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If I, as the manufacturer, say that "You can have 30% discount on the new stuff if you let me wipe out the flash memory holding all the software in your old stuff, making it ready for recycling", is that "planned obsolence" as well - the ability to wipe out your flash? If any device allowing the flash to be wiped out is "illegal", then the great majority of all modern devices are illegal.
When you connect to the internet (or the mobile network, or whatever) to have your smartphone updated, or your camera lens, or your TV set, that is a flash update. (Strictly speaking it may be another technology that behaves similar to flash.) The updated code may very well be that which disables your device, by wiping out all or parts of the flash, or disabling some functions. No earlier preparations for is is required, beyond providing the ability to accept software updates.
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Disclaimer: I never owned any Sonos product, so my understanding of how they operate is based on what I have heard from others.
If I got it right:
There is nothing whatsoever that forces you to "brick" your Sonos gear. You may continue to use it for as long as you like; it will continue to operate as it does today. Certainly, it won't have regular upgrades forever - nor does my lawn mower, my hammer or my bathroom mirror. I am not ditching those.
If what you want is to get yourself a new and exiting this year's model with all the new bells and whistles, there is nothing whatsoever forbidding you to do that. You can put your old Sonos into a box in the attic, or maybe continue using it in the den in your basement.
If you want to cover part of the cost of a new system by selling you old Sonos to someone else, you can do that, too. The new owner can continue using it just the way you would have done if you hadn't been insisting on new bells & whistles.
At least here in Norway, all of that was fully accepted. The problem is that Sonos said: We will give you a 30% discount on the new system if you send your old one to a recycling center. But the customers screamed out: We want those 30% discount without having to recycle anything! If we want to sell the old stuff at 20% of the cost of the new one, so that we get the new stuff at half price, all in all! If we want to stuff it away without recycling it, we still want that 30% discount! (Well, Sonos are not demanding that we recycle, but we want that stuff in our attic to be fully usable at any time, and Sonos won't let us.)
For the envionmental impact: I believe that Norway is in the forefront with regard to recycling. For at least 25 years, any store selling electric and electronic products are by law required to accept the return, at no cost to the customer, of the same group of product as they sell. If you sell radios and TVs, anyone may leave their old TV set at your store. The amount of electric/electronic waste recycled is on the average around 30 kg (60 ponds) per person per year. (For the USA, that would be ten million tons of electric/electronic waste a year).
In our homes, we have a separate box for used batteries, lightbulbs and other kinds of "special handling" waste. We have three garbage bins: For plastics, for paper and "the rest". The return percentage of (all!) plastic bottles are in the mid nineties, and the same for aluminum cans. You can fill up your car with all sorts of waste and drive it to the dump: There, experts will help you find the right on of the 12-15 bins for your waste: Metals, glass, pure wood, paper, organic garden waste, ... For a few things requiring special manual handling, there is a small fee (like chemicals, plastic wrapped(!) asbestos etc.), but we are talking about maybe ten USD, maybe twenty. You won't be ruined by it.
And we do not ship e-waste to Africa. Statistics show that 62% of it was processed here in Norway, another 32% in our neighbour country Sweden, 4% in Germany.
The "e-waste problem" is found in the basements and attics of people. In one survey, about 70% of those asked confirm that they have non-functioning electronics (phones, PCs, ...) laying around that they just haven't gotten around to return for recycling. (And I suspect that 30% are in the same situation without knowing/admitting it...)
So if you just get your old Sonos to a recycling station, and get the new stuff at 30% discount, I don't think the situation is that bad, neither for your bank account nor for the environment.
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Member 7989122 wrote: For at least 25 years, any store selling electric and electronic products are by law required to accept the return, at no cost to the customer, of the same group of product as they sell
That has been normal here for a few years too; complemented by a EU-law that states that for each product a producer would need to be able to supply spare-parts for at least 10 years after they stop selling it.
Member 7989122 wrote: We will give you a 30% discount on the new system if you send your old one to a recycling center. But the customers screamed out: We want those 30% discount without having to recycle anything!
