ and 100s or 1000s of other sites.
Related: I was looking at WinRAR’s site last week after reminiscing about it with coworkers, and found that a. They haven’t really updated their UI since I last used it a decade+ ago b. The download is still 4 MB. THAT is why native is superior – if you know what you’re doing, you can get incredible performance with absurdly low filesizes.
I'm arguing that it's successful because any of its users can trivially hack something on top of it and distribute it, including things the original devs never intended or think is a good idea. In that way, its success mirrors Excel.
Emacs and Vim are way easier to extend.
But in terms of access, JS wins hands down.
From a documentation, examples, accessibility, tooling, and number of people you can get help from, JS wins.
What other metrics should we consider when comparing, API complexity, LOC for average plugins, google results?
I think if we had a reasonable baseline for comparison, it would be helpful.
Maybe as a general purpose language, but for this specific comparison (extending editors). Elisp and Emacs wins. Vimscript is not the best plugin language, but the interation process is way better than VSC.
And it only performs that well, because all critical code is written in a mix of C++ and Rust running in external processes, and they have ported text rendering into WebGL.
There are many VC funded companies here. How many of you felt pressured to pick a hireable language like JS/Python because if not you couldn't deploy your investor's capital? Like, if you had presented a plan of "I'm going to need 4 graybeards that know Haskell", you'd get denied for not thinking big enough.
So while the pool is larger for JS/TS and Python, that may not always be beneficial.
[0]: https://mercury.com
VS Code and 1Password 8 do come to mind. Blazingly fast. Low memory footprint. Incredibly reliable.
100+ MB for what is essentially an encrypted local DB with cloud sync and a GUI seems absurd.
AirBnB, UberEats and Facebook are all built with React Native and they have excellent performance.
Using a JS framework for your UI doesn't inherently mean it will suck. It can be done well.
If you expect it to be half as much work, you'll be disappointed.
If you expect it to be a tradeoff that makes some things easier and some things harder, and you're willing to invest in making it excellent, then it can be a very reasonable choice.
https://getmcss.com/press/facebook-exits-react-native
> Performance issues: React Native apps are known to have slower performance compared to natively built apps, which can be a drawback for users.
Airbnb has dropped React Native.
At least on iOS, the Facebook app is not and has never been built with RN. Some features were, but none of the core ones like News Feed. The biggest example of an RN-based feature is Marketplace.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/it-was-the-wrong-dec...
In particular
> Employees claimed that Sonos’ desire to get new customers and please investors was becoming more important than ensuring that old hardware would work properly with the new app.
That sure sounds like this was a deliberate choice.
That said, I suspect Sonos' market has mostly disappeared. A decade ago I paid $400+ to get streaming audio; now a lot of people are happy with Spotify Connect and $200 google speakers or a $50 refurb echo 4.
They just really need to sort out the damn software.
Now if the CEO made the change for other reasons (usually financial, such as customer subscription lock-in) despite the technical downsides (which should have been presented by the CTO), then yes, in that case the blame would primarily fall to the CEO.
I doubt a Salesperson has the technical expertise to initiate any of those changes.
That reminds me: When S3 dropped support for MD5 ciphers, it ended up causing problems for a number of their customers who had remarkably old computers connecting to S3. The machines struggled to handle the newer / stronger ciphers they were now required to use. In one case it went from "just about keeping up" to "got no hope". That was a "fun" way to unexpectedly break folks.
Sort of like "test your stuff simulating a really shitty network connection", perhaps something else in that vein would be "test your stuff with excessively slow crypto and longer-keys."
I suspect it’s all related to centralisation and control and subscriptions to radio services and profit however so I won’t hold my breath. Most enshittifcation has profit at its root. :-(
Could a more technical CEO have turned the ship around more quickly? Sure. But let’s be honest, the blame rests at the feet of the engineering team. Someone got excited about using some new tech and didn’t fully consider the ramifications. This happens all the time. And if you’re lucky, the code review saves you, or if not then QA saves you, or if not then the beta testers save you. If a problem remains after that, then it tends to become really hard to undo, from an organization perspective.
