It's a conversation I have to have with a client. Take over job that has 15 connects in the rack and a Playbar. I'm also concerned the Playbar will soon suffer the same fate if purchased several years ago. We add a Tonecase for that this summer.

5-disc CD changer. Or maybe one of the big carousels for the high rollers! For this demographic, I'll load that thing up with Nora Jones, Michael Buble, Eric Clapton Unplugged, Eagles Hell Freezes Over, Fleetwood Mac's Rumors and whatever else Amazon recommends. Stick an emitter on there with half a glue stick and an extra adhesive cover and pipe it into an analog matrix (232 controlled, of course) and some audio sensing amps. Hard-wired keypad that sends it straight to random. No firmware. No IP control. No tech giant turning it into a brick. Maybe some OvrC...juuuuust in case.

I swear I'm gonna start doing this.

No heads up to dealers and I took the brunt of emails today. No fun.

Price increase 12 days ago, then this. On products that just so happen to be “custom installed” and probably a bulk of their units. Coupled with lawsuits, tariffs and shareholders this is far from a coincidence....

And their “trailing credit BS” from the holidays, we’ll see how this turns out, considering we can’t even input for the credit yet, the whole program is engineered so people “forget” todo it.

All of this is pointing to box moving and prepairing to get bought. I’m also wondering if they are trying to get bought by amazon, sue amazons biggest voice competitor, fluff up sales.....coupled with ring/Alexa/eero.....makes sense.


All of this being said, today’s calls and emails have been tiring. Heads up would have been nice, and it appears every single client got the email. I have clients that were screaming at me that the stuff I installed over the holidays are already obsolete, etc etc. so frustrating. Stomping those fires out with the others “this should have lasted longer” blah blah blah...

This whole thing feels rushed. Kind of like a knee jerk reaction. Why May? What’s the cut off. Processing power? Bullshit, unless they need more processing to send data points back so they can sell it. Who knows.....

Really? What has really changed in Sonos to require a hardware change to stop supporting old product? This seems more like a way to try to force new product sales.

I'm shocked by the amount of integrators that don't use a unique email address for each client that myself and the client have access to for these types accounts. Almost all my clients have a generic 600oceanave@gmail type address that they never access personally. The few clients that have their personal email address associated with the account have already asked for upgrades so it works for me.

I'm laughing reading a lot of these responses.

Name 1 source device under $500 that gets support past 5-6 years?
And this is the 1st time SONOS has done something like this, although it could become a norm.

I'm not a SONOS fan. And I've only got a few dozen systems out there. But people losing their $hit over 6+ year old equipment, that is going to get 'reduced' functionality, is comical.
For customers that have huge SONOS systems and thousands of $ invested in it. Yeah it kind of sucks for them. But they are getting 30% towards new equipment. That would save those big systems thousands of $ upgrading by itself.

I do agree dealers not getting a heads up was BS. And from what I here, only direct dealers can participate in the rebate program. And it isn't that great for them anyway. But this is SONOS; they have NEVER been dealer friendly. Not in the least. They could care less if we all fell off the face of the planet.

So what has changed? So many butts hurt.

Brad, some of this is newer gear. If manufactured in 2015, could easily be in the pipeline, sold, commissioned in 2016. Lotta 3-4 year old gear here.

I don’t buy your analogy with A SOURCE DEVICE of 5-6 years old... clients may have 10, 20 of these to “upgrade” at one time!!

We do this for new systems, and have for years. We were doing this long before Sonos demanded email/password registration for their systems.

It's the Sonos systems that were up and running (all of the future stale Sonos products included) that were out in the wild prior to Sonos requiring email registration.

These systems were up and running fine, then one day needed an email and password in order to operate... The customer entered the info as Sonos asked. Many entered their own, not the one we generated/had shared access to.

On 1579670444, Malcolm013 said...

This is exactly right.  If we're talking about systems from 2015 and earlier.  The integrator didn't input account information, because the requirement didn't exist.

In the corporate mindset dealers probably did not “touch” their customers often enough and promote Sonos. Over the past weeks, Sonos systems registered to an email address that I have access to have been “touched” at least once a week, usually several times a week.

If they just keep the status quo for the current players and then make only the new features available for future products it's not a big deal. It doesn't take that much memory to stream a song. If they don't purposely break it, I'm guessing they will cruise along for a few more years. I could be wrong - we'll see.

And OMG so many texts from customers. Stupid vague email blast. Probably to spur panicked upgrades.

Yep, i remeber those days...

Going forward I’ll be pointing out that Sonos is popular, relatively easy to use, and that there is a likely five year “sundown”.

I did read on the other forum that some of the affected equipment, might have been sold to dealers as new, over a year past when hardware changes were made.
[Side note]: When URC 'fixed' the OLED screen on the MX780, with LCD replacements; I got sold MX780 remotes still with OLED screens, over 2 years past the hardware change/fix. Was NOT happy about that BS, when I got customer calls a year+ later complaining about the screens.

Anyway, it is not like the SONOS units are being bricked. Everyone is acting like in May, their SONOS systems are not going to work anymore. That is not true.
They have said many times on their forum board since yesterday, this will just stop future updates. People can still use the system just fine.
One day their favorite service on the platform might get an update, that might keep it from working on the old systems. That could take YEARS to happen.

Again, this is such an overreaction I'm seeing by everyone. Is no one stopping to read the details about how this is going to actually work out for customers? I thought I was the one who usually goes all savage on companies lol