SONOS ends support for legacy speaker devices

Today, Sonos (makers of high end connected smart speakers) announced it will phase out support for its legacy speakers and products.  The planned sunsetting of support for the legacy devices will be May 2020 and the company is hoping over the next few months, customers will upgrade or prepare for the eventual service disruption.  Sonos thinks that most of the devices will continue to work as is but will not receive any feature updates or service improvements.  Since these devices are connected, users often play external music subscription services like Spotify or Amazon music but if changes are made to the APIs or programming of these services, the legacy speaker functionality could break.

Another wrinkle to the software update disruption is that it could also affect newer devices in the home if they are set up in a whole house group.  Sonos software requires that all devices be running the same version of the software.  Customers with a mixed environment will have to choose between removing the older devices to the group or not receiving updates to the newer devices.

To soften the blow of the announcement, Sonos is offering a trade-in program that will give customers a 30% discount on newer replacement products.

You can find a list of the legacy products affected here : https://support.sonos.com/s/article/4798?language=en_US

Happy Listening!
–Carlo