Hector Martin

This is the the most environmentally unfriendly abuse and waste of perfectly hardware I've seen in five years working at a recycler. We could have sold these, and ensured they were reused, as we do with all the working electronics we're able. Now we have to scrap them.

Apple has activation locks and Meraki has licensing requirements, one for anti-theft and the other to sell software. This is the only time I've seen a company explicitly brick its own hardware in the name of "sustainability" and "encouraging recycling."

To add insult to injury, there are complaints on Sonos' support forums from people who've managed to accidentally put their devices into recycling mode, and been told by Sonos support that there's no way to stop the countdown, forcing them to buy new devices after 21 days.

This whole situation is screwed up, especially since it's actively harming the environment in direct contravention of their stated values, and Sonos is the only manufacturer I know of that does it. Who the hell came up with this idea?

From what our eBay guy can tell, the bricking isn't even in hardware; you can't recover it if you're good with JTAG, because it's blacklisted as "recycled" on their servers. There's nothing stopping these things from working except Sonos says they can't.

Wait it's bricked from the SERVER side?

As far as we could tell, yeah.