Back in January, Sonos was the star of a juicy controversy. It announced that regular software updates would be ending for some of its older products, and while that on its own was enough to get people riled up, it also brought the company’s “Recycle Mode” under the spotlight.
Recycle Mode was part of Sonos’s Trade Up program, which allows owners of older hardware to upgrade to a new model for a 30% discount. However, in order to get that discount, the old speaker had to be put in Recycle Mode. After 21 days from initiating Recycle Mode, the old speaker was bricked and could no longer be used.
A Sonos spokesperson confirmed that the Trade Up program will continue, but recycling mode is no more. If you want to get the 30 percent discount, you just need to prove you own one of the eligible “legacy” products by validating its serial number. Once that’s done, you can apply the discount to anything Sonos is currently selling at its online store. Indeed, the “Trade Up” name isn’t exactly accurate, because you can continue using the legacy hardware as long as you want. Sonos says you can give it to a friend, keep using it yourself, sell it, recycle it, send it to them it doesn’t matter. Unfortunately, if you’ve already set some products to recycle mode, you can’t reverse it, but said customers in that situation should contact its customer service team.
this is a major improvement over the old program. While Sonos positioned its recycle mode as a way to make sure that people weren’t acquiring aging hardware that didn’t work as expected, the truth is that even older products that are close to obsolete can still be useful in certain circumstances.
