I've never owned any Sonos products but I read about this debacle last year. As I understand it, Sonos' new app made major UX changes and bricked many older products. They apologized Their PR unit responded with formulaic damage-control and the obligatory vague corporate promise to do better in the future.
Since I trust that most of you aren't bots, I want to hear from the Sonos users - did Sonos right their wrongs? Did any of you abandon them for good? How's the ANC on Ace vs. Sony XM5's, APM, or Bose QC? Any major gripes with the Ace overall? I've seen big discounts recently - low-mid $200's range new.
Sonos definitely needs better PR.
I've had Sonos for 10 years now - bought my first units in 2015, when I bought the house I'm currently living in. The Play 5 gen 2s I bought still work fine, with all features and current software.
Let's start with "bricked". In 2019 Sonos launched a program where owners of old systems could upgrade their hardware for 30% off. Since Sonos doesn't have stores everywhere, their idea was that instead of you handing in the device the device you enrolled for such an upgrade it was deactivated and should be delivered to recycling. This seemingly benign scheme
backfired spectacularly. I see the actual scheme as a big nothing burger, but it is regularly brought up without the context so it's definitely a spectacular PR disaster.
The next big controversy was when they left some old devices behind. Sonos launched their new S2 OS in August 2020 or so, and
products launched between 2005 and 2010 didn't get the major update. S1 still got updates for existing services etc, but not new features. Still getting updates after 15 years is very good in my book. What they should have done better was to let S1 and S2 devices coexist in the same app, today they are AFAIK completely separate apps and systems.
An interesting read about the app rewrite can be found
here, but there are several. For my use, the problems I experienced was slowdowns - especially when launching, a less intuitive UI, and missing features/weird choices. E.g. tracks from my local library was ordered alphabetically and not by track number, with no reorder possible. That's not a good way to listen to some albums, operas, or audio books...
Since then, the app has been fixed. Still on the slow side when starting, but the rest is OK for my use cases - the things I miss have never been there, e.g. to like a song on Apple Music or Spotify from the app, or use smart playlists. Might be different for others. I mostly start playing from Spotify via Spotify connect, or from Apple Music - or via voice. There has never been problems with these.
Can't tell you anything about the ACE headphones - I replaced my old Airpod Max so with Sony WH-1000XM6. My usecase is using them during transport and at work, not at home where I have all my speakers - so I went with the best reviewed ones and focused on ANC in addition to sound quality. Other than that, I have a lot of devices. 17 in total, I think, including two surround systems and four Ikea Sonos frames. They're great as discrete back speakers.
