Referring to the manufacturer / engineers / decision makes, of course
I can somewhat understand your point. Although, why wouldn't the consumer expect new products to have the latest standards and protocols? Imagine you bought a new mobile phone or Smart TV and it sported yesteryears Bluetooth and WiFi-protocols with the same excuse you provided, would that feel equally Ok? We can be pretty sure noone is caring about 8K on their phone either right?
Say you have a pretty "well utilized" (read: congested) home network that your family uses for their different needs. Gaming, streaming, surfing, web-tv etc and so on. And now you want to put the Zen Steam into this already pretty loaded network and it does not have any of the new technologies WiFi 6 offers that could, potentially, greatly alleviate any further congestion. Not to mention helping to keep the network latencies low and save on the power bill with the new power-saving features. Among other benefits! It's not just about raw speed and throughput. This is important I feel, for me at least. I can totally understand like, single people with basically nothing "in the air", and basically no network or activity in said network to talk about. in that case... who cares? Use wifi 3. (No, not really... just trying to make a point)
As a side note of sorts; iFi frequently tries to make a big deal about having USB 3.0 on their products. (And I've been quite vocal about their shady practices surrounding this very topic in the past) Want to talk about some completely unnecessary overkill, well look no further. But, that's a good thing. They should utilize the latest standards. It looks good on the spec sheet, it's "future proof", and it helps the consumer feel good about their purchase. "What consumers would actually need" is a line written down somewhere in the "manufacturers underground stand-up comedy guidebook". Heck, even us consumers don't give a single _ _ _ _ what we would actually need vs how much we could possibly get. If you want your product to compete / be competitive, you'd better spec it accordingly in today's market conditions. Or, if you made some substantial savings by using the more "cost-effective" (in marketing speak) solution, why not roll that into the marketing pitch and tell the consumer about what they gained in return (if anything... of course). Turning a negative into a positive! That's definitely a thing!
Edit:
I see, thanks for the answer!
Well, I use WiFi 6 except for a few "legacy" products we still have at home that we keep going (and some appliances, smart fan etc). I would have loved it if the Zen Stream would have had WiFi 6 capability as well. I was excited for this product, one of the / if not The most exciting product iFi have launched in a long time, but that exclusion was a little bummer amid the excitement. I am just one voice. But, that is one customer's voice at least, that both use and would have wanted it.
And, I was not aware that we (meaning us consumers) needed to request to iFi that they implement the latest standards and protocols for them to actually appear in their future product releases. I will certainly keep this in mind for the future