That wasn't very obvious from the first part of the article; it reeked of planned obsolesence. Something that wouldn't be surprising, since Apple does the same.
Member 7989122 wrote: And we do not ship e-waste to Africa. Statistics show that 62% of it was processed here in Norway, another 32% in our neighbour country Sweden, 4% in Germany.
It's not like the Netherlands is shouting that we ship our waste to Africa; there's noble recycling-companies doing the work here.
Member 7989122 wrote: The "e-waste problem" is found in the basements and attics of people.
For Norway, perhaps. Aw, and;
Norwegians 'worst' for dumping electrical waste[^]
Plus;
What is my phone doing in Africa? | Oslo European Green Capital 2019[^]
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: Plus; What is my phone doing in Africa?
I guess that seminar was, at least in part, spurred by the large number of waste thefts the last couple of years. Last year, a large band of waste thiefs was arrested; they had been hauling e-waste and other metals to African countries (mostly). This is strictly forbidden by Norwegian laws, but acts of criminals. When caught, they are imprisoned (or in smaller cases, fined).
All of the European Union has similar laws. You are not allowed to export any waste to any country that cannot prove that they do proper recycling of it, according to fairly strict rules. Thievery of waste is a well known problem in many countries, but that does not make it legal. It most certainly is not a part of the "official" recycling system; authorities fight against it.
Yes, we do produce a lot of e-waste in Norway. Far too much. But we do have an "official" recycling system that is working quite well. And once it is into the recycling mill, the fraction of materials actually recycled is surprisingly high. I don't have the figures at hand, but for electronics, the percentage is well into the 80s; the residue is also used, but generally as a filling material, not reused in its original function (the way you can do with e.g. metals).
Norwegians 'worst' for dumping electrical waste[^]: "Less than one-sixth of all e-waste was properly recycled, the report said."
- that must refer to worldwide figures (as suggested by the paragraph that follows), not to Norway. The figures quoted for Norwegian e-waste matches quite well what is being recycled; there is not five times as much not being recycled. Also, there is a continous pressure for increasing both the percentage recycled and improving the technologies for extracting usable materials from the collected waste. About two years ago, they doubled the deposit you make when buying anything in an aluminum can or a bottle, to make more people return them to reclaim their deposit: A return percentage 87,3% of all cans and 88,6% of bottles was considered not good enough. E-waste is, of course, a different matter, but you see the same trend there as well: The return percentage is rising, and the utilization of the waste is improving.
Bottom line: If you return your 10-15 year old Sonos unit to a proper recycling point, environmental concers are not a valid argument for going to war against Sonos.
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Member 7989122 wrote: I guess that seminar was, at least in part, spurred by the large number of waste thefts the last couple of years. Last year, a large band of waste thiefs was arrested; they had been hauling e-waste and other metals to African countries (mostly). This is strictly forbidden by Norwegian laws, but acts of criminals. When caught, they are imprisoned (or in smaller cases, fined).
That's a nice way of saying that those aren't companies, but criminals 
Member 7989122 wrote: All of the European Union has similar laws. You are not allowed to export any waste to any country that cannot prove that they do proper recycling of it, according to fairly strict rules.
I've been to Norway, and I was amazed at the amount of respect for the law there. Some places don't lock their letterbox, police not carrying guns.
Of course the Netherlands has strict laws. And of course, the laws are "gamed". A few fines aren't going to change that.
Member 7989122 wrote: About two years ago, they doubled the deposit you make when buying anything in an aluminum can or a bottle, to make more people return them to reclaim their deposit
Yes, we should have that too; here they can be found along the roads and even in the little forest we have.
Member 7989122 wrote: Bottom line: If you return your 10-15 year old Sonos unit to a proper recycling point, environmental concers are not a valid argument for going to war against Sonos.
I'm not advocating a war against Sonos 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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now we know where not to buy speakers from...
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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Well, I never would have expected a US corporation to be a greedy, amoral f***er!
It beggars belief!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The title is patently false.