I understand why they'd to remove this big clatter of legacy protocols, simplify it, and encrypted everything. A tech-focused CEO would surely want that too, but perhaps might respect the amount of work and testing involved. What they forgot is that in a Sonos is a clatter of legacy protocols on top of speakers that are sonically "ok". Wasn't that their unique selling point? Why wouldn't a CEO with a sales background understand USP?
As someone pointed out: they want to turn once-off purchases into monthly subscription. Maybe. They see this enormous userbase and brainstorm ways to squeeze recurring revenue out of it, but ironically they ruin the product and turn an army of advocates into enemies.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/26/apple-discoveryd-replac...
Kinda feels like those two issues are orthogonal.
mDNS is used by all the major players in the iot space today and there is a reason for it. For instance I believe Chromecast uses mDNS for discovery. Routers have had a long time to work through any possible issues. New code will always suffer from bugs and I'm pretty sure that's been one of the problems they face more than anything else.
Hoping the new one will have more foresight to not screw over existing customers in the face of the new shiny.
In other news, I hear Framework is looking to get into other hardware niches… if they ever made a networked speaker, I’d buy it.
The speakers expose a few SOAP-based APIs to any clients on the LAN. Those allow for track control, grouping, etc. They don't allow adding new music services, but they can do the vast majority of daily interaction. These APIs continue to work nearly flawlessly even for my Play:1 devices that are 10 years old.
Streaming via AirPlay is indeed hit-or-miss, but it hasn't gotten worse in the past couple years.
I control my Sonos from a jQuery-based web application I wrote nearly 10 years ago that runs on a raspberry pi in my closet. I have not had to change anything in several years, and I use my 15+device Sonos system all the time.
The new app is indeed a dumpster fire. Somehow the company managed to make their first-party application worse than any of the third-party applications.
Had this not happened sledgehammers would have been going through speakers.
I would still prefer they rolled back to the old app, or made it as an optional re-release.
Because it is older it has problems with dark mode/light mode. But it is as fast and reliable as ever.
https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/downgrade-a-sonos-pr...
Did this change during all the noise? (Entirely possible I was oblivious)
It now works instantly. Even my customsd sources work, and they work better than the previous app too.
Only thing is I had to go to the desktop app to get the customsd sources working on a new network.
I haven’t used the official App in months now.
The actual Sonos integration still works (IIRC) with most of my speakers, in that I can use them as targets in automations involving audio (sees them on network and integrates directly).
The AirSonos add-in makes the Gen1 devices show up on your network as AirPlay targets. IME, AirSonos can be a little buggy since you're going through a bridge but not enough to really matter. It's functional value far exceeds the frustration (90% of the time it works 100% of the time).
With all this, you might be stuck with the old room names set when you had access to the Sonos native app. I think AirSonos lets me mask those names, but every now and then I have to remember that, oh yeah, the Play3 labeled Kitchen is actually now actually bedroomxyz. But again, it works for all intents and purposes. I can airplay from sonos, audible, etc to my gen1 sonos equipment, and that's waaaay better than tossing them into a chinese river (recycling) or a local landfill.
The EEVBlog video about the "Fronos" project (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeIk-4ItQ70) involved embedding a new amp with bluetooth into the Play:5 chasis, and there are certainly amps these days you could consider that have built-in airplay. Something for the project queue. For me, using the above with Home Assistant keeps this project at the bottom of the queue, though it's probably the "right" solution long term.
I’d say that leads me to believe it’s an app issue versus just Bluetooth. Agree that BT by itself has a reputation to match, but in this case Sonos is to blame. The other apps recommended in the post work well.
because the problem with sonos is that they're actually really really good. dollar for dollar, it's some of the best sound quality you can find for home audio, and it doesn't require a month of product research to figure it out. it's easily available in most big-box stores, and unlike some other brands they don't have a shit-tier line of products that look indistinguishable from their good stuff so you have to be cautious as a consumer to buy only the good stuff. if you go to best buy and spend $500 on sonos products, you're going to get your moneys worth.
it's too bad their app sucks, because their hardware doesn't.
