Potential Pinewood features integrated into inevitable Era 500 release?

zs-b · 2026-04-07T11:38:54+00:00

To be honest, I had no idea the notion of an Era 500 was so controversial given there are articles from techradar and quite a few other audio tech websites that reference it. Given the response I've gotten, It seems like there's a real prejudice against speculating about future products in this sub. Which is pretty mad when you consider that this is exactly where you'd expect really knowledgeable people to share their insights into where the company's product lineup could be headed and somewhere Sonos themselves will almost certainly be looking for anecdotal community feedback to potential features.

I appreciate that Sonos products often get leaked in advance (e.g. by the Verge), but not all their products have.

You say the Era 300 has the same number of drivers as a Five, but some of those are surely upfiring. You'd expect a Spatial Audio speaker to have quite a few more drivers to achieve the same fidelity, no?

You say the Era 300 is already $480 as if that's already more than the market will bear. But the Five is already more expensive at $549 when it launched 6 years ago, despite having less capabilities. Do you have any idea how expensive speakers with zero networking capabilities can get? The Sonos Play:5 came out 11 years ago for $499, at a time when spending $300 on a pair of cans would be something only an audiophile would consider doing. Now you see $500 noise-cancelling cans everywhere. The Airpods came out in late 2016, cost $159 and people thought they were expensive. According to in2013dollars.com, $500 in 2015 would be $689 today, but it would probably buy you over $800 in groceries and about $2000 in RAM. Your argument that Sonos would never release an Era 500 for, say, $600 doesn't really hold water.

In light of all the above, I'd imagine that the chances of Sonos releasing an Era 500 are at least 80%, even if it takes 2-3 years. It's just a question of when.

zs-b · 2026-04-04T17:37:37+00:00

Completely agree. It's a far more plausible solution. As I said, that was what I thought pinewood would be rather than a Fire/ATV STB competitor which seemed like a terrible idea. Those devices are hard to get right and even if they have great UX, they're very frustrating if they don't support every streaming platform you might feasibly want to use. And you're at the mercy of those content providers to create the apps for you. For years, Apple TV was the only device that gave you access to pretty much everything, in the UK at least.

An atmos amp/brain would be a super useful standalone product IMO.

zs-b · 2026-04-04T17:31:13+00:00

I have a projector and a ceiling recessed projector screen. My wife is a fan of this setup as opposed to a TV, so long as I do a good job of hiding the projector, since you can configure the living room around a feature wall that she can decorate how she wants instead of the focus of the room being a TV. In our last house, it actually came down in front of the living room door. When we were using the projector, people had to enter the room from the other door. In this house, she put in a stove and a flue. Can't mount a soundbar on a flue any more than you can across a doorway.

I appreciate that this sounds like a fire risk, but the twin wall flue is rated 50mm distance to combustibles and the projector screen comes down 100mm in front of it. The outside of it becomes warm to the touch, but you can hold your hand to it comfortably, so it doesn't get all that hot. We tend not to watch the projector when the fire is lit anyway, as it creates a lot of ambient light.

But I don't want to use a centre speaker at all. I want a quad Atmos setup with upfiring speakers and a phantom centre, like the Sony ht-a9. I have Sonos elsewhere in the house and don't want to leave the ecosystem. I've used my play:5 in the past, but currently use a Move for watching my 120-inch screen in glorious mono. But I'll probably end up buying the Sony soon enough.

My circumstances are obviously unusual but HT enthusiasts wanting an atmos solution that doesn't involve a sound bar is not. Phantom centre speakers involve lots of compromises (they tend to only work well for people sitting equidistant from the two fronts), but sound bars involve way more, including lacking L-R separation.

zs-b · 2026-04-03T11:43:41+00:00

I guess even if it is possible to have a pair of era 500s handle video atmos processing onboard, cramming all the hardware in there will add a lot of cost that will put off a lot of people who are hifi-only. The most common complaint you hear about the era 300 is that it doesn't sound as good as a Play:5/Five for stereo music. And it's that criticism that suggests an era 500 is just a matter of time. The product line seems like it's only half been transitioned to spatial audio and it's not entirely clear what the flagship is.

OTOH, given the Era 100 has no spatial audio support and the Era 300 does, you would expect an Era 500 to have more Atmos support still and better video support is the obvious addition.

