"The value of your investment may go down as well as up".

Also, you have to recognise the difference between an investment and a rental contract with a punative deposit and no guaranteed term.

When did "investing/invested" become a replacement for "buying/bought"? Or are people in denial that they spent money on an item that depreciates faster than a car as soon as they buy it and try to make themselves feel better it's an investment and might increase in value?

Saw the same rubbish all over the Sonos forums when they messed things up. People claiming to have invested in X amount of Sonos products and demanding Sonos fix it.

No.. you bought some electronic things that may or may not do what the marketing claims when you bought them, with no guarantee things "coming soon" would arrive or the software would continue to provide the current services.

You didn't invest in anything unless your idea of investing is giving money away in return for items.

Time to investigate open source and self build - I have a whole home system based on Picoreplayer. There are additional plugins to extend functionality for the likes of BBC Sounds, Spotify etc.

https://www.picoreplayer.org/

If something requires a service to work - an app, cloud storage, maintained server, subscription service or LLM - then you are not buying it, you are renting it. At the end of the rental period you will have a free paperweight and the thanks of the CEO for contributing to his yacht. Plus you learned a lesson.

Just buy cheap, generic, standalone stuff and it will work until it dies. You might be able to fix it, but if you can't, it wasn't expensive. Get another one.

If it isn't standalone, just avoid it. That includes software (SaaS) and storage (cloud services). Because those providing services do not consider you as valued customers but as sheep to farm. And you know what happens to the sheep in the end.

What did they expect? They bought a product dependent on somebody else's computer so shouldn't be surprised when it gets switched off.

You'd expect that be now people should have learned better but, no, the Gadarene rush continues.

I’m still astounded by how quickly people tend to blame the victim instead of the perpetrator. This issue is not with the customers, but entirely with Bose. I genuinely hope that this decision will have lasting repercussions for them.

It’s unreasonable to expect people to be knowledgeable about the concept of “cloud,” how it’s integrated into the products they paid a couple of thousand dollars for, and its future evolution. When you purchase a product, you don’t expect to be an expert in its workings. They’re buying an appliance, not a complex puzzle.

It's really not unreasonable to expect people to know what they're buying.

But, if you're absolutely sure I'm wrong, I know a bloke who's got a bridge for sale.

"It's really not unreasonable to expect people to know what they're buying."

At what level should they "know what they're buying"?

When they buy a fridge, should they know the about setting the correct temperature and putting food on the correct shelves, or should they know the thermodynamics of the refrigeration cycle?

When they buy a lawn mower, should they know how to add petrol and use it safely, or should they know how the Otto 4-Stroke Cycle works?

Joe and Jane Public already think their home wi-fi is their broadband and Google is the Internet, so IMHO it's reasonable that they expect audio products to just work, without needing to know in detail how the sound comes out.

But they should understand that the "smart" features are effectively subscription services. The difference between a Sonos or a Bose and a Netflix or a Spotify is that the subscription is paid monthly with the latter and is made clear(ish) at the time of sign-up, while the former adds a premium on to the initial cost to pay the subscription.

It is, in many ways, a pyramid scheme. The more customers there are, the more infrastructure is needed to support them and the more expensive it is to run. If the only source of income is new customers then you must ensure a steady (and increasing) supply of new customers or else the whole thing falls apart.

Personally, I have never bought anything by Bose. I first met their PA speakers back in the 1990s and they use a similar technology to this day. Their small drivers, resonant "waveguides" and EQ'd-to-heck amplifiers just set my teeth on edge from an aesthetic point of view and I can't say I've been terribly impressed with the quality of the sound produced by any of the kit I've heard. Volume , yes; the darned things can certainly be loud and it's impressive how well a small, battery-powered Bluetooth speaker can fill a small room full of small children in pink tutus, but "no name" kit at a quarter the price can be sourced which is just as loud, and almost as "HiFi".

M.

(ish) is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

The blame is 100% on the corporation. Don't give them excuses.

"This is cloud-connected and it definitely won't stop working whenever we just can't be fucked any more" is the modern equivalent of "sure I just packed this meat yesterday it's totally fresh and it's supposed to be green".

I should be able to assume that the food I buy from a supermarket won't kill me despite now knowing knowing what a fungal spore is or how it facilitates their reproduction.

(ish) is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Not sure what you mean by that. I was making the point that anyone signing up for Netflix knows it is a subscription, though they might not realise that the Ts & Cs could change at the whim of the supplier. The same cannot be said of people buying cloud-reliant speakers, which is a shame. They should be more interested in educating themselves but as an alternative they must made aware of what they are buying.

