Sonos users have hit out at the company for its trade-in program that appears to involve bricking older speakers.
Any customers with older Sonos speakers can trade up for a 30% discount on a newer device, like the Sonos Beam or Sonos Move.
In order to do this, users must activate 'Recycle Mode' through the Sonos app. This provides them with the discount code but also starts a 21-day countdown timer on their older speaker ending up with it being 'permanently deactivated'.
That means all the data on it is erased and the speaker is bricked, rendering it unusable in the future. While Sonos has suggested that customers then take the speaker to a local recycling facility or ship it back to the company, many have taken issue with the process.
Recycling facilities often resell or reuse older products like this and it appears that Recycle Mode stops this from happening.
This is the the most environmentally unfriendly abuse and waste of perfectly hardware I've seen in five years working at a recycler.
We could have sold these, and ensured they were reused, as we do with all the working electronics we're able. Now we have to scrap them.
— ralph waldo cybersyn (@atomicthumbs) December 27, 2019
Signal amplifying. This is absolutely horrible.
Planned obsolescence is bad enough.
Trying to rebrand "we rendered the device permanently unusable" as "recycle mode" is wrong on so many levels I'm not sure where to start. Please let @Sonos know that this is not acceptable. https://t.co/hfCCZjidOo— Jake Williams (@MalwareJake) December 28, 2019
Sonos has responded to the criticism, telling tech site The Verge it is prioritising the customer experience above all else.
'The reality is that these older products lack the processing power and memory to support modern Sonos experiences,' the company told the site.
'Over time, technology will progress in ways these products are not able to accommodate. For some owners, these new features aren't important. Accordingly, they may choose not to participate in the Trade Up program.
'But for other owners, having modern Sonos devices capable of delivering these new experiences is important. So the Trade Up program is an affordable path for these owners to upgrade.
'For those that choose to trade-up to new products, we felt that the most responsible action was not to reintroduce them to new customers that may not have the context of them as 10+ year old products, and that also may not be able to deliver the Sonos experience they expected.'
Many have pointed to Recycle Mode as another example of planned obsolescence – deliberately building a product with an expiry date in mind so that customers are forced to buy the latest version.
Well historically, Sonos supports planned obsolescence better than most. Hopefully they learn from the feedback. If I get some good usage out of the electronics and consume less it's better than a bunch of useless echo dots or Google mini's lying around.
— TL (@djtatami) December 31, 2019
It's unclear whether Sonos will take this feedback on board and change its approach to Recycle Mode.
But the problem of consumer electronics going to waste is an increasing one. The Electrical Waste Recycling Group says that about 500,000 tonnes of electronics are recycled in the UK each year. But that's a tiny proportion of the unrecyclable 'e-waste' going to landfill.
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