I know its some choices but any of them are good choice its mostly flavours. What you get for same money will sound better and 100% last longer because you have modular system instead of glued box that stops working when Sonos stops caring about the product (like they did before).
fwiw i did exactly what you're suggesting for my personal use, i've got a wiim pro and a fosi v3 and kanto 5" speakers and i'm very happy with my setup. but i'm a nerd who likes shopping for things like that, and i know enough to know that most people would rather not. and it's not like i saved anything compared to going with a sonos.
edit: and, as i just learned a little further down the thread, you've also got to be careful which model of wiim you buy - the newest and nicest ones don't have airplay.
> because the problem with sonos is that they're actually really really good. dollar for dollar
They were really expensive, but people confused quality (why else would it cost so much) with convenience and were happy not knowing about anything else.
It's a good strategy, works well for other companies. But when you remove the convenience part of it everything else falls apart too.
I would not say you didnt get anything back. You got setup where at minimum the speakers will work for decades.
People who pay for WiiM ultra most likely dont care about Airplay anyway because Airplay 2 devices send lossy AAC 256kbps audio. You dont get streamer for 329usd to send reencoded music there. You get it so it streams from the original sources directly.
the reason airplay matters so much is that even if you want great audio quality and care about the bitrate of your music, other people in your house don't and just want to make music come out of the speakers. no airplay resigns the device to "nobody else can use it" status.
The whole point is Sonos is easy. One product for speakers. Another one for a sub (which most people don't even need). Ok now you're done. And then there's people who really don't have space for all that.
Then again you can look for wiim mini packaged with active speakers - they have colab/packages like this. I recently got wiim+edifier [1] in sale for 130usd and its shockingly good combo for fraction of sonos (especially since its stereo).
Are you familar with the models I've referenced? Both include streamers.
When they came out, there was nothing else that had their combination of sound quality and app features.
Before their new app, the competition had basically caught up, Sonos was only marginally better in a few ways.
With their new app, I'd never recommend Sonos.
Also what brands make speakers that sound just as good for the price and simplicity of setup? Asking legitimately not a jab.
Sound is fine, not hifi just a notch below, but good hifi surround is a 10k thingie. They cost 500-800 in Europe, much less than Sonos surround+sub solutions. No issues with connectivity, connect via eArc with TV without issues and starts with it, bluetooth with both Samsung and Apple OK too. Have some extra features when paired with Samsung TVs. One detail I love - extra bass control on remote, so I can move it down easily during late night watching (low frequencies travel better through walls).
I like them a lot and run Spotify from phone on them all the time.
I've always been amazed at how different my experience apparently was to everyone else's, because I only ever see glowing praise (before the apparently disastrous new app rollout, which still sounds like a better experience than I had). I can only assume there were significant updates and improvements in the time since, because the company wouldn't have lasted a month if our experience was typical.
> Spence, in October, had acknowledged mistakes surrounding the app's release and said that he and seven other company leaders would forgo their bonuses.
People out of a job because of you and you're gonna forgo your bonuses.
> Spence, whose total compensation was $5.19 million in fiscal 2023, took a roughly $72,000 cash bonus.
Well, the board seems to have fired him too?
Remember, though, conveniently, according to other executives, there's "only a limited number of people with the skills to be CEOs! So we have to pay them so much!"
Speakers with decent sound (sure, your separates system is going to sound better, but pretty decent). They have some really fancy wireless mesh tech in an era where that's unheard of. They pick up your local music collection and have a controller application on most OS's that allows you to build stereo pairs or tv surround systems wirelessly, arbitrarily group together rooms in your house, stream music from wherever to wherever and generally just have music in the places you want it with little hassle. I still have some Sonos play:1 speakers I got in 2012 that are going strong, even though they live mostly outdoors now.