As for obsoleting tech, how is this different than VCRs and DVDs and 8-track tapes becoming obsolete? And no, I don't agree with so-called "planned obsolescence" either (it's not clear that is what Sonos is doing).
And I guess it's immoral then to give a 30% discount on new tech if you recycle your old tech? Gee, I wish I'd been able to do that with my VCRs and DVDs when I upgraded to DVDs and Blue-Ray.
And how 'bout them TVs, eh? Why wasn't I able to "upgrade" my tube-TV and get a discount on my LED digitial TV?
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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The tech isn't outdated; their bloatware just got too bloated for it.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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LOL. Still not "evil".
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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The evil is that they hire "new programmers" rather than "older" ones*.
* Looking up the reference would be much too much like hard work, so I'll just hope you get it.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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It doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that it's hard to get parts for your Model T Ford these days, the thing came out in 1908 and nobody would really expect a car to last for over a century. Nobody is really blaming Ford for no longer producing replacement parts.
The Model T was produced for the best part of 20 years and presumably parts were freely available for a good while after the last one rolled off the production line in 1927, so it isn't hard to imagine early adopters running their cars from 1908 through to the 1930's and beyond.
A few decades on, cars just don't last that long. Not necessarily because they're less well made but because new features (whether they be for safety, comfort, performance, emissions or whatever else) come along with increasing rapidity and often become expected and/or legally required. Yesterday's bonus features become today's "must-haves".
Now if someone tried to fit 40 years worth of motoring innovations into an old Ford Cortina, they'd pretty soon realise that it would be a bit of a struggle to integrate anything more advanced than a seat-belt because the framework simply wasn't built to anticipate the "mod cons" of the future.
Is that Ford's fault? No. You can't really blame people for a lack of precognition.
So what have Ford done about it? Well, they'll take your old car and recycle it in exchange for a discount on a contemporary model. They've been doing it for years. Does anyone complain about this? Does anybody say "You should be giving me a 100% discount as I bought this thing in perfectly good faith in 1972?" It seems a pretty reasonable thing to do and no-one has been making a fuss about it.
Then someone in the electronics business does something similar - "keep using the old one of you like or chop it in for a discount on the new state-of-the-art model if you'd prefer that" - and they're public enemy number 1. Go figure ...
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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Exactly the sort of thing I was thinking. Same goes for cassette tapes, 8-track tapes, VCRs and DVDs.
Plus the title is absolutely false and the author must have known it.
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Not to speak of video from the moon landing...
Brief summary for those who don't know the story: When the last-of-a-kind video tape player capable of playing the video tapes from the Apollo 11 moon landing was to be ditched, someone in NASA came to think of those original tapes: We never digitized them properly. Maybe we should do that. But where did we put them? ... As far as I know, the tapes were never found. And the last tape player for that format was ditched.
When you today see the "high quality" Apollo 11 videos on YouTube, they are much better quality than what we could see in 1969, but that's because we today have quite fancy restoration techniques for sharpening up the blur that was received over the radio link. Everyone knows that the video tapes recorded onboard the space ship, and physically brought down to earth, would have been razor sharp, compared to the restored images.
I am afraid that lots of users of the first and second (and maybe third) generation of digital cameras will discover that they have lost piles of images, the day they bring down that box from the attic to show their grandchildren. I, too, have got a handful of 2" Sony floppy disks, but without the camera (which I borrowed for a single weekend) I have no way to view or print the images. I have transferred all the photos I once stored on 5.25" floppies to my harddisk - but kept that Win98 machine, in case others need help. Same with photo archives on 3.5" floppies. Some people were going "professional", using tape for archival storage: You may have to search far and wide to find someone who can read those tapes. Some units used the LPT interface, but you shouldn't be too certain that the drivers will work in a Win10 DOS window! Others had dedicated interface cards - but when did you last see a PC with an ISA bus? Lots of my friends can't even read their CD-ROM photo archives any more.
