Sonos is betting that consumers will pay up to 33% more for a new soundbar that hasn’t yet been released, despite the fact that several brands like JBL offer great value soundbars at a price significantly lower than what the new Sonos offering is expected to cost.
The US audio company is battling a wave of complaints about its software, particularly its latest app, with some customers so angry they are calling for class action against the company.
says its next-generation home theater product, currently codenamed Lasso, is “ultra-premium” and that the main difference is that the new offering will feature technology from Mayht, a Dutch startup acquired by Sonos last year for $190 million.
Sonos, which deliberately leaks new products to distract from the problems, is currently developing a soundbar that is expected to cost more than $2,000, despite custom installers in Australia abandoning the use of Sonos in homes with custom systems.
We originally announced a price of $1,900, but that seems a little shy.
On Sonos’ community social media pages, Matty Jake wrote of the company’s latest troubles: “If ever a situation called for a class action lawsuit, this is it.”
The company sells its customers expensive hardware systems in multiple units, bundles them with a software ecosystem to use them efficiently, and then radically changes the software in an automatically updating environment.
For the record, ChannelNews has a box of expensive Sono speakers, including the famous Play 5 speakers, which are now completely useless as network speakers. The only sound is emitted if you connect a record player or an external source to listen to music.
It seems we missed the message that Sonos had the right to make these speakers completely redundant when they were purchased.
At the time, Sonos touted its Play 5 speakers as “the best network speakers” on the market.
Matty Jake then wrote with other Sono owners to support his call for class action: “Unsuspecting customers are losing access to extensive and essential media sources and features that significantly diminish the value of their expensive equipment and/or render it untenable for uses they had every reason to believe they would continue to have.”
“(Sonos) customers who wanted to continue meeting these essential needs were forced to sell the company’s equipment they had no intention of selling at a loss and purchase competing equipment.”
The behavior of this company (Sonos) indicates that the choices made to remove features were part of an intentional plan to harm the product experience of many users in favor of other products.”
“It would be like selling someone a car and then updating the operating system so that the steering wheel is controlled by AI rather than manually, because that would mean more profit for the company.”
He claims that if they fix this problem with their new version of terrible software, how much damages are owed to each customer for lost time and undue harm?
“The market value of my hardware fleet, which I had no intention of replacing, is probably $7,000 to $8,000. How much have others invested that they think they have to leave SONOS?”
As for their latest new soundbar offering, its components and speakers have been completely revised and redesigned” and these improvements will include the inclusion of Bluetooth connectivity, which is absent from the previous model currently on sale at JB Hi Fi.
Most soundbars and speakers today come with Bluetooth.
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