My Sonos desktop app made the same forced update. The “Check for Updates” dialog had a tantalizing “Later” button, but it took me back to this same useless screen.
The release notes for the update to 8.1 say only that it “delivers support for the all-new Sonos One, the smart speaker for music lovers” with a link to buy the new device.
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Marty McGuire
at
said:
Sonos desktop app made the same forced update. The “Check for Updates” dialog had a tantalizing “Later” button, but it took me back to this same screen. The release notes for the update to 8.1 say only that it “delivers support for the all-new Sonos One, the smart speaker for music lovers” with a link to buy the new device.
Marty McGuire
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said:
I started the update and haven't checked back. It has probably taken over my house by now.
Matt Mets
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said:
The price was right on those ones, though, yeah? I'm using one of the bigger speakers that has a line in as an amp, and it doesn't even have a hardware button to select the line in function without using the software.
Marty McGuire
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said:
Haha, yes indeed. 😅 I am not surprised by the lack of a hardware button on the fancy line-in model, given their other design choices. I feel like Sonos has been balancing it's appearance as a luxury brand with the growing pressures from streaming service business models to mistreat customers. As they lower price points to get into more affordable markets, they behave more badly.
Matt Mets
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said:
Most of this could be solved by being more transparent/allowing opt-outs from the update process, right? It's got to be tough to support a multitude of firmware variants against an ever changing target of wifi devices with different chipsets and network stacks, so I can totally understand pushing new client software and deprecating older firmware.I wonder what their business model looks like for supporting these older speakers, and if they're counting on kickbacks from the streaming services to …
Matt Mets
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said:
Also, looks like there is an open source replacement for the client: https://github.com/SoCo/SoCo
Marty McGuire
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said:
Historically Sonos has always had a way to skip an update notification temporarily so you can just listen to some dang music. I vaguely remember a past update where some service (Amazon Music?) stopped working *until* I allowed an update - which feels much better to me. My guess is that kickbacks from streaming services is a newer or newly emphasized aspect of their business model. Thanks for the SoCo link! I will check it out. This definitely added to my energy meter for building my own …
Matt Stultz
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said:
Devils advocate, they could have a security patch that they don't want to leave out there. What if your Sonos is part of a bot farm until you upgrade.
Marty McGuire
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said:
Matt Stultz you know better. A) the devil needs no advocating. B) if that were the case they are violating responsible reporting practice because there is no mention of security updates anywhere.
Matt Stultz
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said:
Meh, just saying it's possible, also they could know of a security flaw but don't want to report it because there is no current exploit. I guess we will know if your theory is correct when you update and fond out if any features are missing.
I'm also going to try to buy phones with headphone jacks as long as I possibly can.