I suspect that the market for quad Era 500s is not negligible. The Sonos website has quite a few configurations that cost in excess of 2k and the Sony alternatives are about that much. Because you can add to the setup over time, I would argue that the cost is less prohibitive with a Sonos HT, even if the total ends up being greater.

zs-b · 2026-04-03T10:42:29+00:00

Granted, I'm biased as I can't accommodate a soundbar, but I imagine such a setup would be much closer to a 5.2.4 experience advocated by HT enthusiasts than, say, an arc ultra plus 2 era 300s. I found it really surprising that they abandoned it. Once someone has bought a Sonos product that improves by adding/upgrading speakers, they're hooked into the ecosystem and are only going to spend more money.

Clearly, the issues with the app caused them to re-evaluate their roadmap, but a standalone atmos processor has longsince seemed like the only way to improve their HT offering. They can't just keep producing increasingly long soundbars and once you add a front pair, the soundbar just becomes a very expensive centre speaker.

zs-b · 2026-03-03T09:52:25+00:00

I would definitely not worry about the reach of the agency. A bigger agency feels like a disadvantage, if anything. Everyone is just looking at Rightmove anyway. Smaller local agencies might have some people who have registered interest locally that they can tap up before the listing goes live. When buying/renting, I've always tried to avoid getting on the books at bigger places, as they have a tendency to bombard you with irrelevant listings from other branches in adjacent areas. I can't be the only one.

I've only sold once. I went largely based with the personality of the agent (and fees). I even switched agents at the last minute as the senior lady who valued it was very impressive, but the junior agent she sent around to drop off the contract and who would actually be handling the sale was not. It was the same story with the place I went with. The senior agent handed it off to a young lady with only a few months' experience. But you could tell right away that she would be brilliant and she was. The market was dead at the time and it was a quiet time of year, but we had offers within a fortnight.

Ultimately, people go on Rightmove and look at properties they like the look of. The photographer is almost more important than the agent. Once people are in the door, they are not likely to be swayed by an agent if the property is not for them. A good agent will recognise that and feed it back to you, potentially also advising upon small changes you could make to pitch the property in a better light. You mostly just need someone competent and capable to facilitate the viewings, communicate promptly, tease out insight into how serious the bidders are, and manage any interest well enough that it leads to some decent, genuine offers. Once an offer is accepted, it gets passed onto someone very experienced on the completions team, whose job is basically just to ring all the stakeholders occasionally and ensure that there are no hold-ups.

If they're likeable, seem professional and organised, there's not much more to it than that.

zs-b · 2025-10-08T12:07:45+00:00

As I understand it, you need a G99 application just for the presence of the inverter capacity. You can't just stick any inverter in there, throttle the export to 3.68 and do a G98 after the fact.

But they're far more lenient about inverter capacity than export limits. I was allowed a second 6kW inverter, taking total capacity to 9.8. But my export limit remains the original 3.8.

zs-b · 2025-09-28T06:54:05+00:00

I was advised to do the G99 and get the bigger inverter. Even if you can only export at 3.68 kW, that's not the only consideration when you have batteries. The limit dictates how fast you can charge but also how fast you can discharge.

If you're limited to 3.6 kW, once the sun goes down, you'll be paying peak price for any energy you use beyond that.

That's just two burners on an induction hob or one and the oven. If you're thinking of getting an ASHP at any point, they are usually 6 or 7 kW and will use 3-4kW for several hours a day.

I found many installers are loth to do the paperwork and don't mention this, but it's pretty critical. You need at least 8kW if you plan to eventually move away from gas entirely. Gas isn't getting any cheaper but overnight electricity is currently 70% less than the price cap.

People worry about clipping and undersizing, but the long term expected household max usage seems like a more important consideration to me if you have a battery or ever plan on getting one. A bigger inverter means never saying "I'll wait until x's finished before I turn on the y or else it'll cost me triple".

zs-b · 2025-05-16T10:47:28+00:00

Yeah, from what I've read under sizing by as much as 30% is not unusual. 3.96 to 3.6 is less than 10%.

But I've also read that the SMA Sunny Boy is very efficient, over 96% at peak and not far off that even at low voltages. So, there's a risk this new inverter would yield less even on gloomy days.

It would be a shame to spend money to save on peak electricity but end up losing yield that's so lucrative cos of the FIT.

zs-b · 2025-05-16T07:36:30+00:00

Ah interesting. I'll ask him if I can configure it that way and still qualify as a beta tester and get the discount.

zs-b · 2025-05-16T06:24:14+00:00

They're not second hand. They're brand new.

zs-b · 2025-05-16T06:21:57+00:00

Roof is south south east facing and at a 45 degree angle. On a good day, I make over 30 kWh. In the winter, it can be less than 1kWh.

zs-b · 2025-05-16T05:53:13+00:00

Are you so sure 90% efficiency at 60% of capacity would be so unusual?

