Sonos contributing to electronic waste

I would guess that’s more of an issue with updating the website  or marketing oversight rather than intentionally misleading customers.  But if that’s the sort of thing that you normally find unethical, then so be it.

It's reasonable to suggest a simple oversight or blame marketing (let me guess you don't work in marketing lol). But The recycle program was announced Oct 30 2019. Too long for simple mistake. So yes I'm willing to call it out for what it is. 

Even if this is a mistake we’re still talking about bricking Connects that may have been bought a few months ago…. Can’t be right, surely….

What makes you think someone who bought a Connect a few months ago is going to voluntarily brick their unit?

Who would pay new prices for a Connect just to brick it when you get the same rebate for the cheapest (barely) working one off ebay?

Now a contractor that has a lot invested in their connect setups might want to grab a spare or two at new prices.

Is there an announced deadline when the trade up offer expires? It seems to me that there should not be any, so that if I were to choose an upgrade anytime in future that were to render my Connect unusable, and I wanted to get a replacement Port, it should be available to me with a 30% discount.

That would reduce the furore now, I imagine, as well as make the upgrade in future more palatable to everyone. And someone that opts for the trade up just now would do so only to get the additional features on the Port, and not out of any perceived need to mitigate the risk of obsolescence.

The “trade-up a device” program end date hasn’t been mentioned that I have seen.

Once traded in the discount is permanent, only expires when used.

I have one sitting in the pool, waiting for something I can’t resist.

Except the price of the Port goes up $50 one week from today (in the US) which offsets much of the advantage of the discount. If you really want to get a Port using the maximum advantage of the discount you only have a few days to go through the recycle process to get your discount voucher and then place your order. 

So long as there still is a significant discount available on whatever is the existing price of a new Port in the future, this still won’t generate a lot of waste. 

What would help make this a good scheme is for Sonos to declare prominently that it will remain a Sonos policy from here on out: Put up an approved/registered model for recycling at any time in the future and the new unit will be discounted by 30%. That should allow for software upgrades that render units obsolete to be not as unpopular as they are now, and also not have people rush to recycle simply in anticipation of this happening.

Why there need at all to be such upgrades that get units wasted before the hardware fails is a different question altogether, I suppose, and one that I would still ask for what is merely a home audio system. It is the largely meaningless upgrades that are making for more electronic waste, not the trade up scheme that is being misidentified as such. But Sonos is a very small part of an environment that is geared to this way of living in every domain, with fashion in personal wear leading the bandwagon, so it isn't easy to see how Sonos can buck this trend all by itself.

I don’t - but I find the concept of selling new kit to people that in a few months time you’re going to be saying simply isn’t up to scratch - to the degree that you’re offering trade-in terms - to be a bit bizarre...