M.

I’m not blaming anyone for putting their faith in a large privately (sorta) owned company who should do better for their customers. It’s a shame that BOSE didn’t guarantee the service for x years. That’s the let down, a trusted brand letting its customers believe one thing and not delivering.

Immediate cynicism required - ‘what happens when this gadget can’t talk to the Internet?’, and ‘can company X remotely knacker this product?’ are the two questions everyone should learn to ask because you’ll always find out the answer, either before or after you hand over money for it.

There is blame both sides.

Manufacturers tethering products to the cloud, for whatever reason, without understanding/caring about long term costs/implications and not informing buyers.

Buyers spending significant money on internet connected products without finding out what happens when there is no internet.

The EU Petition to stop killing games, really needs something similar for products which depend on cloud services to work and cannot provide their primary sold purpose without the cloud.

Or maybe manufacturers need to be legally required to put large warning messages making it clear no internet servers = useless product or what stops working when they decide to stop supporting the product.

Manufacturers should either offer or be forced by law to offer minumum operation and support periods with financial penalties for not complying. It's not just cloud and app support that's a problem. When my vacuum cleaner recently broke terminally after 30-years' use I looked at the market and found that many new ones are battery operated. I contacted the suppliers to find out how long they would gurarantee to supply new batteries. Without exception they all replied that they would support their products for a minimum of two years. Fucked if I'm spending that sort of money on a product that could be useless after only two years. I bought one that plugs into the wall - it might not have the bells and whistles of the battery ones but it'll still be working in ten years.

The problem is that people are growing up today with stuff which costs £££ and has a lifetime of just a few years and they are assuming that it was ever thus. I've just replaced my fridge/freezer after the old one, bought in 1993, gave up the ghost. About ten years ago I had to buy new a inlet valve for my washing machine - and I bought a couple of spares cos the machine will probably outlast the spares. Ditto the elements for the grill and oven in my 1980s oven and the spark igniter in the gas hob - I've got spares stashed for all of them There used to be a shop in the next town that seemed to be able to get parts for any household appliance going back to Edison but it closed recently, not because it couldn't get parts but because people were no longer using it.

I have various cloudy, internet enabled things and when I bought them I was fully in the knowledge that there would only be a few years of use from the internetty bit. If I am lucky that is, and if no hacker has used it as way in to my home network before then.

Like when I bought my VHS player, nobody told me that BlockBuster was going to close down. What an absolute bugger.

Oh no, my Hutchison Rabbit phone, my pre-GSM 1G analog built in car phone. What am I to do with all this terrible treatment of consumers?

I just heard that loads of medium wave transmitters have closed down and my radio is now useless.

Devastating.

And…

I just found out that analogue tv broadcasts ceased years ago. All this time I thought I was watching a nature documentary about snowstorms in the arctic.

Very disappointing, my Pye dual standard set should work for many more years.

I quite agree. In my loft there's a box marked 'Frankenmatic'. In is the electronic guts of an old Servis washing machine. It was perhaps the first domestic washing machine to have a digital display on it. It used to wash clothes far better than most of the modern machines do. Done and dusted in about 40 minutes. No lies about how long it's going to take.....oh this is going to take 2hr and 20mins...no wait...how's about 2hrs. Ha no.... let's call it 1hr 50mins. No stains of washing powder because it was washing and rinsing the clothes in a puddle of water. And, and, it had a HOT FILL. Why on earth, in these days of solar heated water have they removed the hot fill connection from a lot of the washing machines?

And if the old Motorola MCU in it will let me download the code in it, it will become immortal courtesy of ARM.

It lived for 22 years When it was 21 years old I made it a cake and we had a party for it. By then it had had more than one set of inner and outer bearings, and a new drum, 2 pumps. When I have the time I'll find it, or make it a donor body and FrankenMatic will_live_again.

"Why on earth, in these days of solar heated water have they removed the hot fill connection from a lot of the washing machines?"

Combi boilers is probably why. Most people have those. The inlet hoses can't cope with hot water at mains pressure (look at one to see), internal hoses and other parts may not either, and the water hammer is likely bad for the boiler.

The budget Indesit washing machine in the cellar was cold fill only when it was purchased about a decade ago. It is now connected to a thermostat controlled shower mixer tap turning it into a cold to hot fill washing machine depending on the temperature setting.

