I’m so mad at myself for staying with Sonos, but Paul is right - the quality is great, and the market was bare back when they slipped up. Plus I’ve already got both feet in the system. Hope they continue to make good on past transgressions.
On the other side of that spectrum, Windows. It’s nice that Microsoft finally appears to be making an effort with that product but I think it may be too little, too late. The only Windows system left in my home is a company-issued laptop that I loathe to try and rouse from it’s sleep state. On top of that, many of my non-enthusiast gaming friends have also jumped ship in the last year, and my parents have rid their last Windows PC for a couple of Chromebooks and one old desktop running Aurora to interface with a CnC machine. I anticipate continued slippage in their market share despite any continued effort.
I used to religiosly read the VS Code blog and monthly patch notes but ever since it moved to weekly, I can’t keep up and I no longer care. I have also since started using Zed as my daily text editor.
The real upside of Sonos in the year 2026 is that all their speakers are network addressable. Not only can I control them with Home Assistant and my AI, I can route my AI voices to them.
In case anyone is interested in driving their house mates crazy, I use Breeze text-to-speech, an open weight model that has really good voices and allows for prompts to add prosody to the output, and can clone voices using 25 second clips. I’ve been giving my agents fun voices by sending them clips from YouTube.
Breeze runs on my mac Mini, and I use Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil to route the voices to any speaker in my house (including all the Sonos devices). Airfoil Satellite on my iPhone allows me to change the routing on the fly as I move around. It also routes into my hearing aids for when I don’t want Lisa to murder me.
Here’s a Leo clone reading the above in a happy, excited voice:
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