Now, if those aren't your use-cases, and you really do care about high fidelity sound (I don't), then it's probably not for you. But it has been great for me and I've built up quite a lot of speakers.
Unfortunately (and here's the subject of TFA) - in the middle of last year they screwed the pooch, and half the time their app doesn't even load any more :/
I looked at the Sonos ecosystem for this, but their non-speaker devices are absurdly priced. The network audio streamer is 449 and the amp is 699. WiiM amps are either 299 or 379 and their network streamer ranges from 149 to 329. I have a few of the network streamers which were 149. They connect into my receiver, into an old amp I have, etc. and work perfectly.
As CEO of a public company you get about 3 quarters down before you're out.
And not just the app itself but the fact that despite mounting criticism from the community they didn't immediately revert it. Thus demonstrating that they don't really care about their own, up until that point, very loyal customers.
Sonos has been around for many years now. When it launched, smartphones weren’t dominant. To control a Sonos you had to buy a controller specifically for it. It had its own wireless networking because WiFi wasn’t dominant. To use it with WiFi you needed to buy a separate bridge.
Online music services weren’t a thing like they are now. Music collections were on your local hard drive.
Back then the main competition for Sonos was paying a pro to hard-wire a speaker system into your house. I saw one of these about five years ago. Built into the wall in the kitchen was a cassette tape deck.
All that has changed. Now there are wireless speakers from JBL, Apple, Amazon, Bose, Google, and at least a dozen others. There’s Bluetooth. There’s AirPlay.
The Sonos app was ok for its time, but it’s an outdated model now. But at least the app used to be good at controlling Sonos. Now it’s not even great for that.
Without that outdated app model, there’s no reason to buy Sonos. Just pick from…anybody else. Many are cheaper and sound just as good. They don’t rely on an app, which is good-just use Airplay or Bluetooth.
As bad as the app is, it’s not a trigger of the decline of Sonos. Is just a symptom of it. The company has no future. Thus its release of headphones that don’t even integrate well with the Sonos system. These are just as pointless as its speakers.
I doubt Sonos is around in a few years’ time.
Sonos' product is convenience, experience, and decent audio, in that order. Mini speaker voice assistant things equal/beat them in 2 of those categories, and high-end audio brands beat them in the third, leaving them holding the bad in the middle.
Also, multiroom. AirPlay does it OK. BT does not.
Now I'm using AirPlay, because it's working more reliably than the Sonos app. Which is a surprise, because it used to be the other way around.
If Sonos goes away, I guess I'll switch to HomePods? I'd rather not, given the prices and reliability, but I really can't imagine going to BT.
Boards are typically loyal to their CEOs (if the stock and revenue are performing well). They'll never fire a CEO who's coming out of a double-digit percentage growth last quarter.
Thus, the reason he fell out of the boards' favor is the low performance primarily and this was the last straw indeed.
My instinct is to think it's fuel on a fire that was already burning - declining sales across the market, smart speakers taking a big slice out of Sonos' pie, and missing the boat on new markets (headphones) … and then a bad app release being the straw that broke the camel's back.
Incredible vesting schedule
I've got a Denon amp which has Heos, had random Alexa/Google Home devices previously, random amps with just Bluetooth or line in whatever. Thought there must be a way to sync these things, think previously there was the Google Chrome audio?
The WiiM devices seem nice but is that the price of entry to sync various unrelated audio ecosystems then?
Edit: had only seen the price of the highest end ultra device, this is actually very reasonable..
The other option for multi-room sync is AirPlay, on any device where that is possible (including wiim), so it’s pretty easy to solve multi-room audio these days.
Chromecast Audio lost the ability to do multi-room sync in a patent dispute with sonos
i'm not sure what device you're looking at, but i've got a wiim pro plus and it definitely supports airplay - i was just using it yesterday.
It seems like the newest and most expensive devices (WiiM Amp Pro & WiiM Ultra) do not support Airplay.
i had been considering an ultra to replace my tv soundbar, but no airplay is probably a dealbreaker for me.
