What do you think about the longevity of these Sonos products? I got sucked into the ecosystem via IKEA/Sonos collab and now added one to my TV setup.
The ecosystem is nice _currently_ but do you think the hardware+software will be useable in 5,10,15 years from now? Do you think it could be liberated software wise. Thinking about this because I am contemplating moving my vinyl setup to Sonos as well.
The hardware will absolutely still be useable. The hardware quality bar is very very high.
Our app usability sucked then (and still does now), but plenty of our products met and exceeded ten or fifteen year lifetimes.
One of the biggest issues we faced when I was there was trying to support devices shipped in 2002 that didn't have enough RAM to run features being shipped in 2016! Newer products shouldn't have that issue. They ship with tooooons of RAM for fear of that situation popping up again.
I have ten year old Sonos gear that still works. The feature I wish the speakers had most? A line in jack so I could use them with something other than apps. That is a kind of future proofing all powered speakers should have.
The Sonos product team had a completely unexplainable aversion to line in jacks, to the point where you almost weren't even allowed to discuss it.
I suspect it was a lot of fairly self-interested resume padding for some PM resumes. Nobody there was going to make their next career move as "innovators" shipping a technology that'd been perfected for fortyish years before them.
Probably, but I don't have the time, interest, or access to the PCB files any more.
I think you'd be out of luck in most cases anyway, as we almost always used I2S as our audio interface of choice. If we didn't have a use for the RX line (i.e. The audio input line) of the I2S interface, it generally wasn't broken out of the SoC fanout.
What's more: we didn't generally enable driver support for I2S receive in products that didn't use it. There simply isn't a use for it.
Furthermore, you probably wouldn't be able to modify the app stack to use that data if you somehow did figure out all the needed kernel mods. Sonos deployed Secure Boot and signed app updates starting in 2013, because they realized they were potentially selling a botnet for hire if they didn't have a good way to secure their players.
I'd settle for a line-in straight into the power amp. No integration of any kind into the existing Sonos ecosystem. Make them dumb - because the speakers do sound great for their size.
I recently added a new Sonos Beam to my TV and used Sonos One speakers from 2017 to serve as my rears. While Sonos has done some weird stuff with old product retirement in the past, being able to pair 6 year old speakers with current hardware was delightful and restored my faith in Sonos product longevity.
The ecosystem is nice _currently_ but do you think the hardware+software will be useable in 5,10,15 years from now? Do you think it could be liberated software wise. Thinking about this because I am contemplating moving my vinyl setup to Sonos as well.