Sonos

The internal email from Chief Product Officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin did not specify how many jobs will be lost. Per Bloomberg, the cuts will happen today, and are the result of “a shift in product strategy.” The email also disclosed that a team is dedicated to headphones inside Sonos, which might be behind the “major product in a new multibillion-dollar category” mentioned in yesterday’s earnings call.

Also discussed this week: Nilay’s ideal commute, our CSS hopes and dreams, and all the reasons T-Pain is the absolute ideal Vergecast guest. Plus, you know, Sonos and Google and antitrust and Pixels and the Meta Quest 3 and everything else happening in tech this week. But especially T-Pain.

The service agnostic company was first to market with a speaker featuring both Alexa and Google Assistant, but JBL is first to allow simultaneous use of the two most popular voice assistants. Sonos previously said it was Google’s fault for blocking “concurrency” — a feature Sonos had been working on since at least 2017 — presumably out of spite for losing that lawsuit. We’ve reached out to Sonos for a reaction and will hopefully have something to publish soon.

The long-running patent dispute between Sonos and Google is headed to the courtroom on Monday. The whole-home audio brand is insistent that Google copied its smart speaker technology. Sonos has already picked up a win at the ITC, but next week the federal trial kicks off.

US District Judge William Alsup is openly frustrated that these two companies have been unable to work something out and just settle already.

“By the end, our parties’ legal bills will likely have been able to build dozens of schools, pay all the teachers, and provide hot lunches to the children,” he wrote in a previous filing.

Giles Martin, the senior vice president of sound experience at Sonos who mixed the first-ever spatial audio album, and Sonos CEO Patrick Spence joined Nilay Patel for a Vergecast interview about the company’s new speakers and make a case for spatial audio.

Martin:

...we can project sound and because we have channels of projection. Spatial audio is multichannel, stereo is two-channel, mono is one-channel.