Sonos says users don’t have to 'brick' old speakers to get a discount on new ones

TORONTO -- After receiving backlash from customers, Sonos is reversing a policy that allowed those who owned its speakers to upgrade to a new model at a cheaper price only if they deactivated the old one.

A Sonos spokesperson clarified in a statement Friday to CTVNews.ca that the “Trade Up” program would be removing the requirement to recycle the older model in order to get a discount on an upgrade.

The Trade Up program was announced in October 2019. It offers users who owned “legacy products” produced between 2005 and 2011 the option to get a deal on new speakers. However, after they applied to trade up their product, their old speaker would stop working completely after approximately 20 days, a transformation known as “bricking” a device.

The company’s website, which, as of Friday, had not been updated yet to reflect the new policy, stated that deactivating the old speakers “prepares them for responsible e-recycling.”

But critics of the program questioned the wisdom of deactivating and recycling speakers that still functioned, pointing out that a better way to reuse and recycle them would be to give them to friends and family.

The new Sonos statement, however, says that customers with older products who wish to upgrade will “still receive a 30 per cent discount on new Sonos products, but they can now choose what to do with their old device: continue to use it, give it to a friend, donate it to charity, responsibly recycle it at their local e-waste facility or send it back to Sonos via a prepaid shipping label.”

In order to get the discount, customers will simply have to prove that they own the affected older products by validating the serial number. A spokesperson told CTVNews.ca that the website would be updated "in the coming weeks" to reflect these changes.

In January, they announced that they would no longer be sending software updates to older legacy products -- sparking outrage and confusion from affected customers. They had to clarify the statement a few days later to say that older speakers would continue functioning as normal without updates, they simply wouldn’t receive new features or connect well to new Sonos models.

In regards to the older and newer models not working well together, CEO Patrick Spence said in the follow-up letter that they would work on finding a solution for the issue.