The hot water comes from a coil in the first accumulator tank of the central heating system and the water in the accumulator tanks is heated by three wood burning ranges. This setup reduces the amount of electricity the washing machine uses considerably, especially so for hot washes.

It has been working fine like that for over a year now.

It's not really the strength of the hose, it's the fact that (European-style) washing machines use so little water these days that be it combi or stored, the machine will likely have finished filling before the hot water has got to it. Our LG also "pulses" the water flll which really wouldn't do a combi boiler any good. Shame, as I installed a hot water circulation system in our new house so hot water is never very far away from the taps.

Conversely our dishwasher, while single-fill, specifically says that it is happy to be connected only to the hot supply. Can't do that with the washing machines as they need cold for rinses.

M.

"It’s unreasonable to expect people to be knowledgeable about the concept of “cloud,”"

Nonsense. It's long been well known that one shouldn't buy a pig in a poke. In fact, going back 2,000+ years, one might have advised one's child " Caveat emptor, quia ignorare non debuit quod jus alienum emit ".

Ignorance can, and should be, cured through education. Investigate your world, people. It's for your own good.

Perhaps a large sticker with some text like "This product requires an Internet server provided by the manufacturer for full service. The manufacturer may cease to provide the required server at some point in the future".?

"Clouds can go down as well as up"

So they should take it as a (expensive) lesson about "the cloud" and how devices depending on someone else's systems may stop working anytime they need to sell you new ones.

Vote wit your wallet, next time.

This is no longer innovation - is plain, simple enshittification.

Whilst I agree with that viw a big part of the problem is that people buy into all this IoT/Smart tech because it is trendy and cool.

They are all just fashion accessories and do nothing that a phone with a Bluetooth speaker, or heaven forbid, a traditional amp and speakers can do.

"They are all just fashion accessories and do nothing that a phone with a Bluetooth speaker"

Bose stuff doesn't sound that great, but it is much better than every BT speaker I've ever heard.

I beg to differ. The kids have some very cheap BT speakers which make just as much noise as a similarly-sized Boze unit.

If it's quality you are actually after then a lot of "HiFi" amplifiers these days come with [1]BT receivers built-in , and if your priority is volume then there is any number of [2]portable speakers at any conceivable price point.

M.

[1] https://www.richersounds.com/fosi-audio-bt20a-black/

[2] https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=0313-AGQ

"When you purchase a product, you don’t expect to be an expert in its workings. "

If you don't, be prepared to lose lots of money.

If you buy an automobile, you have to understand that it requires external suppliers to keep it going. For petrol/diesel, there are loads of companies and locations that are happy to sell you some. For an EV, anywhere there's an outlet you can use, you can recharge but you need to understand charge rates/time, driving efficiency and your immediate needs. If you get a Hydrogen car, you may only have one place to refuel and while there can be more, for the time being it's like Bose having you as a captive audience except Bose isn't going to let anybody else be your supplier.

When travel was by horse, you had to know about horses far more than most people know about cars these days. It's not being an expert, but knowledgeable enough to understand what you need to understand.

With a tiny amount of education, people could figure out that instead of spending thousands on Bose landfill, they could buy a cheap used computer to interface with online music services and connect that to a good amp and set of speakers for far far less and much better quality. My old MacPro 4,1 cheesegrater is my media server. I could use a $50 Mac Mini, but I had the MP just sitting. It stores all of my audiobooks, music, podcasts and loads of movies and other video and spits it out on command locally or to some other place on my home network. It runs headless. If I need to do some recovery, I can hook up a KVM to get it going again. It's not rocket engineering. Everything it's doing has already been implemented and it was just a matter of learning how to work the dials.

You forgot to mention that it also doubles as a fan heater!

When connected to AUX? Can't guarantee performance over a signal coming in over a piece of wire? Ok, at some point the capacitors are going to dry out, but other than that, surely...

Bluetooth is *almost* as solid as a wire, although it is possible for your next BT *source* to no longer support the specific protocol (but that wouldn't be Boses's fault).

"Bluetooth is *almost* as solid as a wire"

Gosh that's a stretch. Bluetooth here sometimes doesn't want to connect to sensors about 10 feet away if the moon is in the wrong phase. You can't beat a wire.

You can't beat a wire, agreed, but my experience with BT audio receivers at work is that they can work over longer distances than you might expect. I've managed 25 to 30m if there aren't too many obstructions in the way, though human flesh is very good at reducing range. However, I have two "pro" receivers, one of which is rock solid up to 20m in most circumstances and manages 30m regularly, while the other struggles above 10m, even when I am streaming from the same phone.

