I'm sure that such behaviour would be actionable, unless purchasers had accepted a license agreement that specifically stated that the equipment would cease to function at the end of its supported life.
Most, including me, skimmed at best the license agreement and could not quote it now. License agreements/EULAs and such are another sore point with me; pages and pages of legalese that virtually nobody can follow let alone remember. A topic (rant) for another thread.
Technically they are not saying it won't cease to function, just that no updates will be possible, and functionality will be limited. An upgrade or two ago not all my devices upgraded right away with the result that I could not do some basic library functions like adding or searching. That's pretty broken in my book, but may meet the letter of the law (and I certainly do not know the law, here or across the pond). And of course if you add a new device you cannot update with older devices on the network, meaning you either cripple the new unit or pay to buy all new units. A lot of us have a number of units (seen 12 to 20 and more on the SONOS forum) so even at 30% off that is a lot of money to replace units that are working just fine now (and cost a lot less five years ago). One guy listed over 30 devices.
Users are livid as you might expect but hard to say if SONOS management is watching or cares. Their stock has been going mostly up and a few large investors have joined. Their last report included verbiage saying they needed to more-or-less get people to buy new gear; this may have been their solution. Remains to be seen if the backlash makes them change course. They could come out with a special deal that garners acceptable losses, blow off their older customers (who might not buy that much new gear anyway), or come up with a solution that lets new and old co-exist. I assume they could structure the code to do that but no idea at what cost. That would seem to me to be the cleanest solution but I've no idea how practical. Several folk suggest producing some sort of hub that lets you isolate new and old devices on separate in-house networks and run both SW versions but that could also be a mess.
I probably have the skills to set up a RaspberryPi and/or some sort of server scheme but making it work over the whole house and friendly enough for my wife (the kids are probably better able to handle it than I!) seems challenging. A friend of mine is using a Python library (SoCo) to control his, another option. Most people are not that technical and many have large investments in SONOS gear so I could not begin to guess the actual fallout. I suspect there will be a lot of grumbling (rage, even) that will die down and new users will come on board. As far as they are concerned the whole thing may blow over in a few months or a year. But remember the Pinto...
