This is what annoyed me about Google discontinuing the Chromecast Audio. Buying expensive speakers with the wireless functionality built in never made any sense to me, given that you're tied to what will soon be old technology and the chance of it working flawlessly years down the line is pretty much nil. And that's what we're seeing now. As new features and protocols get introduced, older hardware can't keep up.
But with the Chromecast Audio, you could achieve the same effect as a Sonos (Wifi streaming, synced multi-room audio, etc.) with a $30-40 piece of add-on hardware. And if standards change or it ever loses support, you just need to replace that one part rather than ditch a perfectly good speaker and amp. Not to mention, dollar for dollar, you can get vastly better sounding speakers than Sonos for the same money. But Google stopped selling it so that's not really an option anymore.
Also, one article I read said that all of your Sonos equipment will be kept on the same firmware, so if you have one or two older speakers in your system, then your newer hardware won't update either. I guess that makes sense, but it's pretty ridiculous.
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