It somehow just works? Unreal. updates are bugfixes and new features… Most unreal thing. Their phone app didnt require me to create account? When was last time i saw that?! It just found speakers, setup network and Bye, enjoy.
Raspberry Pi + Snapcast + Any speaker with an AUX input
I've got a few Pi's hooked up around the house now to extra speakers, home stereo, and even a .NET snapcast client running on my desktop PC.
That setup plus Music Assistant has been awesome so far. No proprietary hardware or closed source software :)
1- I don't like the sound processing. I mean, I understand that for most folks it's great, but they don't even come close to my Genelec setup. So I mostly use it to listen to podcasts, but for serious music/movies, I only use proper high fidelity sound setup
2- I don't like the all or nothing approach: if I don't like my current audio streaming setup, I can keep the speakers and the subwoofer, and just get new electronics. But with Sonos, I have to throw everything out.
A hardware company should not be able to brick products that can "in principle" work for a ling time.
I recently bought a pair of Genelec monitors (8330) and a sub (7350), and am interested in replacing my Sonos arc soundbar, sub, and satellite ones with a proper Genelec-based 5.1 based setup. But my only concerns are price (it'd be at least 5k), and the distance to the monitors - my sofa is ~4.2m away from the television, and the maximum distance where direct sounds dominate (green in this image from https://www.genelec.com/correct-monitors: https://images.ctfassets.net/4zjnzn055a4v/3SiwbzysMQkGR6oN47...) is 3m for all but the most expensive monitors. So I'm curious if it works well for you.
I ended up designing the system myself. Wired in speakers, down to the basement where all the receivers are. I'm really happy with the result, and grateful I didn't get bullied into a specific Vendor.
Not everyone has this luxury. Once the drywall is up, it's really hard to get a decent whole home system and Sonos was the way to do that. My Dad and my father-in-law are in deep with Sonos. I can feel their anger and frustration when we're over. They really did their customers dirty.
I believe my (rather old) Sonos is now not supported and there's really no reason for that. It's such a Google move (eg earlier Nests aren't Matter-compatible for really no reason).
Even when I was using it, there were basic issues that plague most network-connected devices: they're usually really bad with dealing with transient network issues. Like if my Internet hiccups, I don't want the Internet radio station I'm playing to stop and have to be manually restarted.
Also, Sonos insists (or it did when I last looked into it) of creating it's own 2.4GHz mesh network. There was really no way of forcing it to use your existing network. You could kind of turn off the internal mesh network and force it to use Ethernet but not entirely.
As a user, I want to play my Spotify or Apple Music and have that synced across multiple speakers. That's the real value proposition of something like Sonos. It shouldn't be that hard. Particularly with music, you get fetch the whole song. There's really no reason for a network interruption at all.
I don't necessarily want to use a dedicated app either. I want to treat my Sonos as just another output choice on Spotify like headphones or a Bluetooth speaker.
Fault tolerance and ease of setup is what something like Sonos should be about. And that's hard because you have to deal with a long-tail of issues like packet loss, token expiry with third-party providers and so on.
I have no idea what Sonos have been doing isntead.
I use dumb bookshelf speakers with Bluetooth support. Mine are "Edifier" brand, but there are others. Works perfectly. (at least as "perfect" as BT can ever get) No apps or smart stuff, beyond BT.
On the other hand, when I'm trying to comprehend how to get audio from a TV into them, then I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I found one of the few remaining TVs with a headphone out, so I can use that. Next time my TV breaks, I guess I'll have to learn what is actually going with HDMI. Connecting arbitrary speakers to a TV seems like an arcane mystery.
I've never heard a problem with fidelity before, and I am often picky about that. Like I can't stand the sound of satellite radio. Codec sounds horrible to me.
In the 10 years I've owned them, I've used the app less than 10 total times. I much rather prefer just using them as an over priced surround system and use my Playstation to play music through the TV/sonos.
