Look What You Made Me Do (Premium)

Sonos has always been a controversial company, but this summer’s self-inflicted and easily avoidable problems, which I now call Sonosgate, are the final straw for many one-time fans. This is understandable: Our relationships with ecosystems like Sonos are built on trust, and while trust is something that one builds slowly and over time, a betrayal of this magnitude can ruin everything.

I’ve been a Sonos fan and a loyal customer for many years: I purchased my first Sonos smart speaker in 2015 after fretting about the expense for years, though I now own about 10 of them. And while there’s little reason to recount my history with the platform here, the short version is that I own several thousand dollars’ worth of Sonos equipment, use them daily, and have enough experience to speak to the ecosystem’s relative value. If you would like to learn more about this, The Lure of Sonos (Premium) is perhaps a good place to start, though I have only expanded my use of Sonos products since then.

My love of Sonos has long hit on that odd emotion/logic divide, but maybe that makes sense: While Sonos spans both audio and video and makes home theater products of some renown, my focus is mostly on music. So much so that I’ll be publishing a separate post about music soon, as the original write-up intended for this article grew well beyond the point of common sense. For now, I will simply say that my relationship with Sonos can be viewed as the most recent era in a literal lifetime of loving music. And that the importance of music to me is so strong that I’ve put up with some Sonos issues that might have otherwise triggered changes long ago.

That is, my love of Sonos is really more of a love/hate relationship. And while that, too, is a long story, I can cut to the chase here as well. Sonos products are expensive, perhaps overly so, and I’ve always resented that to some degree. There were technical issues, among them a need to solve a reliable connection issue at our last house by purchasing yet another Sonos device, a Sonos Boost, to create a dedicated Wi-Fi network separate from that used by our other devices. And there still are integration issues, such as those caused when Google stole some Sonos technologies, triggering a series of lawsuits, and, worse for customers, the inability of Google’s YouTube Music app, which I rely on, to natively control Sonos systems (as was possible with its predecessor, Google Play Music).

I would like Sonos and Google to wrap up that nonsense to benefit their shared customers. But the biggest problem with Sonos, by far, at least until now, is a direct result of the Sonos/Google falling out. Because there’s no way to control Sonos with YouTube Music, I’ve been forced to use the horrible Sonos app to do so instead. (At least on Android; if you’re an Apple user, you can control Sonos over AirPlay, which is wonderful.) To be clear, when I say the Sonos app is terrible, I mean the previous Sonos app, not the somehow even more horrific current version that triggered this year’s latest controversy.

Without getting into the specifics—which don’t really matter anymore, as that app is gone now anyway—the Sonos app has long colored my view of this platform and ecosystem in a negative light, undermining my experiences and making me second-guess my choices. This thing was a train wreck from the get-go, which makes the diminished quality of the new app almost entertaining. Almost.

Then and now

Through the years, I’ve defended Sonos.

I still feel that the controversies over its 2020 decision to obsolete older speakers—some as old as15 years—were overblown and unfair, and that it’s 30 percent off trade-up offer was the right thing to do. This event emerged as the poster child for what I call faux outrage, in that many of the people complaining about the decision weren’t even Sonos customers, they were just trolls making noise. (Sonos quickly appeased the complainers, halted its efforts to recycle older equipment, and later created separate apps for newer and older speakers, respectively.)

I still feel that Sonos was right to sue Google for patent infringement, protecting itself and its patented innovations from a predatory Big Tech giant that’s used to getting its way with smaller, less well-funded companies. Sonos eventually won big in court, but the judge later threw out the damages award, leaving things in an awkward place. As noted above, it’s time for these two companies to put this mess behind them.

This latest controversy is different, in some ways, but taken in the context of the other issues I’ve identified, one can see a pattern emerging. Or perhaps just repeating.