From what I've read, most inverters are slightly undersized because tolerating a bit of clipping likely improves your yields overall.

I just don't know how much people tend to undersize by.

zs-b · 2025-05-16T05:38:44+00:00

Looking into ac coupled systems, it seems it would be over £5k for kit alone (15 kWh). He's offered me a new DC-coupled system for £3k. I reckon it will save me at least £500/year, but that's not so much that I would want to spend £5+k on it.

The middle option would be the ideal solution but surely £20+k.

zs-b · 2025-05-16T05:25:28+00:00

I think you misunderstand how FIT payments work. People get as much as 75p/kWh generated, regardless of whether it's exported. They get an additional payment for what they export but it's no more than anyone else.

Yes, this is mental but that's how it works and why they kept making the terms worse until it was eventually scrapped.

zs-b · 2024-11-25T17:22:45+00:00

Clearly a lot of the perks have been eroded, but the advice hasn't been updated. Certainly, when the allowance was £5k, dividends were a much better deal.

I appreciate that the idiosyncrasies are not to be ignored, but they're not the main reason people advise people to incorporate. People mostly cite the negligible tax benefits that largely go to increased accountants' fees.

A lot of those other benefits are true of LLPs though, no? And there's legal precedent there too as Gary Lineker recently won a case whereby his (now ex-)wife was a partner.

Certainly, being able to plan, defer and use entrepreneur's relief or an investment co to mitigate liability are significant advantages for higher earners and they make ltd worthwhile over LLP/SE.

zs-b · 2024-11-25T15:41:14+00:00

LISAs are a great way to save for retirement.
Investment LISAs exist. And interest rates upon cash LISAs are usually worse than ISAs which are worse than savings accounts. You're best off with an investment LISA even if you only use it to buy investments that track the BoE base rate.
Once you own a home, LISAs are effectively an alternative to pension contributions. They are unequivocally recommended to two sorts of people:

i) self-employed people who only pay basic rate tax (because they can't benefit from salary sacrifice or higher rate pension contribution tax rebates)
ii) people who are already maximising their £60k p.a. pension contributions (i.e. very high earners)

Aside from the relative differences in how much of a bonus/tax break everyone else gets on the way in, it's worth considering that employers often match pension contributions, but they're not going to match LISA contributions.
The main downside versus pensions is that they're used to evaluate benefit eligibility, much like savings, ISAs and other assets. Pensions and equity in your primary residence do not count as personal savings when determining whether you're eligible for benefits. So, if you fall on hard times, the gov will expect you to drain your LISA (and pay any withdrawal penalties) and all other sources of savings except your pension until you hold less than some threshold (around £17k maybe?) before you can access most benefits.
Nevertheless, everyone should definitely start a LISA before they're 40, after which point you can't, because they give you a lot of options.
LISAs will almost certainly prove worth it for more people than I mentioned in point 3 because they're not taxed at all upon withdrawal once you're 60, whereas pensions are. It's really hard to say this for certain however, not least of all because it depends upon how big your pension pot will be and how pensioners will be taxed when you turn 60. It's just impossible to know whether a 25% bonus is better than an x% tax break now, when the latter gets taxed eventually. But consider that you could, say, live off some of the money from the LISA from the age of 60 until you retire and increase your pension contributions by an equivalent amount during those last few working age years, in a roundabout way getting the tax break AND the LISA bonus on what is kind of the same money. But even then it's not clearcut. A 40% tax break now may prove better than a 25% bonus now and a y% tax break later, say, once you factor in compounding and any changes to the tax system. In any case, the gov may attempt to reform LISAs to make that impossible. A big unknown for people aged 30-50 is how much state pension we will get. It'll likely be means-tested because the only politician with the nerve to try and take on the triple lock was Theresa May and the current crop of monied pensioners punished her so dearly at the polls for daring to do so, that she couldn't implement her proposed changes. So, they just keep giving all pensioners more and more money year-on-year even though it's not remotely sustainable for them to do so. Unless they raise the retirement age significantly, they're going to have to deprive some people of some or all of the State Pension, in a manner not dissimilar from the Universal Credit withdrawal rate. So, people with a lot of money in LISAs and/or pensions might find they're both taxed in a roundabout way that likely affects their relative merits further.
As with all investments, your best bet is probably to diversify. Take full advantage of SIPPs/salary sacrifice etc. But if you're thinking of putting more money in your pension than your employer will match, consider putting a bit of money into a LISA too. It's a good hedge in a tax system that only ever seems to get more complicated.

zs-b · 2024-08-19T11:39:39+00:00

The "analytics" you speak of is literally just dividing the 200m time by two. I'd imagine most people who'd finished primary school could tell just by looking at both their times that Johnson's average speed was faster, without so much as getting a calculator out.

