There are a few issues here, and people are overly harsh on Sonos. They have just about the best update support in tech. Some of these devices have been around

There are a few issues here, and people are overly harsh on Sonos. They have just about the best update support in tech. Some of these devices have been around since 2005. They have been providing longer-term support than Apple has for their iPhones, for instance, which in turn is much better than you get from Android. Updates cost money, and Niley Patel speculates that Sonos is losing money on older devices with all of the updates they have been providing. But the devices still work, which is a testament to their build quality. Sonos needs to figure out a solution. There are some solutions: 1) I don't know how separated and abstracted their development process is, but, ideally, they would be able to continue to provide security updates, even if older devices don't get anything beyond that. But how many years should they do? 10? 20? 2) Sonos could sell extended support for devices that people have owned after X amount of years. Even charging $19.99 a year for a household would probably put this back in the black. If people are going to use Sonos products for 10-20 years and often have expensive and complicated setups, they should figure out some long-term support. 3) Sonos could start to become a SaaS company and largely lease their speakers. Microsoft is starting to do this with the Xbox, and it is a way around this issue. As hardware gets too old, Sonos would replace it with newer hardware. There is a reason that more and more software is subscription-based. 3) Sonos could come up with a premium subscription offering that bundles in long-term support. Eero has Eero+, which I find to be a good product, and it's how they get into the black on hardware sales. I'm working on a longer write up about this for Medium, but this isn't as easy of an issue to solve as many make it out to be. Providing infinite support for networked-based devices will eventually put you out of business. Sonos is the one dealing with this because they have been selling these speakers the longest, and they have people who are able to use their devices for a long time. One issue I think they are running into is that they used to update products pretty infrequently. They didn't even do small step updates to keep the CPU and networking equipment updated. This is particularly an issue with the 1st gen Play 5 that they sold for about a decade. People who bought a Play 5 15 years ago should not continue to expect support. People who bought one five years ago should. They have the same exact internals. That was a mistake, and they should make sure they are upgrading the internals in every device every three years or so. Had Sonos been doing this, they would be talking about far fewer products. Sonos has devices that range from 32 GBs of ram to 1024 GBs. The delta in their older stuff and their newer stuff in terms of tech is huge. This strategy is on their old CEO, and their new CEO believes Sonos has to update their stuff more often. It's probably going to take a few years for the update cadence to sort itself out, but in the meantime, they are kind of in a quagmire.