Sonos, the American audio systems maker has announced a Trade-Up program in October this year. This includes customers gaining a 30% off on new Sonos products in return for permanently bricking their old products. While this was found unreasonable, the new answers from the company made it controversial.

The Trade-Up program, in simple, requires your old Sonos products to be deactivated permanently and recycled in order to get a 30% off on its new products. While Sonos felt it’s right decision to make recycling a condition of this offer, the community and others as well, feel it’s illogical to do so.

A user from Twitter (@atomicthumbs) explained why this program could be dumb. As working in an e-recycling plant, he calls this action as environmentally unfriendly abuse, as it’s doesn’t let consumers to share/sell it someone else nor keep it, but to scrap the perfectly working speakers off. Moreover, the recycling process takes energy resources to do so, which justifies his claims.

Here's Why Sonos Want You To Deactivate Your Speakers in Recycle Mode
Image by https://www.pexels.com/

The products eligible for dumping are Connect, Connect Amp, ZP90, ZP80, ZP100, ZP120, and Play:5 (Gen 1). These products are assured to be usable for over 10 years, with 5 years of continues updates. And it somewhat makes sense as the products eligible for this program are older than 10 years. The catch here is, Sonos defends itself that they cannot be usable in the advancing future.

Sonos reply to Verge’s asking on this issue revealed,

The reality is that these older products lack the processing power and memory to support modern Sonos experiences. 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.

The procedure of obtaining this offer is like; Opting into Trade-In program from the app, deciding the device to be deactivated, confirming and turning the device into Recycle Mode and disposing it off to a recycler or sending back to Sonos.

Once turned into the Recycle Mode, this action cannot be reversed and there’s nothing to be done other than dumping. But of course, this disaster can be undone in particular situations, where individuals activate the Recycle Mode without any intention or by accident. Sonos says that its customer support team can help in reversing that.

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