Sonos makes terrific hardware, but its software has always been horrible, and so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the new app is horrific too. That it arrived with major functional regressions—you can’t even edit a playlist or the Now Playing queue with this app, basic music player features—is rather incredible. And while this says a lot about the lack of quality control at this company, I think it also speaks to a more profound issue.

In late 2023, we learned that Sonos planned to dramatically expand its product offerings this year, starting with a long-rumored pair of expensive headphones. Those headphones, like the smart speaker innovations that triggered its controversial 2020 strategy, would require new software, however, and major changes to the underlying platform. And though it had a blueprint for how to move forward—it could create an S3 app for the new products, just as it had split its app into S1 and S2 variants before—it chose the unthinkable instead. To get those headphones to market as quickly as possible, and after multiple delays, Sonos simply replaced its S2 app with the new app, unleashing a hell of well-deserved complaints.

It worked, sort of. Those headphones are now available. But Sonos has finally undermined customer trust by its actions, a fate it avoided with previous controversies. This time, it’s not faux outrage, as the complainers this time are all actual customers pointing out very real problems. And this time, its response was not swift, but drawn out, and its solution is completely inadequate: After promising in early May to fix the issues quickly, Sonos did almost nothing to address any of the concerns. And then, almost three months into this fiasco, its CEO finally admitted to the sad reality that Sonos would not be able to fix the problems, the problems it had created, anytime soon. That most basic of features I noted above, the ability to edit playlists and the Now Playing queue, won’t be available again to Sonos users until October. October?

That’s unacceptable.

But it’s also immaterial to me. As it turns out, I’ve been rethinking my approach to music for some time, and broadly, across the service I use, the earbuds I take to the gym, the headphones I travel with, and the speakers we use, both here in Pennsylvania and in Mexico City. This has turned into a real gut-check moment for me, in fact. And it ties into many of the enshittification issues that have consumed personal computing in recent years. And into many of the themes that come up again and again as I think about, and write about, technology and ecosystems.

There’s so much that goes into this. Please allow a related digression.

The digression…

Like most older white guys, I have a series of well-worn lines I like to cart out as appropriate. For example, if my wife, brother, or a close friend points out when something I say or do is contradictory, which happens fairly regularly, I always respond with something like, “No, I can explain that. I’m a hypocrite.”

Likewise, in 30 years of covering the personal computing industry, I’ve developed a similar series of maxims, honed and expanded over time, that I also cart out as needed. Some are intentionally absurd—”technology has never failed me”—but, more often, I’m looking to cut to the chase and state, simply and quickly, something that I feel is (or should be) universally understood. The right tool for the job being an obvious classic.

Some concepts are more complex, of course. I refer to decision-making as a matrix of choices in which individual choices are weighted according to our individual needs, rather than being black and white. Nuanced, but also personal to the individual: Where one person might value the camera system above all else when buying a smartphone, for example, another might prefer a specific device design, platform, or whatever else.

I understand, too, that preferences, the choices we make, are often as much about emotion as they are about logic. That the most important decisions we make in life should factor in both sides of this duality.

Whether this is related to age, experience, or both, my biggest pet peeve, the single issue that I obsess over the most, is when things don’t work. Technology, for all its advances, is endlessly frustrating, a breaker of promises, a thing that is 1s and 0s and should be made to just work but instead behaves chaotically, unpredictably. It’s maddening. It’s maddening because things rarely just work. They rarely work properly at all.

And maybe this is obvious, but  I want the things I do to occupy my time—work, play, whatever—to be good. To bring this back to technology, which rarely works properly, gets in the way, and is often a general nuisance, this is why I refer to my previous relationship with the game Call of Duty as unhealthy. As a basic matter of self-improvement, I’m better off without it.

And we’re back…

And I know what you’re probably thinking. What on earth does any of this have to do with Sonos?

But that’s the thing. This is all about Sonos.

