Comment by Wafje
2 days ago
Bose should not receive praise for this move. Bose only took this action after community backlash. In an older version of their end-of-life announcement, most functionality of the speaker systems would have removed and transformed the devices into dumb-speakers/amps.
Good that they changed their statement and took the right action. Even better for the community for stepping up and 'forcing' Bose to do so.
Sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20251201051242/https://www.bose.... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/bose-soundtouch-home...
> Bose should not receive praise for this move. Bose only took this action after community backlash.
They received the backlash, they responded to it by properly addressing the criticism and doing the right thing. It should be praised. Especially since it wasn't some PR-centric damage control, but an actual direct address of the specific points their original approach was criticized for.
Compare Bose's response to that of Sonos (another large techy audio brand). Sonos had an absolutely massive backlash recently (within the past few years iirc) in regards to deprecating software support for their older speakers that I'd read about everywhere (including HN) for months and months.
Afaik, it didn't lead to Sonos doing the right thing in the end (unlike the scenario at hand here), despite the online outrage being way more widespread than in the Bose's case.
Agreed. When someone does something, hears the complaints, and changes, it's charitable to bin them as someone who made a mistake and wants to improve.
Not every company deserves this charity, but the social media default nowadays is to deny that charity to everyone, and to go scorched-earth.
Even if they don't want to improve, and just do it reluctantly, it's best to reward them for doing something good, because otherwise they'll have no incentive to do something good in the future.
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Sonos gets backlash every few years and they don’t change. It’s almost as if consumers are shit at boycotting companies.
Which does make Boses move even more impressive when you think about how it wouldn’t have affected their business to do nothing.
A few years back Sonos was going to EoL and brick a huge humber of their "legacy" devices and that those devices would prevent new ones from getting updated. After backlash they reversed their decision and all devices remained functional: https://www.businessinsider.com/sonos-device-support-ceo-apo...
However, I wouldn't expect anything from Sonos at this point in time.
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And some people have been advocating for Apple to do something similar with old iPhones and tablets for a decade, and there’s no sign. Their privilege but not great for the world.
Would you elaborate? Because my understanding is that Apple has offered outstanding support for older devices in terms of iOS support for quite old devices.
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Yeah, it’s good to see a sensible response to community pressure here. While I take the point that they only conceded after pressure, at least they did concede. I’ve upgraded their brand in my mind from “planned obsolescence e-waste villain” to “cares about PR and will do the right thing while being watched”. I think the only truly trustworthy companies regarding end of support handling in consumer tech are those whose brand is explicitly tied to openness / repairablity ala home assistant, framework laptops, etc…
Sadly those tend to be niche companies already focused on power users, but any other firms should be considered guilty until proven innocent of enshittification (forced bricking, closed source, subscription creep, privacy violations and data brokering).
> Bose should not receive praise for this move.
Remind me of any other vendor in recent history that end of lifed a hardware product and then open sourced it whether they got backlash or not. Because I can’t think of a single one.
So yes, Bose absolutely deserves praise.
Google refunded all Stadia purchases, both hardware and software, after they discontinued the platform/product. Then they added functionality (the ability to operate the controller as a generic Bluetooth controller) afterward to keep the hardware from becoming e-waste.
Cheaper than the class action which would've followed given Stadia's relatively short life.
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Logitech are my go-to example of a company that does the right thing and deserves recognition for it. They kept their squeezebox.com servers going for a decade after they discontinued their Squeezebox hardware audio players. At the same time, they funded a maintainer to keep improving the open source server software that users can self-host on multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, macOS, Raspberry Pi). Two years ago, they finally shut down the squeezebox.com servers that they were running but the server software is still being actively maintained: https://lyrion.org/
I recall there is also an open source and hardware speaker but not 100% sure it's from Logitech.
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Arguably HP open-sourced webOS, but they did also got backlash because they killed that entire product line without warning.
They killed the product line almost immediately after release. And they fired basically everyone they acquired from palm.
It was a real shitty move.
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Except the title is wrong; Bose didn't open source anything.
Pebble?
Don't punish the behavior you want to see. Would we rather they defaulted there? Sure. But it's arguably an even better signal to see that they're willing to listen to their customers even when there is no direct financial incentive for them.