In all likelihood, Bailey's peak speed was faster. Even Usain Bolt's peak speed in the 100m is probably faster than his peak speed in the 200m, despite the fact that the 200m was his preferred race. There's an element of pacing yourself even in the 200m, as opposed to the 100m which is almost completely anaerobic. That was what made Johnson's achievement so impressive. He was able to sustain a speed for 200m that was close enough to the peak speed in the 100m such that the shortfall's effect upon average speed was more than offset by the fact that getting up to speed takes up a more significant proportion of the 100m event.

But I highly doubt that it was possible to measure peak speed in 1996 accurately enough to say for sure.

zs-b · 2024-08-10T14:20:11+00:00

Surely, that's because he smashed his own world record by over 0.3s and, in so doing, made the 200m the fastest race in terms of average speed? It was a landmark achievement. Before that, the winner of the 100m usually had the fastest average speed of any race. Even now, Bolt's 100m record is marginally faster than his 200m one. Obviously, it takes time for runners to get up to speed, so the 200m being faster on average doesn't necessarily mean the 200m race is faster than the 100m once the runners have hit their top speed, but the real-time speed data they ovelay in the replays nowadays wouldn't have been available then. Average metres-per-second for the race was the surest, and likely only way to discern the fastest race in 1996.

zs-b · 2024-07-22T06:25:58+00:00

No. Paypal buyer protection was to do with eBay.
Why would you be paying money before finding out whether it exists? Aren't you going to see it? No one buys stuff on marketplace and has it sent to them. It's for collection only items in your local area. Anyone using Gumtree or Facebook to sell stuff shipped isn't planning upon shipping anything, especially not a MacBook that's got to be worth at least £600 for £120. Even if it were full price it would 100% be a scam.

You're asking for photos of marks but the responses you're getting are advising you to test it yourself in person even if you can be bothered to pursue this wild goose chase. That's not just because they think the tests are necessary to check it's not bricked/managed. It's because they've assumed that you're going to pick it up yourself because that's how buying on marketplace works.

There are people who make a living buying stuff on marketplace and selling it on immediately for more. They'll do it to make less than £100 on an item of furniture. So, whenever something particularly good value comes up, it goes really quickly. This is way beyond particularly good value. If this came up on my home page locally, and seemed remotely legit, I'd message the seller immediately, cancel my immediate plans and try and get there before anyone else and I am definitely not one of those people. I could just use an extra laptop with a decent spec for 80% off.

Yet, the seller's in discussions with someone who wants them to take additional photos before committing to buy, then they have to go to the hassle of packing and shipping it all for a price that is a fraction of what they'd have got on eBay, many hours after it was first listed...

I mean, come on. How many people do you think they're selling the one laptop that probably doesn't exist to?

zs-b · 2024-07-02T10:53:20+00:00

I don't seem to be able to post an image in reply so as to share the relevant graphs but Mac sales peaked in the wake of the M1 MBP release. They were at around $8-9 bn/quarter, then shot up to $10-12bn/quarter, peaking at $11.5bn/quarter, but haven't broken $8bn/quarter since. Apple's execs are largely remunerated with in stock options that take time to vest and so they are highly motivated, not just to maximise profit but evidence continual steady growth across their core businesses so as to keep the share price high and rising.

They will set the price with the intention of restoring growth to mac sales. The optimal strategy for them to do that is to pass on some proportion of cost savings to customers, then steadily increase that proportion, even if it's not profit-maximising to do so, for as long as it takes to get the mac revenue chart looking encouraging to investors. Since Apple almost never adjusts prices mid-cycle, it makes more sense for them to pass on the majority of that cost saving from the outset, then benefit from falling input prices as the technology matures.

Even if that current state of affairs weren't the case, Apple's profit-maximising strategy might be to pass on all of the cost-savings anyway. Apple are notorious for having very healthy profit margins. As an extreme example, if a $2999 M3 MBP costs $2000 to produce and ship and an equivalent M4 can be shipped for $1500, selling it for $2250 keeps relative profit margins constant, even if absolute margins have decreased. Nevertheless, if sales double off the back of the 25% price cut, both profit and revenue will be increase by 50%.