The only "comforting" side of it is that noone cares anyway... Once you have shown the photos from the past weekend to your friends, once you have posted your vacation photos on Facebook and received a dozen likes, noone cares about those pictures anymore. Maybe they still exist, but who cares to look at pictures from yesteryear? Or even from last month? It really doesn't matter to us that our personal history is lost.
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Good points...
However...Member 7989122 wrote: It really doesn't matter to us that our personal history is lost.
There's a lot of people that care about that. It's up to them to take the steps to preserve and make accessible those images.
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Well the title is completely incorrect. What Sonos did is to make obsolete the things you buy from them if you turn it in for recycling. For that effort you get a 30% discount on new stuff. OOOH big evil here. 
But nothing is stopping you from selling your old Sonos stuff *as-is* to someone else for a 50% discount from the original price and then using that to get new Sonos stuff. Sheesh. This article is so much false alarm signaling.
Also, it's an unfortunate side-effect of technology. Just like VCRs and even DVDs are "obsolete" because we've moved on to other things. This is no different.
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
modified 23-Jan-20 15:02pm.
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When the general public are screaming, they often are the culprit themselves...
Norway went from analog to digital radio broadcasting 2-3 years ago. The change was finally decided in 2011, and completed, region by region, from January to December 2017. Everbody knew that it would be coming, everybody complained about the mountain of FM radios that were rendered useless when the FM transmitters were turned off.
But between the 2011 decision to close down FM and the actual turnoff, five million pure FM radios were bought by the public (counting about 5 mill people). The question of switching to DAB had been hot in media since at least 2005; noone could claim that "I didn't know!" Everone knew very well. I was into discussions with people insisting that they couldn't get a DAB radio for their new car - but when I dug up the brochures from the importer, showing them that DAB-radio had been standard-equipment for two years, an FM-only radio had to be explicitly selected, they admitted that they were so much against the switching to DAB that they had deliberately made that selection... (Believe it or not: I met several people doing that!) Note that till this day, I have not yet seen a single DAB radio that does not handle FM as well; you wouldn't loose anything by buying a DAB radio. (There are DAB adapters intended for plugging into an FM radio Line In; they do not need an FM tuner, but they are adapters, not complete radio receivers.)
And by the way: The mountain of discarded FM radios failed to materialize. Maybe it made a bare noticable hump on top of the mountain of mobile phones that people throw away after two years of use. (Actually, it is close to three years nowadays, but that is because people are holding their breath waiting for 5G.)
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#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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We are happy to announce the availability of the preview SDK for Microsoft Surface Duo, and availability in the coming weeks for the preview SDK for Windows 10. Try it before they give up on it
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Try it before they give up on it
I thought that sentece was only reserved for google 
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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True - Google would have given up on it already.
TTFN - Kent
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I have a feeling that folding phones won't be as popular as tech companies have decided that they will be.
They're assuming that being able to put stuff in your pocket is a big thing, but one of the main allures of mobile phones is that they're small enough to hold comfortably in the hand.
Having a phone that's more difficult to hold kinda breaks that, and why would someone want an unwieldy double tablet, when it would be a relatively trivial matter to network two tablets together to extend their screens? (if you then wanted to keep the unwieldy option of sticking them together, you could always use duct tape.)
As for tablet-sized devices that fold down, who would want to carry something that bulky (and heavy) in their pocket? If you carry it in a bag, the folding thing isn't such a great advantage, and could even be more of a disadvantage. Flatter and thinner trumps smaller but fatter, in many cases.
So the only working use case is for devices that fold out to somewhere between phone and tablet size, but which are still awkward to hold.
They won't sell none, but I hardly think it's going to take the market by storm.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Yeah - I kind of like the smaller one. Almost like a day-timer, but you're right - hardly a one-handed tool. The big one just reminds of kids books for some reason.
It's niche, but I guess a differentiator?
TTFN - Kent
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You underestimate the strength of "I have the newest gadget" of many morons that will buy it just for the sick of showing it when going out.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Nelek wrote: You underestimate the strength of "I have the newest gadget" of many morons
I'm more the "I've got a new gadget that's been out for three years -- they've got it working properly, now" type.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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