Their financial incentive is negative. They were hoping to force everyone to buy new speakers, driving sales. But if the community is able to get open source firmware to run spotifyd on them, there is a non-zero (not everyone, but it's non-zero) amount of people that will just not buy new speakers from them.
If they can make this OS story go viral, then they stand to have a lot of customers defect from their competitors even people who would never really care about open source.
Could easily be net positive.
It's not negative, though, or at least they don't think so. The fact that they are doing this OSS release means that they believe any loss of new sales would be dwarfed by a loss of goodwill if they'd bricked the old devices.
Certainly goodwill is harder to quantify.
This is why I said "direct". This is an indirect financial incentive, and there are other indirect financial incentives at play here (as others have noted).
> Their financial incentive is negative. They were hoping to force...
Maybe?
People stuck with Bose bricks might show a preference for non-Bose replacements.
People who thought Bose speakers would stay useful longer might prefer Bose, or be willing to pay for a more expensive Bose speaker model.
(Yes, I agree that some PHB's at Bose were almost certainly imagining that their customers would be forced to re-purchase Bose speakers. I'm questioning the validity of their initial assumptions.)
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I've got a simple formula in life for when people do things beneficial to me: I praise them for it and encourage them to keep it going. If someone does things antagonistic to my interests, and then corrects course in reaction to objection, they can be sure they're going to be rewarded. This has worked for me.
If your belief is that some other tactic works, then I can see why you'd do that. For my part, carrot + stick has always worked better than stick + more stick.
It works on dogs, children, and adults, the inability to praise the good because they did something bad prior feels like more of the online black/white moralism that used to characterise Twitter dogpiles.
Well they still did it, thus praise (though less effusive than if they had just done it initially).
Bose: does something bad. People: complain. Bose: undoes what they did and does something slightly better. You: complain.
I'm not sure I get the logic here.
Slowly but steadily I'm comprehending why companies are getting tired of some people. No matter what companies do, people will always complain. Don't get me wrong, there's always room for more improvement, but a slight complement for their slight improvement won't hurt anyone + a change in tone from complaining to suggesting improvements would be a nice bonus.
I don't understand this attitude. Bose listened to feedback, and responded in a positive way.
That's a good outcome for the community, and refusing to "praise" Bose's actions just because they didn't originally do what you wanted is petty and churlish.
And?
When presented with information that you're acting in bad faith, if you choose to change: that is praiseworthy.
It's very brave to take that in, and not worry about "brand damage" or "appearing weak". It's brave to even challenge yourself when someone tells you you're wrong. It's entirely admirable.
It's the default human behaviour to double-down.
Why should Bose not get credit for this? If you are saying that people should treat them the same regardless of whether they listen to their consumers or not, then why would they ever bother listening to the consumers?
Also remember that there is no believer like a convert. A community helping guide a company towards open source culture could make for a very strong ally.
Then again I know nothing about Bose’s open source culture so take it with a grain of salt.
> transformed the devices into dumb-speakers/amps
Isn't that still gonna happen now?
From [1]:
What will no longer work:
• Presets (preset buttons on the product and in the app)
Of course Bluetooth and AirPlay continues to work, but isn't that what a "dumb speaker" is?
[1] https://www.bose.com/soundtouch-end-of-life
Bose's original plan was to remove all WiFi-dependent functionality (no AirPlay and no Spotify Connect)-- while they wouldn't quite be "dumb speakers" at that point (since Bluetooth would've still worked), it would've turned them into pretty much just overcomplicated Bluetooth speakers.
> Isn't that still gonna happen now?
No, if you read farther down the announcement, they also say this:
> Open-source options for the community
> We’re making our technical specifications available so that independent developers can create their own SoundTouch-compatible tools and features. The documentation is available here: https://assets.bosecreative.com/m/496577402d128874/original/...
So, they're going to strip the "smart" functionality from the app that Bose provides, but they're letting people continue to use it if they want to.
I've read that document. As I understand, the "smart" capabilities are exactly the presets. Those need their server to function. Do you see anything saying otherwise?
Well maybe they should receive praise for changing their mind. I get your point but they could have doubled down.
I believe that if someone (or some company) changes their ways we should accept that and not condemn them forever.
Honestly. Bro needs to chill. Big companies don't really do anything unless they recieve backlash. That's just how it works.
Is the world a better place before or after Bose decided to change course?
Ugh, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
There is no winning or redemption after getting cancelled it so seems.