If You Have Older Sonos Speakers, We Have Sad News for You (Updated)

Older Sonos speakers to be abandoned in May.

• UPDATE 1/23: You should read the post below to understand the Sonos situation, but today, the company announced changes that should let your legacy products works longer and co-exist with your modern Sonos devices. Read the story here.

Because Sonos is no longer a new company and has been doing this whole premium speaker thing for some time, we have arrived at a place where support for some of their products is no longer sustainable. Sonos announced today that some legacy products, including the first-gen Play:5, will lose software update support in May of this year.

If you own any of these products and have a Sonos account, you should have received an email this morning with the news. Sonos also shared a blog post (linked below), for those who didn’t.

What we’re looking at as being affected is any product released between 2005 and 2011 from Sonos. The full list includes original Zone Players, Connect, Connect:Amp (launched in 2006; includes versions sold until 2015), first-generation Play:5 (launched 2009), CR200 (launched 2009), and Bridge (launched 2007).

Once May 2020 rolls around, Sonos says that because these products “do not have enough memory or processing power to sustain future innovation,” they will no longer see updates. For now, the products should all still work, just keep in mind that “over time this is likely to disrupt access to services and overall functionality.” In other words, they may work for a while, but don’t be surprised if your legacy Sonos products eventually die.

In possibly worse news, if you keep older legacy products active in your system that are mixed with newer products, Sonos says that your newer ones may not receive updates either. Because Sonos needs everything in your system to stay on the same software, this is the path they have decided to take. That’s…not good.

As far as options for the future go, you have a couple. For one, you can just continue using your Sonos goods and hope they don’t die. Your second option is to use their Trade Up service and swap out your products for new ones with a 30% credit applied.

Super sadface.

// Sonos