No suburban paradise is complete without whole-house music. In setting up the latest here in Lincoln, Massachusetts I plugged in a Sonos ZP100 that the company’s records show I purchased in 2006 (yay for the RDBMS!). It failed to boot. I called the company on a Sunday, was connected to a competent native speaker of English, and offered the chance to pay about $150 (including shipping, tax, etc.) to swap the dead eight-year-old box for a working new one (retail price: $500). Of course they are sending me the new one right away and I will return the old one in the box that they provide.
Now my only complaint about Sonos is that they don’t make dishwashers…
Sonos is a very nice and slick off the shelf solution with good support but nowadays (unlike 2006) it is possible to piece together much cheaper solutions today using bluetooth or wifi and your phone, computer, etc.
For example, the Rocki http://www.myrocki.com/ device turns any set of computer speakers into a streaming wifi player for $49. Bluetooth audio dongles are even cheaper – under $10 and there are many bluetooth enabled speakers as well.
At $150, I would definitely go with the Sonos, but for $400 for a Sonos 5 (which Sonos is $500?) I might consider a Rocki plus a set of computer speakers ($100 total) or a bluetooth speaker ($50) plus the phone in my pocket.
It’s a shame when great, well supported products like the Sonos get driven off the market or pushed into a small niche by cheap Chinese junk with Indian tech support (if any) but that’s capitalism for you. I don’t know how Sonos can still justify charging $400 for a little wifi enable boom box – to me there’s just not $400 worth of hardware there and the intangibles aren’t worth the premium (to me). I’d be shocked if they were paying their Malaysian supplier more than $40 for that box.
It’s interesting you mention dishwashers. We recently looked to replacing our ailing (but not failing) Kitchenaid. Reading online reviews, you quickly get the impression everybody hates their dishwasher. Even manufacturer sites (which you’d think would be sanitized or astroturfed) are full of negative reviews.
Reading between the lines, it looks like things started going downhill in dishwasher tech when simple electromechanical timers were replaced with microprocessors (which really really don’t like moist warm environments).
J. – I think the online reviews are biased toward people who have had problems with their dishwasher. If your dishwasher works, you forget about it and don’t go back to the manufacturer’s site to write praise.
How is it that some people are perfectly happy with their dishwasher and others hate the same machine? I suppose it could be variability in manufacturing between units, but I think the main cause is that there is considerably variance in water hardness, in how hot your hot water heater is set, in how dirty your dishes are, in your expectations for how clean the dishes will be, etc., so that the same machine that works great for me might seem awful to you. A lot of people are unhappy with new machines vs. their old ones because the manufacturers have changed the cycles around to be more energy efficient.
I became very unhappy with my dishwasher when they took phosphates out of the formula – the glasses were covered with a dusty white film. However, there was a loophole in the law – you can still buy detergent with phosphates made for commercial purposes from restaurant supply houses. Once I switched back to phosphates, my dishwasher worked again.
My Bosch can be a little smelly, as Bosch dishwashers are wont to be, but other than that it works well and I haven’t had any service calls on it. The old mechanical timers would also wear out after a while. Modern appliances are made to be more “disposable” than the old workhorses – the ancient Hobart Kitchenaids were built like tanks. However, in the internet age, there is much better access to parts and know-how than in the past. If you are reasonably handy, you can do most appliance repairs yourself (and not waste a day waiting for the service tech to show up). If a service call is $250 it may not pay – you just replace the whole appliance instead. But if it’s $80 for a circuit board that the UPS man brings to your house instead, you can keep the thing going longer.