In my case it was 3 years from purchase to now when Sonos declared some of my devices "legacy" (3 play 5's and a Connect) so I might be a tad bit bitter..
I have no complaints about their desired direction of course and also understand that newer services probably require updated devices.
However there is no reason that the older devices continue to function as they have been barring a change in streaming protocols etc.. and even then it seems like there could be some sort of hub/bridge that could translate to the older system.
I agree completely. But I also think things like that should have a MINIMUM of 10 year life. This short lifespan and forced obsolescence is environmentally irresponsible - even with a buy/take back program.
That's why I tend not to buy all-in-one stuff, at the expense of more complication and footprint.
A speaker can easily last 10+ years. We shouldn't be filling landfills with them because of some software limitation ending their life.
I think so too. Their claim is that some of their older speakers don't have processors that are S2 controller compatible. The weird thing is that these incompatible speakers include ones made 3 years ago (like @erktrek has), but not ones made ~8 years ago (like the Playbar/Sub that I have).
I suspect they sold me older models and that is the root of the my issue. My other Connect is fine as are my play:3's which are discontinued but work and are not considered legacy.
The problem for Sonos is they can't upsell you more services etc if the platform doesn't support it..
IIRC, it's more RAM and storage than processor. (I could be mistaken, I just remember somebody emphasizing differences in those two things across the product lineup.
IMHO, the only thing they have done that might be considered 'inconvenient' (in the latest strategy, I'm ignoring the various missteps that got us here) is that although you can mix S1 and S2 devices, they all have to stay on S1 and the S2-capable devices can't take advantage of any of the S2 features if you want to leave all of your products (both S1 and S2) bundled together. They had a long enough runway that they should have been able to make a 'combined' app that allowed all products to coexist on the same combined 'platform', but with their own feature set. But I don't work for them, so it's certain they know better than I do, but I didn't see the effort. Maybe they made that effort, maybe they didn't.
In the end, I bought some of my speakers many years ago and every one of them still works today. I don't know what they owe us beyond that.
I think that any S2-capable devices on an S1 network will just get the latest S1 firmware. I have auto-updates enabled, so I don't know when my devices last updated, but all of my devices (which are a mix of S1 and S2) have the same version number and build number. I'm currently on 11.2/57377280.