M.

I dumped all my Bose kit after they refused to add AirPlay 2 to their SA4 amp around 6 years ago - Despite there being known solutions they refused to consider.

Bose's founder Amar Bose was known to have made great products that lasted the test of time - Supported for decades - He will be rolling in his grave !!!

Told you so.

Thank you, Bose, for applying another layer of knowledge paint on the idiots who persist in buying into The Cloud TM .

I agree that, if by now they haven't yet got the message, it is high time to apply the good ol' two-by-four to the wallet so they might finally be enlightened.

Kudos to you for bearing the heavy weight of this education.

The correct parallel with Bose bricking their hardware isn't the Sonos app debacle, bad as it was. It's what Sonos did five years ago, where they said all their older products would stop working after May 2020, but which they tempered with a truly generous 'offer' of a discount on new hardware if you sent the bricked units to them. Understandably the customer backlash was swift and vigorous and they quickly backtracked, introducing the S1 and S2 apps for controlling older and newer hardware respectively. I still have the email from CEO at the time (see below). I notice that my copy of the email has British English spelling, which is nice :-)

If Bose customers are able to generate a similar amount of noise, perhaps the company will back down (although I doubt it).

"We heard you. We did not get this right from the start. My apologies for that and I wanted to personally assure you of the path forward:

First, rest assured that come May, when we end new software updates for our legacy products, they will continue to work just as they do today. We are not bricking them, we are not forcing them into obsolescence, and we are not taking anything away. Many of you have invested heavily in your Sonos systems, and we intend to honour that investment for as long as possible. Whilst legacy Sonos products won’t get new software features, we pledge to keep them updated with bug fixes and security patches for as long as possible. If we run into something core to the experience that can’t be addressed, we’ll work to offer an alternative solution and let you know about any changes you’ll see in your experience.

Secondly, we heard you on the issue of legacy products and modern products not being able to coexist in your home. We are working on a way to split your system so that modern products work together and get the latest features, whilst legacy products work together and remain in their current state. We’re finalising details on this plan and will share more in the coming weeks.

Whilst we have a lot of great products and features in the pipeline, we want our customers to upgrade to our latest and greatest products when they’re excited by what the new products offer, not because they feel forced to do so. That’s the intent of the Trade Up programme we launched for our loyal customers.

Thank you for being a Sonos customer. Thank you for taking the time to give us your feedback. I hope that you’ll forgive our misstep and let us earn back your trust. Without you, Sonos wouldn't exist and we’ll work harder than ever to earn your loyalty every single day.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,

Patrick

Patrick Spence

CEO, Sonos"

If only that was their first snafu. Zero trust for sonos, they keep trying and failing. Hoping they will slowly go out of business.

https://www.theregister.com/2017/10/11/sonos_privacy_speakers/

"Been Bose customer for over 40 years. Will never buy from them again"

Now's your chance to buy some speakers that don't sound shit, given the price bracket.

Bose, sonos, Google.. all had cloudy products that are now dead (sure there are many more)

I have a hive thermostat and they keep asking if I want this, that and the other.. no thanks, only have that because it was installed with the new boiler

If it pisses me off again by loosing connectivity it is out of the door, but hive think I want more if their Iintegrations... What for an I vestment into their products for them to drop it and leave me lumbered ?

I have some squeeze devices. Sold to logi who killed it off pdq (why buy them then?)

At least their server is open source so still working well.. even had firmware updates for some players recently too

"I have a hive thermostat and they keep asking if I want this, that and the other.. no thanks, only have that because it was installed with the new boiler"

I'd immediately switch out any "connected" thermostat. In the many decades I've been around, I've never had the thought that it would be handy to be able to change/check my thermostat remotely. If I'm going to be gone, I make sure heating and cooling is set appropriately. Heating is really easy since I'd just leave it as is since it's solar and costs very little. It's 4x 28w fans and two temp controllers. Cooling would be off. When my cat was still with me, I'd leave it on and not worry about it.

What would be a concern is somebody remotely accessing my thermostat and "having a bit of fun" by changing the settings.

A programmable HVAC control at the house I used to rent was just fine. I could warm up the house during winter in the morning before I had to get up, let it cool off during the day to a lower temp and have it warm up again before I'd normally be home. My schedule was consistent so programming was set and forget. My goal now is to add solar (passive heat and PV) to the point where I can just keep the house at a comfortable temperature all the time and not need to worry about cost.

