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from the planned^Wscheduled-obsolescence dept.
Sonos, the consumer electronics company known for audio streaming and "smart" speakers, has decided that the music controller device, the "CR100", has reached end of life. By which they mean they will be pushing a software upgrade that will kill it.
... the next Sonos update in early April will turn off the CR100 connection -- unless you decide you don't want any updates at all. (Make sure you set that up in advance -- if you accept the update, you can't undo it and go back to using the old controller.)
That means if you want to keep on using a device you're happy with, you have to give up all the new features on all your Sonos speakers.
The company says its primary concern is the age of the lithium ion batteries in the controllers; although in that case an official device recall would be better than an update that stops them working - and a battery replacement scheme would handle the problem just as well.
Although the controller is old (Sonos stopped selling the CR100 in 2009) it is still perfectly functional for many users. However, according to a forum posting explaining the options these users will have to choose between the CR100 and the functionality of the rest of their system:
... opting not to update means you will not receive any new features or future security patches for your entire system – not just the CR100. For example, being on an unsupported version means that you might lose connectivity to music services, as is already the case for Google Play Music on the CR100. It is necessary to configure your system in advance to avoid future updates. Any update applied to the firmware and/or to the app, even unintentionally, is irreversible.
Originally spotted on The EEV Blog Youtube channel.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Monday February 12 2018, @04:36PM
It depends a lot on the complexity of the thing versus the off-the-shelf implementations. I moved to using an off-the-shelf WiFi AP a year or so ago, because the one my ISP provides is fast, has sensible firewall config, almost sensible DHCP config, and is less effort to maintain than the one I was using. For music in my living room and bedroom, I use musicpd, one on a NAS and one on a RPi (running Linux, because FreeBSD doesn't support the RPi3's audio output yet). The most complex part of configuring those was running the speaker cable and the result means that my partner and I can control the music from any of our laptops or phones and the RPi can mount the read-only NFS share containing all of my music and so can treat its flash as read-only most of the time. Without anything going to some random service that might go away at any time and is probably harvesting personal information while it's there.
sudo mod me up