I would not buy or recommend new Sonos products now. Occasionally I do think about adding to my setup but since the update debacle that's no longer an option. Over the years my Sonos has been pretty reliable, and very importantly, the wife and kids can use it easily. We just want "Play X in Room Y." It works very well for that. Even my nerdy self is OK with that... I have plenty of other things to nerd/worry about and I just want my music to play.
I did have a period of instability after I moved some Sonos speakers around, and I must say their tech support was pretty good (this was maybe four years ago). They looked at my logs and told me it was a weak signal issue, which I thought was ridiculous and initially dismissed... but after digging some more and troubleshooting my home signals, it turns out they were right.
Old Sonos with old S1 app is still great for me! It really pains me to see how far they have fallen.
As a long time apartment/condo dweller, Sonos basically can't do what I'm looking for.
I don't know what makes them different, or if they are just that popular that I'm seeing the noise, but it's something that I'd personally dig into more before investing.
It was super cool when it all worked but if it took them this long to get rid of that CEO, then I don't seem them turning around at any point soon.
For me, the major thing that matters is that I can see a device in spotifys device list and can play to that device. Similarly, it needs to be zero setup for anyone else on my wifi network (wife, kids, friends). WiiM covers that perfectly.
Granted, there is some work there if you don't already have speakers. I personally think Spotify is a great product. I just don't want my speakers running an operating system. I have speakers as old as 25 years that work perfectly with the WiiM. No point in adding additional tech in a speaker that works perfectly as-is. My biggest worry (which Spotify has been pretty good about) is that the speakers work over WiFi and at some point, will be sunsetted. Maybe not within the next few years, but I don't have much faith that a Sonos system will work well in 10-15 years.
I only have them in one room, so I can’t comment on multi-room audio.
I'm happy with the form factor, audio quality, and overall TV experience, and I honestly haven't used the app enough to even notice if there was a big update.
That said, I haven't used any Sonos multi-room functionality. But I have noticed weird gaps in functionality with the Arc's Amazon Alexa integration. The Arc doesn't support moving audio to it from other Alexa speakers, or vice versa. I have to imagine they deliberately disabled this, as if I'm going to replace all my Alexa devices just to get Sonos multi-room audio working!
But my setup is just Beam + Ikea Symfonisk for surrounds. Planning to add the sub mini later on.
My guess is the issues start to occur the bigger your setup and if you heavily use the app? I havent touched the app since setting it up.
We're on starlink, which is great but adds some latency to some stuff, and the new app has been terrible - barely loads, claims to start playing but nothing happens, volume adjustments take random amounts of time or may be ignore, all sorts.
But also when not using the app (just watching tv) the surround system is still pretty perfect.
But the app they released last year is an unreliable clusterfuck, and while you don't need the app for things like tv audio, if you want to stick an album on in your shed while you do some carpentry (one of my use-cases recently) then you're probably going to want to use it. And right now that's very hit or miss.
So I think a little bit of wait and see is probably the right choice. If they get good again and drop the moronic everything-goes-through-our-cloud approach, I'd have no hesitation in recommending them again.
I understand there's also issues with mDNS discovery and maybe other things, but the worst mistake seems to be the assumption that everybody has a stable Internet connection all the time.
There are other apps that have made a similar mistake. E.g. Ubiquiti's UniFi management app has problems connecting to the local LAN console if you originally signed in using a cloud account and Internet becomes unstable.
One app that handles this right is the Home Assistant Companion app. It detects when you're using a local WiFi SSID and connects directly to the internal LAN address which always works, and otherwise uses the cloud connection or public WAN address.
I wanted to start some music playing via Sonos in another room for my dogs earlier while I was on a call.
It took nearly two minutes for the app to update and be able to select my "calming cello music for dogs" playlist.
Their favourite is Jaap Ter Linden’s recording of Bach’s Cello Suites, I think because it’s a little richer sounding than Yo-Yo Ma.
I read somewhere that dogs love cello music because it has the same tones as the human voice, and it certainly seems to calm them more than any other music.
I was really excited for the app update because the old app was really unstable. Then the update happened and it was like 10x worse than the old app. Then in the past few months it's gotten really solid (for me anyway) and I'm pretty happy with it.
