OPINION: It’s been a tumultuous past year for Sonos. The rollout of its new app caused chaos and upset users. Its first pair of headphones didn’t meet sales targets. To cap it all off, its CEO stepped down at the beginning of 2025.
Not a great year to be sure but surely lessons were learnt? With news/speculation of the next Sonos device hitting the interwebs, perhaps not.
A leak discovered by The Verge (who else?) about the rumoured Sonos TV box (codenamed Pinewood), has suggested that it could cost somewhere in the region of $200 to $400 (given Sonos’ pricing, that could also mean as much as £400 / €400).
The box is being pitched as a high-end alternative to ‘premium’ Fire TV and Apple TV boxes. With such a high price it could end up in an orbit that’s completely out of whack with the competition. Obviously, that would not be good.
Rumoured ‘Pinewood’ TV box sounds too expensive
Yes, Sonos has seen itself as a ‘premium’ brand in the same way that the likes of Bose and Apple see themselves in their respective market.
But, to be honest, while we like to think of Sonos as being ubiquitous with home cinema, they’re not the best-selling soundbar brand – Samsung has been soundbar king for the last ten years, and will more than likely make that 11 years in a row. There is the perception, and then there is the actual reality. It can be painful when those two things clash.
Like it did with the Ace headphones, Sonos is stepping into uncharted territory. A potential $400 price for a TV box is, quite frankly, ridiculous. That’d be more than the Sonos Ace is selling currently for, and would just come under the Sonos Sub Mini and Sonos Beam Gen 2. Who exactly is this device for?
Would you pay $400 for a streaming box when Apple has an alternative priced at $169 and Amazon has one for around $140? Such a high price risks being an own goal for Sonos.
Innovate or die
This streaming box would have to do something that no other competitor is currently doing, and the mention of featuring several HDMI inputs to connect other devices (your Sonos soundbar for instance), sounds intriguing. The idea of Sonos taking more ownership in terms of how its devices wirelessly interface with your TV via the box would be useful – sync issues, signal dropouts could be a thing of the past, and you may have the ability to wirelessly connect other Sonos devices to the TV. This all sounds great… if you’re already a Sonos customer that is.
That Sonos-centric approach, along with the rumoured price, could dampen the appeal of the ‘Pinewood’ TV streamer. From the outside looking in, it would seem as if Sonos has been in expansion mode for the last few years, moving away from home cinema to portable audio in the Move, Roam, and Ace to attract new customers. The TV box needs to be along the same lines in my view.
If it’s to just be aimed at existing Sonos customers, I’m not entirely sure it’ll be a compelling device. Sonos needs converts and not just to appeal to those who still (after the app debacle) believe in them.
I don’t want to be negative all the time about Sonos, but the TV streamer seems like it should be a major product if Sonos approaches it right. Perhaps Sonos should take a leaf out of Sky’s playbook and not go for a high starting price (even $200 seems a lot compared to a $50 Fire TV Stick) but utilise subscription fees instead. Attract people with a subscription they can pay over one or two years and appeal to customers that way.
In a still ongoing cost-of-living crisis, a $200 to $400 streaming box sounds like a near-fatal nail in its coffin before the streamer has been born. Sonos really needs this work to restore some of the reputational damage the app caused. ‘Pinewood’ needs to show that Sonos can still innovate and make the industry move to its whims.
If not, an already shaky year might get shakier, especially with those long-standing rumours that another big tech company might look to snap Sonos up, however unlikely that may seem. There’s plenty riding on the Sonos’ next few products and it needs to nail the execution.