That is, Sonos is everything that’s right about personal technology. But it’s also everything that’s wrong with it, too. And when I look back over the past decade-plus, I see these radical extremes with great clarity. I struggle with the paradox of loving something that has let me down so many times. With the time, money, and effort I’ve wasted trying to make it all make sense. But failing, not because of some personal shortcomings, but because the net of this thing, in balance, is decidedly negative. Not necessarily for the reasons your average Sonos hater would quickly voice. But for so many reasons.

When we bought the apartment in Mexico City, my wife and I knew that we would spend the next two years, at least, just getting it to where we wanted it. There would be furniture, and upgrades like the balcony flooring. We’d have to slowly recreate the infrastructure of our lives there, leave clothes, toiletry items, kitchen goods, and whatever else there so that we could move between our two homes as seamlessly as possible. Both of us have our own focuses. And you know that a big part of mine was the technical end: The home network and Internet service, of course, but also computers and home office setups so that we could work as needed, as similarly as possible to the way we do in the US.

I’ve written about this ongoing work over the past two years, so there’s no need to rehash that here. But long story short, it unfolded as expected. We’re two years into this unexpected life change and it’s pretty much gone to schedule.

From a music (and TV) perspective, I would have ideally gotten Sonos equipment for Mexico one or two years ago. But I didn’t: Sonos hardware is expensive enough in the US, but like most electronics, it’s far more expensive there. And while I entertained the thought of bringing small Sonos speakers or maybe its smallest soundbar there in my carry-on luggage, I never did. There’s a lot that goes into that—matrix of choices, etc.—but I also had the collective negative experiences with Sonos in the back of my mind. And so the cost emerged as a convenient excuse. We ended up getting a pair of Bluetooth speakers on sale that work OK. But they require a lot of manual set up, don’t work seamlessly with the Apple TV we use (there and in Pennsylvania), and while it would it would never have occurred to my wife to ever replace them—they actually do sound really good—I’ve been thinking about doing so ever since they arrived.

Closer to home, you may vaguely recall that my house was struck by lightning. This was several years ago now, and the lightning hit the front yard, not the house, but I am constantly reminded of the aftershocks of that event. Our TV has never been the same since then and, related to the current topic, our Sonos Beam soundbar was destroyed. Sonos replaced it under warranty for free, which was nice. But the replacement Beam and our TV haven’t worked properly together ever since. What should be a simple one cable connection over HDMI doesn’t work reliably or at all. So I long ago connected the optional optical audio cable between the two as well.

And it’s worked, mostly, in that vaguely Sonos way where it’s usually OK but sometimes inexplicably requires attention. The unplugging and replugging of cables, perhaps. Times when the TV comes on, but the sound never does. The occasional switching of HDMI inputs to see if that does anything. Rebooting the Apple TV. Whatever. The point is, you never know what’s wrong, just like you never know when you want to watch TV or listen to music and something just doesn’t work right.

Throughout the intervening years—we sold that house in early 2023 and moved twice that year—the TV/Sonos Beam integration has never been what I wanted. Aside from the usual volume issues common to TV shows and movies today and the aforementioned reliability weirdness, the connectivity with Apple TV was never solid. I would turn on the TV by pressing the power button on the Apple TV remote, and then I’d go to whatever app, find whatever content, and start watching it. And every time, every single time, there would be no sound through the Beam until about 5 seconds in. And so every time, I would rewind to the beginning and just start over so we could hear it. Nothing I did could work around this issue. It was just part of the experience.

Granted, this is slightly better than the Mexico City experience. There, our Apple TV is connected to a USB speaker, and there’s no way to even turn it on from the couch: I have to remember to go over a press its power button, and me being me, I forget to do that about 75 percent of the time. Because it’s a USB speaker, it can’t be configured as the primary speaker, so I sometimes I have to go into Apple TV settings to reconfigure that. And because stereo pairing USB speakers is manufacturer-specific and dodgy with the JBLs I bought, we usually just use the one speaker. It’s better than the TV’s speakers. But that’s a low bar.

