Thoughts on Sonos and what it means for the future of all ‘hardware’

Some months ago, audio company Sonos made a very unpopular announcement. The company declared that it would be changing support for a number of older products. This caused great consternation as the company had said, many times on the public record, that because of the way the products were made, new features could be retrofitted to older equipment. This is because almost every component within a Sonos speaker is under software control.

After a huge amount of backlash from its customer community, Sonos backtracked and drew a line in the sand, declaring older products, made before May 2020, part of an ‘S1’ environment and anything newer is part of ‘S2’.