I am furious that the company did not tell me that a new model was imminent when I purchased mine only three months ago. I would have waited.  Whilst I love my machine,  I would have preferred to have been given the option not to buy one that was about to become obsolete.  

This has gone down like a lead balloon in the UK, where facebook pages are positively buzzing with indignation.

I think the company have done themselves a great deal of damage.

Were you under any pressure to buy one immediately? I don't think so. You always had the option to wait. If they had announced a new model 3 months ago, someone who bought it 4 months ago would have been just as furious as you, and so on. Upgrades are a fact of life. The only thing you can do if you're willing to wait, is to see whether a new model is likely to be launched.

If you buy an iPhone in August, you're likely to be disappointed when Apple has their regular announcement in september. The TM31 was released in 2004, and Vorwerk has kept a more or less consistent upgrade schedule of 10 years.

If Worverk had announced the new model a year in advance, they would have run into the "Osborne Effect", named after a computer maker that pre-announced their new product and then took a year to get it to market, and later went bankrupt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

The only people with a legitimate reason to complain are the people who have asked specifically about a new model and have been given the answer "no" instead of "we can't say" or "we don't know". They can rightly complain about misinformation and ask to have a refund or upgrade. If Vorwerk wants to keep their customers happy, they should honor their complaints.