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 鈥淭rade Up鈥� 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 . It offers users who owned 鈥渓egacy products鈥� 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 鈥渂ricking鈥� a device.
The company鈥檚 website, which, as of Friday, had not been updated yet to reflect the new policy, stated that deactivating the old speakers 鈥減repares them for responsible e-recycling.鈥�
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 鈥渟till 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.鈥�
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 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鈥檛 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 that they would work on finding a solution for the issue.
