sakamura

I am one of the early adopters of Sonos. I understand they wanted to bring the new Sonos infrastructure technology to aging limited microcontrollers. However, at that time, they decided to pull the plug on our devices. So I'm either left with really great sounding "S1" bricks, or I cannot ever upgrade anything.

We got the option to purchase new devices with a steep discount. Still, having 8 devices in my home, that meant purchasing more than 2k$ worth of new devices.

I've had one broken driver so far, I repaired it (thank you Solen). Otherwise, it's been smooth sailing for me, except the very aged S1 app is borked for many things. I don't have Apple Music playlist names (they are all blanks), things are slowly degrading with the streaming service reliability with tracks failing to play here and there.

But at that point, I cannot purchase a new Sonos device even if I wanted to, I can only purchase an used one to add it to my aged S1 ecosystem. So I'm left with three choices: keeping the devices for as long as I could, upgrading all the devices to new Sonos devices ($$$), or migrating to something else.

Still, on the topic of the App, I have chances to use their app outside my own home, and they did a big FCP->FCPX Aperture->Photos move, but without having the core to absorb the very violent repercussions on their ecosystem. It's for the best, and the UI is much better, and I'm sure the code is way cleaner. But for a customer, it's unacceptable.

I would say honestly their long term customers are fed up with their antics. Newcomers in their world might be happy, but they are losing long-time devoted users through successive walls of mandatory migration that first cost them lots of money to upgrade their system, and then a wall of mandatory software update that broke their devices and made them unusable for a portion of their best power users.

I am wondering if they will be able to get that trust back, sincerely. Because the metric is loose enough, I'm sure the execs will all get their bonuses laughing to their company's grave.

And that's if anyone should actually still use Sonos. There's a market, but IMHO, it's constantly shrinking.

There are now really great sounding inexpensive bluetooth devices that can be connected to a computer or phone, HomePods. Great audiophile-grade wired devices can also be purchased for less than $100. So the attractiveness of Sonos is slowly migrating away as the years go by. Same than their Sonos Controller used to be a great idea, but everyone having phones meant having no reason to have a separate controller. Even them taking so long to put a simple bluetooth receiver for phone streaming means the cheap Anker mini loudspeaker can do something a pro Sonos device cannot in a home. So they haven't moved with the times. Yes, they got new devices, but it's harsh. Audiophiles all moved away to Bluesound, new ways of playing audio is now mostly through apps on phones, or computers, and once in a blue moon through wires, since the new Music / Spotify / D/Q/name it are actually awesome. And Youtube is a major provider of music too. Meaning the direct connection in Bluetooth or for the hardcore ones a wired device makes it good. The accounts are shared on every device, it's easy to set up a party room with a computer and connecting it Bluetooth. Synchronization of devices "party mode" is not that useful. Their 5.1 setup is very glitchy and has some lag (or no glitches are a lot of lag). I tried DJing with Sonos and it's worse than in huge arenas. Anyhow, TL;DR this paragraph: there's other better suited ecosystem of devices for modern usage.

Yeah, the Apple Watch limitation is the reason why the kids here didn't get an Apple Watch for such a long time. We are fully in the ecosystem, but they prefer playing games on the tablet, and have no reasons to get a phone so far. They use Whatsapp, Snapchat, whatever, and play games such as Roblox, Minecraft ... but don't care at all about getting the smaller cell phone.

However, the Apple Watch without cell (and worse for base models - again, they don't care about most health items the newer devices propose) couldn't be paired without an iPhone.

It's stupid. We have Mac, MacBook, they got individual iPads, but they couldn't pair an Apple Watch. For us adults, it's ok. But for kids without reasons to have cell plans, it's an artificial limitation that makes it easy for them to be tempted outside the ecosystem.

Same thing for the entire Pencil debacle. It's so stupid there's 3 different models of pencils that can only bind to very particular models. One cannot just say "hey a new model that supports this or that, let's purchase it", no it needs to be made for your own iPad.