
Brick my £400 speaker, or my house full of your products get no updates - ColinWright
https://chaos.social/@LaF0rge/103531538967525615
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akerl_
I’m not sure I’m fully grokking what’s nuts about this?

The speakers all talk to each other, so they’re saying you either update all
or none. And they’re not going to be providing updates for some of their kit
that they’ve decided is legacy.

For people whose stance is that they bought the device and it should continue
working as-is, that’s true: all the devices they bought will continue as-is,
without getting new changes/features. As Sonos notes, over time that’s going
to mean that integrations with 3rd party services will break (“this will
affect your listening experience”), which seems pretty much a given since
those 3rd party services are unlikely to keep their APIs the same forever.

For people whose stance is they bought a continuously-updating system, part of
that is continuously-updating-the-hardware-bits.

But it’s not rational to expect _both_ ongoing updates and for old kit to work
forever, when the devices all interact like a speaker system does. Sonos’s
announcement is literally saying “we aren’t going to update your new kit if
you hold the old kit back, _because doing so would be detrimental to you by
breaking the interoperability of your new and old kit_”

~~~
ColinWright
Try thinking about this not from the point of view of the supplier, but from
the point of view of the customer. In particular, of a non-technical customer.

Imagine this. I've bought something, I'm using it, it's wonderful, and I love
it. I buy more things from the same supplier, and they too are excellent. I
even go so far as to recommend them to friends. I'm not a technical person,
I've just bought things that work, and I'm very happy with them.

Then I get a letter. The letter says, basically, that all my kit, all of it,
will cease to get security updates. Or any kind of updates. I'm not entirely
sure what that means, it was never made much of when I bought them. But it
sounds serious, and sounds like something I should avoid.

But there's an upside! The speaker that I love can be sacrificed. I can let
you brick my speaker, for which I paid £400, and send it to landfill. In
return I get discount 30% on a replacement.

That doesn't feel like a good deal, and it does feel like extortion. As a non-
technical customer I feel like I've been had, and am now having to pay more to
retain capability I already have.

Does that explain further why some people are a bit upset about this? Putting
yourself in the customers' position can help.

~~~
akerl_
My comment, which you’re responding to, already spoke from the perspective of
a customer. As a customer, if I buy a toaster, I expect it to not ever change,
either via gaining or losing functionality. Conversely, if I buy an iPhone, I
expect it to get updates over time until it eventually doesn’t, and if I want
to keep getting updates, I have to replace it. I don’t have devices which both
continue being supported forever _and_ get continuous updates. And if I have
many things that are part of the same system, they need to work together,
clearly, so if some keep getting improvements and the others don’t, they will
no longer function as a single system.

I don’t think their update was phrased perfectly, but no updates are phrased
perfectly. And the overall concept of updating vs static devices isn’t really
that shocking.

------
uberman
This is why no one should "purchase" a "smart" anything unless there is no
alternative.

~~~
mikro2nd
There is always an alternative: no purchase at all.

~~~
Finnucane
Indeed, you can have my old analog stereo speakers when you pry them from my
cold dead hands.