I hope the new CEO creates a new culture there.
So… I’m not shocked at the timing. Sales have tanked, and proved the CEO couldn’t be relied on to right the ship.
It’s just one example of how long serious problems can fester in an organization. There’s likely deep cultural problems throughout the company’s decision making apparatus. We’ll see, but I don’t see Sonos capable of being a trusted brand again.
Firing the CEO seems good but insufficient. Liquidate the company, use the assets to try to offset the environmental damage done by the mass manufacture of e-waste. Or I suppose fix the software stack to bring the speakers back to usefulness, perhaps by throwing away everything done for the last few years in reset --hard fashion.
My app works fine. My speakers work fine. The worst problem we have is rarely the music pauses, we're unsure why, and we just hit play again.
I'm wondering if there is some functionality I am not aware I'm missing or if it is limited to older models that I am simply not experiencing the problems with?
If we need more control over the music, we go to the Pandora or Spotify apps themselves, but Sonos for the speakers.
I guess I didn't use the old one so I don't know what I'm supposedly missing.
I have the Sub, The original big play bar and some 1s and I have a record player that plays to sonos and then upstairs I have an Arc.
I've probably got 10 years on this system now and couldn't be happier. I remember having to replace my receivers 2-3 times in a 10 year time frame from failed circuits to needing HDMI to needing a newer HDMI and all that jazz.
My play bar has just been optical out from the TV and it's supported 5.1 audio realy well.
I use the spotify play direct. I'm not a huge fan of the newer app and I wasn't impressed with them EOL'ing products.
With that said, it's been wife and kid approved. Everyone in the house knows how to use it and its been problem free. No wires for my cat to chew on.
I jokingly said that a 100$ bluetooth speaker would have been better, which was not super well received.
Bottomline is: It does not matter how good your sound system is if it's not reliable.
Plus flaky pairing and system discovery (from iPhones, at least). Wife’s new iPhone couldn’t connect, even though my older iPhone was running the same app version just fine.
It was bad enough I bought HomePods for the bedroom to replace the Sonos 1s we’d used for years. I still have them in another room, just someplace that they don’t get used as often.
That being said they feel clunky and worse year after year, the UI is old fashioned, it's not quite as reliable. And of course the whole thing is orphaned. I'll never buy another set of several thousand dollars of Sonos v2 or whatever they want me to do.
I never even considered giving it away because that would be a dick move.
Got a Teenage Engineering designed BT speaker instead.
Actually, it's exactly like that. It's a path out of the walled garden.
Perhaps it's just my specific network situation. The old app was a constant headache of inconsistent state - music playing while it showed nothing playing, pressing commands (like skipping a track or pausing) but those commands never happening on the device. It also took a very long time to show my entire device list. Never quite worked with the Roam like it should have.
As soon as the new one came along I had the issues you describe with control latency - volume or track changes would either take a random amount of time, or do nothing, or sometimes queue up and all apply at once. Also had inconsistent state, the app showing music as playing while nothing happened, or the reverse. The app's home screen only partially loading, all sorts of crap, with the same issues present on android or iOS.
And apparently I'm one of the lucky ones - some people can't add new products or find existing ones.
Maybe one day they'll release a version that works for both of us :)
Then there's the things that were always shit, like no low latency streaming except through the analogue inputs on the Sonos connect and a closed protocol blocking open source improvements.
I'm really not sure what all the fuss is about.
Things used to work without the cloud. Then the cloud got added and latency shot up, connectivity went down, and systems behaved worse.
I just want to stream my spotify playlist to it and thats it.
To be honest I miss the oldschool BT pairing speakers and I will probably get him one of these soon since Im just done with sonos and I cant see how normal non IT people can even put up with this and figure this whole update mess out.
Meanwhile, although twice the price, the Naim Mu-So Qb 2 I also bought recently is simply a marvel. Highly recommended.