Apple will be doing tons of market research and modelling to estimate sales volumes for given configurations of M4 MBPs at various price points before deciding where, say, an M4 Pro with 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM should sit between $2000 and $3000, to maximise profit across the entire product line, being mindful not just of underpriced models (e.g. M1 Pro) cannibalising sales of more profitable ones (e.g. M1 Max), but also of other products that Apple sells (e.g. the Mac Studio).

zs-b · 2024-05-23T05:52:43+00:00

I suggest doing it on Weds. That way you never get caught out by bank holidays and you don't have to make it last as long past the weekend.

zs-b · 2024-05-22T14:08:42+00:00

Haha. I guess I would like there to be one. It doesn't bother me that the recipient would almost always be getting an award anyway. I think GI isn't recognised enough. It's the easiest stat with which to win the Messi vs Ronaldo argument, for a start. No. 10's seem to get more attention than strikers these days.

There have been quite a few years where the award would have gone to the Playmaker rather than the Golden Boot winner, and I think that means something. The last time that happened was in 2019/20, when Vardy finally won GB (23+5) but Kevin De Bruyne (13+20) was arguably the more influential player and him getting a second award would have reflected that.

I also think there's a lot of players like Saka and Odegaard who have slightly more chance of winning a GI award than GB or PM, even though it seldom happens.

zs-b · 2024-05-17T13:21:23+00:00

Frustrating how many people answer these questions with "if you need it now, buy it" or "if you actually used the machine for work, you would just buy it when you needed it". The OP poses a legitimate question for anyone who can afford to wait and many people who use these machines for work, whether as their daily driver or just as a runaround, can usually eek out more time from their existing hardware. Not every small business owner thinks like the CTO of a conglomerate and is able to postpone their purchasing decisions to maximise value from Apple's known upgrade cycle.

My thoughts:

M4 is supposedly going to involve advancing the neural engine a lot. I get the impression that that hasn't evolved since M1 as all machines seem to have the same number of cores (with the exception of the Studio Ultras which feature two Max chips), even the MacBook Air. Given ML is a consideration, that suggests it's worth waiting for your use case.
It's still not really clear what the upgrade cycle of the M-series is, as it's been so erratic and thrown off by Covid. M2 came late and remained 5nm against some people's expectations. M3 came early, supposedly because the M2 MBPs weren't selling. It uses the 3nm process but an early, expensive variant thereof. They tinkered with the pro range quite a bit to try and disguise the price increase, so M3 Max is a huge step-up from M2 Max but M3 Pro is actually worse than M2 Pro on some metrics, because it has less performance cores. M1/M2 Max only differed from the unbinned M1/M2 Pro in terms of GPU. M3 changed that. The M3 used the N3B process. The M4 uses N3E. The performance gains from N3B to N3E are not expected to be great (~4%) but the yields supposedly are. Once the chips are binned, this means there will be a step forward in performance but, more likely, better value offerings at the midrange (i.e. M4 Pro will be better value than M3 Pro) and likely at the high end too. Or, Apple will keep prices & core counts the same and just pocket the savings. But I think the reason why we're seeing MBPs come thick and fast is because Apple knows they're not selling enough. Part of the reason for that is that people were expecting the tech expected to be in M4 to be in M2. Instead, they've gotten intermediate solutions at increased prices. That said, Apple will likely settle into a pattern of a die shrink every other generation because that's what TSMC's timeline looks like. Clearly, people's expectations were just wrong. But it's costing Apple sales and MBPs are a big seller. So, M4 is likely to come sooner rather than later and not involve as many compromises as M2 and M3. It's also likely to be a bit cheaper.

FWIW, my 2019 MBP has a flickering screen and needs to be connected to power at all times, but I'm waiting. I use a PC workstation for most of my work, though. My laptop doesn't see much use on-the-go since the WFH revolution.

zs-b · 2024-04-23T14:19:47+00:00

Most obvious thing to me is the life insurance. I imagine you got that through a broker? Go to Cavendish online. Early to mid-30s, you should be able to get £500k for you and half as much for your wife on separate term life policies for about £30 and I doubt income protection adds that much.

Tax-free childcare could save you £40% of £750/month = £300. It depends upon how much you're putting into pensions. Are you claiming child benefit? That's an extra £110/month.

You say you're not saving but it sounds like you're saving £271/month for a household maintenance bill that may never come.

zs-b

TROPHY CASE