"We're no longer able to sustain the development and support of the cloud infrastructure that powers this older generation of products."

I'm sorry, but in this day and age where everything is virtualised, why can't you leave the infrastructure running in its own cloud instance? Corporations do it all the time with legacy systems.

When MIT is the majority owner, you'd think they might have some understanding of what is involved and the future issues when tethering their products functionality to the cloud.

Then again, they might just want rid of the peasants buying soundtouch now they have the bottomless pockets of McIntosh and Sonus Faber buyers to empty. $1500 for a McIntosh mono streaming speaker is likely the more profitable market to want, along with McIntosh's car audio business.

Unless there is a completely different sounding set of Bose Products only available in the US, I have no idea why anyone raves about Bose sound quality. Apart from the Noise Cancelling headphones I've not heard anything I'd spend other peoples money on, let alone my own, with a Bose badge on it.

My current car has a Bose sound system, it is supposed to be a Bose premium sound system. It is one of the worst things about the car and I'd be ashamed if that's what I created as a sound engineer. Both my previous convertibles had much better sound systems even with the roof down

But this is not something that can be isolated from the internet and left unpatched. These are cloud servers and there are a bunch of ongoing support costs.

The client made a fixed cost purchase which turns out to be an unfunded "promise" to spend on them for the long term. New purchases may have covered the support costs for a while. But costs can change and it stops looking economical.

just how many products I don't own that require a network connection to work... if it won't work without (external) network connection, I don't use it - beyond things like browsers.

Yes, I am a luddite; I rip my own CDs but I have the originals; I use a Kobo but I have never bought 1 a book from them; instead, I either scan/ocr/edit books I own, or seek out copies that others have made. Every time a company wants me to install an application to my phone, I see it as not only a security risk but also an avoidable point of failure.

But damnit, for people forty or fifty years younger than me, it's just too damn easy...

[1] I do buy Analog magazine in epub format. Direct from Analog, and unencrypted, with a perpetual licence. Copies stored locally.

I own CDs and rip them.

Pay for my music once, not eternally for the privilege of letting me listen to it.

I buy my music DRM free as Flac and download it from the Qobuz store.

Download straight to my NAS and shuffle across disks as time goes on. Far less bulky than the boxes of CDs I have from before.

Day to day even though I own them so won't loose them anymore than I would a CD, I still stream music more often than play from my server along with internet radio. Similarly I have DVDs, Blu-ray and a blu-ray player which I rarely use.

I even have CDs and Movies I've bought and still haven't bothered ripping yet because I just stream them for now. One day I'll get around to it. Probably find my usb dvd drive has given up and the discs are unreadable by then anyway :D

Was interesting to hear my Son's view. While he occasionally buys films, he doesn't see why anyone would buy music when so much is available to stream free or paid online or failing that via an aerial. to him it's just transitory noise to listen to, not something he's attached to.

I don't mind apps using external services for products if they're providing extra functionality above the core features, where I draw the line is when the app is just a remote for a cloud control centre to talk to a device in my own home. If something won't operate locally and can't be configured without the internet, then it's either not coming in the house or it's cheap enough for what it does that I don't care when it becomes a brick.

Do you remember when you used to buy things and they would last until they wore out or the kids got to them?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Oh no, it's TEN YEARS old! Might as well set fire to it. Bose lost the plot when old man Bose passed on (as he apparently foresaw). Even this article suggests that it's reasonable to expect to stop using *speakers* after 10 years.

Ridiculous. Streaming radio hasn't gone away. Spotify, last I checked, is still in business. The hardware doesn't wear out. The speakers in my front room are a 30 year old pair of Definitives (Craig's list), powered by a 50 year old Carver and a $11 bluetooth receiver. Last I checked, WiFi was still backward compatible with 2013 standards. Firmware is updatable.

Everything these days is built to a 4 year refresh cycle, like American cars from the '90s. It seems like a good idea from a corporate standpoint, but it really kills the brand. Example: UA Project Rock headphones by JBL: replaceable earpads! But you can't replace them because they stopped making the pads at 4 years when they stopped making the phones. (And it's actually worse than other brands because they use a proprietary attachment mechanism instead of a simple stretch-on pad.) "Repairable" is meaningless branding now, like "green" or "washable."

We complained about planned obsolescence in the 90s, but those companies lacked vision.