I'm dearly holding onto my Marshall Acton that can be connect to WiFi without an app and stream directly from Spotify. No smart nothing.
Nothing like this seems to exist anymore, not for the $200 I paid this years ago anyway.
Before this I had tried a smaller but $250 Sonos speaker and it sounded like crap, with far worse UX.
Oh you are so wrong.
I'd say no one wants to pay double when two products look the same on paper, and thus people end up with Chinese WiFi devices.
So, companies try to avoid this fate by doing things which make for a better business - but invariably are bad for customers. In most cases, if you come across something awful like this, it's because just doing the right thing for customers doesn't make any money in that particular business due to the nature of the product and buying process.
You can definitely produce high quality goods that last decades and update them regularly because they're simply beautiful. My father's 1995 model is still in use to this day.
Granted, they're insanely high priced, but that means they also sell very few. There must be a middle ground.
Personally, I applaud them. But it's hard for a business to point to them and say "See! We can do that!". Investors will run.
I’m now annoyingly used opening my Sonos app once, closing it, opening it again to get the damn ui to load current streams on any of the speakers.
Someone had to make a decision as to when the updated app would ship. They did not make a wise choice.
Because while that was a shitshow, that's ancient history by now. Did they screw up another generational switch?
- Wreck some folks systems so that they can't add new devices or discover their existing ones.
- Force everything to go via their cloud servers, which adds round-trip latency and server-reliability problems to everything you try to do
The latter one there means that, for instance, if I try to use the app to change volume or skip a track then it might work, or it might take several seconds and then change the volume, or it might not do it at all. Maybe you press the button again ... Then after thirty seconds it might apply all the interactions and skip half an album or get deafeningly loud.
But also the app may just not load properly, with half the interface staying blank. It may claim to have started the music but nothing's actually happening. It may not load the state of the speaker so you can't see what's playing or control it. It might not list all the speakers. Early on after the release we also got lots of tracks that would fail half-way through and skip to the next one.
It's an absolute shitshow, and when people started to complain they were told the problems were clearly with their network setup and that they were at fault, even though everything had been fine before. They started saying things like "Oh starlink isn't really supported because of the latency it introduces", which was only a problem because of their decision to make the whole system terminally online.
So yeah, they screwed the pooch again.
I had checked the compatibility lists and found that one of my older sonos devices wouldnt be supported. But I accepted that as I really wanted to get a new Sonos Sub 4 (S2-only) to connect with my existing Sonos Playbar (which supports updating to S2).
The upgrade process was bad, had to restart and reset devices a couple of times.. but after a while I got all my existing Sonos devices onto S2.
When I added the Sub to the system, the app told me that I couldnt pair it with the playbar. The app adviced me to get one of the newer Sonos soundbars..
I'm very disappointed that they did this.. I fully understand that some devices dont work with a new protocol, but after consulting the compatibility list I expected my Sonos Playbar would be able to pair with all other S2 devices.. what is even weirder is that it is possible to link the playbar with the older Subwoofer devices on the S2 network, so why couldnt a newer device be able to do the same thing..
I returned the Sub and will be ditching Sonos (and probably any other system where you "buy into" the system only to be left with uncompatible gear after a while..
A lot of this could be solved if Apple put some basic engineering effort into the airplay UI, such as adding aliased groups. Every time I want to play to my effing speakers it's a 60 second ordeal.
Sometimes the little banner pops up from the top of the screen helpfully letting me to play to all of the speakers like I was before. Other times it not-so-helpfully suggests just playing to ONE speaker for some incomprehensible reason.
Still other times, the banner covers what I'm trying to see, and swiping it away seems to activate airplay even when I don't want to.
Luckily I only use my Sonos IKEA lamp only with Air Play, but the few times I have to use their app? Bonkers. Absolutely trash.
10 years ago my friends called me a hipster for doing this instead of cloud-based music, but not so much any more. When I hear these horror stories of enshitified HiFi platforms it makes me feel like I made the right investment decision.
These people don't earn that money. But keep defending ludicrous exec salaries.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683753