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Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2016a

As a Sonos (I have close to $2000 worth of products) user this actually doesn't bother me.

To all the people talking about ownership. I find it hard to believe the aux in will cease to work. So worst case is they turn into regular speakers.

What it sounds like is you won't be able to update your firmware. So more likely than not, everything would keep working but random Internet related services (like Spotify Integration) may break over time because, for instance, if Spotify changes their API you won't get the software update to fix it.

And that is why I think it is OK. Software updates over the Internet are always subject to licensing. That is not new and not unique to Sonos.

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> So worst case is they turn into regular speakers.

If I wanted regular speakers, I would have bought regular speakers.

My point being the speakers are the only part of it that are a product. Everything else is clearly a service.

The part of the speaker that is actually a product is unlikely to stop working.

Everything else is 'clearly' a service? On what basis? You buy a product, it has these features, you can do these things, that's the product.

Being able to play music on a 'smart speaker' from my phone isn't a service, it's just a feature of the product. If you sell a product with features that require you to host some servers somewhere publicly accessible on the internet, that doesn't make that product feature a service.

Don't like that? Don't include those features in your product. Design them better so you don't have to forever maintain these servers.

To be fair, one of the "features" is streaming Spotify, which may require a constant dance to keep up with API changes.

'Compatible with service X' is a feature. If it stops being compatible with service X because service X changed their API, then you either need to fix it so it's compatible again, or refund to your customers.

If you want to announce you are compatible with service X as a feature, you should have an agreement of compatibility with service X.

> I find it hard to believe

.... until it does happen as they promised ...

> sound systems that may eventually "cease to function".

Not just some part of it but all of it.

I find it hard to believe for technical reasons. From what I can tell in the Network traffic the speaker actually talks directly to Spotify for instance.

They would need to have a remote kill switch and use it.

Secondly, they have done this before (forced agreeing to the terms to do a software update) and every time they have warned "some functionality might cease to work" and every time I kept using it past the cutoff.

Once, I had Spotify stop working on me. I assume because they switched API keys or something.

In fact, for example, they had an update that killed Audible integration. And my Audible integration kept working until I installed the update.

So they've already released 'updates' that break the device and reduces its feature set, and you're okay with this?

From what I understand that one was more Audible's fault than there's. It sounded like Amazon deprecated the API. I am sure if I kept using it without updating that it would eventually stop working. Anyone who got effected by that should blame Amazon.

The only people that should be affected by it are Sonos. They should sue Amazon for violating their service agreement to maintain Audible so it would continue to work.

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