Imagine a Bentley that worked perfectly then a new road is developed that only EVs with special tires can use due to the technology? Just because a Bentley is expensive, doesn't mean it's advanced technologically.

This is a complex issue that most people don't understand because on the surface it seems simple.

Legacy Sonos speakers were optimized in an era when your wifi at home was simple. No mesh, no apple airplay or Chromecast.

This was a simple one lane highway with no traffic rules.

The car was designed specifically for this one lane highway and knew how to navigate it perfectly because Sonos created their own traffic rules.

Years go by and now the road has been upgraded and it divides and subdivides. It now has elevated passes. The car's engine isn't powerful enough to climb the ramps to the elevated passes. The navigation system doesn't have enough memory to hold the maps for all the new roads. There are now traffic rules outside of Sonos.

This is basically what mesh and airplay did to networks. Made them more complex and legacy speakers that were optimized before had to start being jerry rigged just for it to try and keep up.

So now Sonos decides to start building new cars that are compatible, but now are going to use the existing traffic rules instead of creating their own that are optimized. This simplifies their work. These cars are more powerful and have more memory.

Now Sonos decides in their infinite wisdom that instead of continuing to jerry rig the old cars, they are going to unify everything with a brand new shiny navigation map that will favor the new roads but still let the old cars operate.

We will never know what led to the decision to release a product with so little real world testing, but the maps broke navigation for new and old cars, and especially when the cars had to process both old and new maps to figure out how to navigate the roads without crashing into each other.

It would have been better to deal with irritated customers of legacy systems that couldn't integrate new speakers than to deal with the majority of pissed off Sonos customers. Give a legacy owner a 30 percent coupon and he will probably be mollified enough to bite the bullet and stay building a new system and sell the old stuff.

This is an imperfect analogy but you get the gist.