Quote:
Originally Posted by Gershon
what should the life expectancy be for a $6000+ McIntosh streamer?
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Often the more expensive something is, the lower the life expectancy as a result of a much less sold items.
I've a Naim NDX streamer since +5y, but also a 350€ SONOS Connect since 14 years. The SONOS app gets regular updates, is as good as bug free and is state of the art. Obviously, if you look at the number of SONOS units sold, they cannot afford to let the customer down. Next to that the software development cost is the same if you make an update for 1m devices or a couple of 1000 devices. Porting the application from Flash to another technology is a significant application rewrite. This is something companies are looking at.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gershon
I know if you ask anyone at McIntosh, the firmware/software/update answer will always be: what problems are you experiencing that make you want an update? I guess my generic answer is that, because my MB100 is now a ticking time bomb, and I guess my expectations at that price point are different than McIntosh's.
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This is correct. The McIntosh approach is based on the idea "If something works today and you don't change anything, there's no reason why it shouldn't work tomorrow", which is correct. However, Flash faced several security vulnerabilities. As long as it was supported those issues got fixed. So yes, it will still work tomorrow, but you can be exposed to some security leaks which will not be fixed anymore, causing potential serious consequences. Next is that if you do an OS update of your system, it's not guaranteed Flash will still work.