Re: Why indeed...
Oops! I appear to have tweaked the nose of some who have sipped of the Sonos Kool-Aid.
Being fair, I suppose I was a tad harsh.
But...
I'm certainly no high-end audiophile (far from it) and most of my audio stuff is unashamedly low priced and low end. I've spent far more on instruments than any hi-fi stuff (even though my instruments are, themselves, largely from the low end of the price spectrum). I do, however, stand by the general drift of my earlier hyperbole.
A few years ago, I actually looked into buying some Sonos stuff. Someone elsewhere in these comments has already mentioned the convenience factor, which is a fair point and was the angle I was coming from. So - knowing three or four people who had various different Sonos products (including one guy who had spent a fairly significant amount putting Sonos speakers, etc. in several rooms of his house) - I asked if I could go along and have a listen to some of my favourite bits and pieces of music on them.
Now, I suppose if I'm being scrupulously fair about it, it's possible that all of these folks had things configured incorrectly or set up the wrong way or some such, but the overall impression that I was left with was that the Sonos stuff just didn't sound very good. Even compared to the relatively cheap and basic gear that I had at home, never mind some of the stuff I've heard over the years in the homes of more serious musicians and audiophile types.
As background music while you were doing something else, or to provide music for a bit of a party, yeah, the Sonos kit was fine. Similarly, if you're using it to provide the audio for your TV or home cinema set up (maybe). But if you actually want to sit down and listen to the music, as music, with no distractions, I really didn't rate any of it at all. And certainly not at the kind of inflated prices that Sonos were charging.
So I decided not to pursue that particular avenue after all, before I even thought about the issue of product longevity and the possibility of the manufacturer simply pulling support for things after only a few years.
Under the circumstances, I guess I dodged a bullet. Even if they had sounded much better (as they should have done, given the price) I'd have been royally pi...er...peeved had I bought into them only for Sonos to pull some of the stunts that they have in the last couple of years.