I have a cunning plan

In any event, I came home in June from Mexico City resolved to figure out something better. But by this point, Sonos was completely off the table: Just ahead of that trip, our Beam stopped working with the Apple TV. I did all the usual troubleshooting, but with the trip approaching, I ran out of time. Our niece was staying in our place to watch the cats, so I wrote some instructions about connecting to the Beam temporarily in Apple TV settings. But, she would need to use the volume buttons on the Beam: The Apple TV remote could no longer control the volume. Fantastic.

Coming home to this inoperable Apple TV/Beam setup was more than I could take. I had started researching solutions when a thought occurred: While I’m no fan of the Apple lock-in ecosystem or its HomePod speakers in particular, I had this vague idea that the smaller HomePod Mini speakers could be stereo paired and used as a sort of soundbar replacement with Apple TV. This is not a path I’d normally pursue, but if this just worked, it seemed like a reasonable TV-based solution for Mexico. And because I would need to test it first here in PA, I would have something to use here temporarily, buying me time to find another alternative.

I cannot overstate how much this thought messed me up. Even considering this configuration violates so many of my maxims—about ecosystems, walled garden lock-in, open vs. proprietary, cross-platform, and even personal integrity—that I don’t even know where to start. But it occurred that some of my beliefs were perhaps contradictory. (Which is classic when you think about the problems with belief systems.) That is, yes, I have this strong personal stance against … whatever. But I can also define my life-long experiences with technology has been largely frustrating. And that the greatest successes in this area come in those too-rare moments in which things just work. The daily delight I still experience when I open a Copilot+ PC display lid, and it actually comes up immediately every single time, is the best and most recent example of this type of thing.

And so I did some reading. Confirmed what I thought to be the case.

And then I did the unthinkable. I ordered two HomePods as an experiment. Not two HomePod Minis. Two of the larger, more expensive HomePods. And while I always suspected in the back of my mind that this would never work out—I am so diametrically opposed to this type of product—I did feel a nagging in the back of my brain. I already use Apple TV. What if this does work? What if this is just the same thing as using Apple TV, similar to the Apple soundbar idea I’d long had, with an integrated Apple TV? What would it hurt?

What indeed.

Allow me to be honest here: I had two nagging feelings in the back of my brain. The second one was, what if this actually works? I know that seems like the same feeling, but there’s a reason I got the larger HomePods and not the little ones. The larger HomePods support Dolby Atmos immersive sound, a feature our Sonos Beam lacks. And they’re big enough to fill the living room here in Pennsylvania with sound. If these worked out—really worked out—I’d just use them here. And then consider smaller HomePods for Mexico.

The HomePods worked out.

Yes, they just work: When I power up the TV using the Apple TV remote and start playing content, they come on immediately, as God intended, acting like an extension of the Apple TV. Which they are, of course. The sound quality is fantastic: Yes, my Sonos Play:5s are louder, especially with the Sonos Sub subwoofer, but they’re bigger, too. (And more expensive, though those costs were sunk years ago.) But I’ve quietly just used the HomePods on some music nights and my wife hasn’t noticed a thing. They’re quite good.

(On the flip-side, I should note that the initial configuration was time-consuming and frustrating. This is apparently common, and it almost scuttled the whole experiment.)

And while I will continue to rationalize this purchase as noted above, my next steps were problematic. I had to explain to my wife what I’d done and was doing. And I started considering more changes to my music consumption. Changes I’m currently experimenting with.

And … This article is much longer than I intended. But let me just add that I’m not going to expel Sonos from my life in a knee-jerk over-reaction to this terrible company’s terrible decision-making. The speakers we have sound great, and except for the Beam, which is likely a TV problem, they work great too. (Assuming I stay out of the Sonos app.) We will keep using them. Until one day, we won’t. But there will be no new Sonos equipment coming into my house. And while I don’t recommend the unexpected new Apple-centric direction I’ve taken in our living room to others, I do always recommend being open to changing things up.

It’s not always possible, but finding something that just works is a great place to start. And a great reason to change.