Last updates to their original amp, connect, and Play 5’s will be released this spring. Then they are “legacy”. Kicker is, if you have those in your system, the rest of your stuff gets no more updates either.
I knew it was coming, but still a little salty about it. The danger of digital technology I suppose. They had a good, long run.
YUP! Got the notice this morn. Question is: Why stick with Sonos and buy current products? Sonos does not state any ‘improvements’ or reason to justify doing so.
I might just continue on with ‘legacy’ for most of ‘other room’ systems and replace the ‘Connect’ with a better streamer. What’s the take by others here?
I have ZP90 Connect. Bought it in 2011. It’s for use in a bedroom system. If it goes belly up, an RPI3 is ready to takes its place. Sonos is outdated.
Yeah. I may pass on the old stuff to a friend who wouldn’t add any additional parts and just keep my newer stuff as my system. Funny that the Play:3 survived the cut-that always felt like the bastard stepchild in the Sonos line.
I have a Sprout and RaspberryPi that will work just fine for my outside speakers. Not like anyone in this house appreciates the Sonos setup I built anyway.
That is indeed sad. Some bad vibes about Palo Alto, Jony Ive (Palo Alto citizen I belief) leaving Apple, Sonos stopping development, sad …
I got the email today about Sonos discontinuing support for their now legacy products. I have 6 or 7 of them around the house and a complex system in Florida that feeds built in speakers in the whole house. I use them for background music. They had their day and there’s a number of alternatives. I don’t know if I’ll bother replacing them with Sonos gear.
Same here. And honestly, the gear they are shutting down is the stuff they originally rolled out with way back when, so I admire how long they DID make things work.
They were so far ahead of the pack when they came out, it almost wasn’t funny. In some ways, they still haven’t been caught.
I don’t get the value I used to what with the family just not using it. They have no interest in Roon either so whole-home audio was just a umiami91 fantasy to begin with.
Plus I’m still mad they quit supporting MLB broadcasts. Probably not their fault either (small niche for MLB when Alexa is out there) but still…
Agree very disappointing . 37+ pages of not very happy people on the Sonos community.
while a lot being said on the 30% trade up on investments made to purchase new products just recently hiked. also disappointing that some of the products they have moved to legacy are only 5 - 6 years old.
I find that the new products have actually started to fall away in build / sound quality & like many on the site time to look at alternatives for those background systems…
Absolutely. The new stuff is nowhere near the old stuff in quality. Since they went public, they’ve been going for market share over that premium reputation they had at the start. I’m still shocked the Model 3 didn’t go legacy. I have a stereo pair of those in our bedroom that I’ll be keeping. I’ll keep what I have until it dies, but doubt I’ll be investing in more of their gear.
It was a great relationship, Sonos, but I’ve moved on.
Oh! From The Verge:
“Sonos tells me that beginning in May, it will introduce a way for customers who want to keep using their legacy hardware to separate those old products from their main Sonos system.”
Well that’s cool then. I can keep my Sonos Amp for the deck. Hell, with Roon, I was fine anyhow. But for NORMAL folks, that kind of sucks.
Why, oh why did I wade into the discussion on this on Twitter?? Pointing out that the legacy models were designed prior to the existence of the Moto RAZR is denying the capitalist business model plot that Sonos is engaging in here.
Never mind that Sonos was designed before streaming existed to play music from a local library. Because people still play 50 year old records on 25 year old turntables, this is all a plot to rip off customers.
Kill me now. Please.
why did you go down that rabbit hole…
good luck on the journey 
Because I’m an idiot. And because. Well. Because I’m an idiot.
Sonos are not stopping development, they are increasing it. They have to because their main competitors are Amazon and Google who subsidise their hardware, so Sonos is perceived as relatively expensive and so has to be that much better.
I got the email and am being offered a discount of about £170 on a Move unit for a product that cost me about £300 over 10 years ago. That’s a very good offer.
Sonos operate at about breakeven. They have 9.1 million customers with 26 million products. Turnover of over $1.2 billion. They invented multi-room audio.
See page 16 regarding discontinuing older products.
Sorry, it sounded that they were stopping, but re read it, they stop supporting legacy products.
A problem of these times I guess. Lesson learned I guess, don’t invest too much into these systems. They are not that old, you don’t trash something because it’s out of fashion.
They are discontinuing products that were made between 15 and 9 years ago. They will still work and mine still does. The issue is that the hardware cannot deal with today’s software.
The alternative would be to limit software upgrades so that they can work on a 15 year old processor. That would make all future products uncompetitive and probably cause the demise of the company.
For example, I recently junked a mid-2012 iMac because by mid 2019 it could no longer support the latest OSX operating system. Should I stay with the old operating system and, for example, be subject to new security threats that will not be subject to upgrades?
The Devialet Expert streaming card was designed for units first sold in 2010. The unit I bought was manufactured at that time. They produced a new streaming card in 2017 and offered it as part of a substantial upgrade to the DAC and amplifier at a very reasonable €3,000, typically about 20% of the cost of a replacement system, but with a huge increase in overall performance. By comparison, that was the same cost of the the upgrade kit from PWD Mk2 to DSD DAC, and that is just one component.
And what about the DMP? Non-serviceable only about 2 years after it was first released due to hardware redundancy.
Sonos owners, and I have a Play5 and Soundbar, should be delighted that their units have remained upgradeable for so long, far longer than anything else I can think of. It is astonishing that they have achieved that on 15 year old hardware.
The lesson for manufacturers of more expensive audio like PS Audio is to make systems as modular as possible or as cheap to manufacture as possible. Having previously been faced with the high upgrade cost of a PWD Mk2 DAC, one reason I went for Devialet was because it was modular, in fact buying an old unit ex-demo and immediately sending it from the dealer to Devialet for an upgrade, so it had complete new internals. Linn have done this for years, so have dCS.
Meanwhile, my 7 year old Sonos Playbar continues to do excellent service as a TV speaker and hopefully will do so for many years to come.
My message. Digital technology changes everything. Nobody seemed quite as worried about the environment when their Kindle e-readers died or stopped adding features. I don’t recall Amazon offering me a discount on a new one either. “But people still read books that are older than fifteen years”
I give up.
Kindles are also heavily discounted compared to iPads etc and much better for reading books. When you get a new one you still have your library and you can share a library with family members, even if they live miles away. My wife and I both have Kindles and buy books.
I too got the same notice from Sonos. Meh. It’s not very good sounding equipment in the first place. Certainly no reason to upgrade to their latest crap.
I just love to see honest opinions 