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Meanwhile, my non-smart fridge continues to run just fine. Why do we need smart fridges? That was always a bad idea.
But your non-smart fridge doesn't support surveillance capitalism or a subscription model! How will investors keep making money on you if you think you can just decide for yourself when you need to shop for food?
I see reasons to have smart features in a fridge. Reminding you what food is going to be bad soon. Letting you know a list of recipes you can do with what food you have. Hell even being able to see and set timers without having to take my phone out. What I cannot fathom is the fact that the module running those smart features is not separated and modular enough so that basic functions like refrigerating are not dependent on an entire Android stack running.
I cannot relate to this. The past 15 years have made me so tired of connected devices (and subscriptions) that simple products feel like a relief. Side note, I bought a great, magnetic timer for my daughter that we keep on the fridge for just a few dollars.
I feel like this is what people say a smart fridge _could_ be good for, but can they even do that? From what I understand the most sophisticated ones can tell you if some specific items are in your fridge, and otherwise they just do basic shit like display photos and tell the weather.
Right now, no. The technology just isn't there yet.
… and makers don’t have an incentive to even deliver such features, because people are already buying them?
At least I wouldn’t know what’s stopping them from building actually-useful features, tech-wise. Or was it just always a bad idea because fridge placement is random and items are often hard to find/detect?
I don't think many people are buying them tbh.
The technological issue is that computer vision is hard, even after the last five years of AI progress.
My 'smart' fridge came with an app. Which only function is to perform diagnostics on the fridge when something goes wrong. A while ago, the fridge stopped cooling. I ran the diagnostics, which reported everything as A-OK. A service call found that the compressor had died. So, yeah, they cannot even do the basics, let alone something actually useful.
All of those features just seem so gimmicky, and I could never imagine myself actually relying on them. If you are a functioning adult, these things are barely convenient, and the novelty wears off very quickly.
I will take a solidly engineered fridge with a good energy usage profile every single time over some overengineered wifi-connected piece of crap.
People pay 10-20% extra for food to be delivered to their door just for the convenience of only having to open a single app rather than call the take out place directly.
Never underestimate the value of convenience to people.
How? Are there cameras inside the fridge that check best before dates, and what food is in there? Having a fridge that is actively spying on what I eat seems even worse.
It's one of the tragedies of modern tech. We could make a time saving smart fridge but we end up with ads and data collection with a veneer of usefulness.
Why not just attach a tablet to your fridge? Then you can easily upgrade and replace it over time. Maybe the fridge maker could integrate some internal sensors and let a generic tablet interface with them, if you want to? No need for some integrated "smart" (dumb) feature that bricks the fridge and fails at doing the basic job a fridge is supposed to do!
The trouble is that 'smart fridges' turn out to be just a regular fridge with an android tablet on the front. Which is useless.
I would love a fridge with a camera inside and a smart enough AI to tell me (1. what's in the fridge (2. how long it's been there and (3. what I've eaten from it. Some companies have tried making this kind of fridge, but AFAIK they don't work very well.
Why not just open the door and have a look in the fridge?
...while I'm at the grocery store on my way home from work?
1. Look in fridge before work 2. Add any missing items to shopping list 3. Reference said list on the way home from work
1. When you finish the milk, voice record "buy milk" on the phone.
2. At supermarket, listen to voice recordings.
I'm actually working on a pet project to transcribe my 20 years of voice recordings and organise them, then sync them between the phone and desktop. Maybe in the coming weeks I'll know that I needed milk in October 2008.
I mean, there are plenty of voice assistants these days. We use our Alexa for this but both Siri and Gemini could easily do it. Whenever we run low on something, "Alexa, add milk to our shopping list" and then can look at application at grocery store.
And what happens when its your kid who finishes the milk and doesn't mention it to you?
Or you didn't finish the milk, but didn't realize it had gone bad until after you got home with ingredients for a meal depending on milk.
Have a shared shopping list with the family. Teach your kid to put the milk on the list after they finish it. Be at least somewhat aware of how old your food is. Problem solved. Somehow we managed this model for a century.
Well, then, of your cows can only be milked on the 'morn you'll have to do with milking one of the goats.
I think the point is these devices sell some kind of convenience. Anyone who grew up of a certain time is seduced with this idea of our world being perfectly in tune with our needs, like the Jetsons.
Now we have generations of people who grew up with surveillance capitalism and broken promises I wonder what the next big wave will be
I instead use the technology of "whiteboard on fridge, where I write what I want or what is running out." That way it works when I didn't even plan to shop, because I vaguely remember what's on the whiteboard on the fridge.
I'm biased working for an online grocer, but isn't the problem really that you are in a store making the decision instead of in your kitchen at home? Half the goods I buy anyways aren't in a fridge, so a smart fridge only solves parts of the problem.
Yeah, if the argument truly is, "I want to be able to know everything I need to buy for cooking," then you need "smart" everything - cabinets, bread baskets, a way of analyzing the produce sitting in a bowl on the counter, pantries, freezers, and so on.
Perhaps it's because I'm the cook of the family, but to my mind, if you're in your kitchen on a daily basis, it's incredibly easy to have a strong idea of what you have at home when you're at the store. It's never perfect and once in a while you double up or miss things, but that's life!
I'm not the only cook in my family though. Last two nights I made dinner, but Monday my wife did. I'm not sure who will cook tonight (I need to get my kids to start doing more of that). The result of that is nobody knows exactly what the other person used up.
We do have a shared shopping list. If I remember I'll put things I use up on the list, but often I'm busy at the time I notice because the thing on the stove needs to be stirred constantly... Last night I used one can of beans leaving two more - I didn't put beans on the list, but maybe I should have. Overall this system is working, but it is annoying and sometimes not ideal.
My wife cooks sometimes too, but usually it's fairly easy for me to observe what she made and have a good sense of what went into the meal.
Same for us. I wanted to make pinto bean tacos last night but forgot the pinto beans at the store last weekend, because I'd assumed we'd had some. We used it as an opportunity to pivot and have a random meal that involved using up extras in our pantry and freezer. Life will always have annoying moments that aren't always ideal, there's no amount of automation that will eliminate them. It's good for us to experience those moments and use them as growth opportunities (not saying you don't, I'm just speaking generally here).
And costs you nothing. Is easy to roll out. Doesn't ever need replacement. Doesn't ever fall apart. Lasts forever.
The smart fridge will also screw up and not get it all right 100% of the time. And for that, it will cost you handsomely, will be difficult to implement in all your kitchen, will need constant replacement, will fall apart, will not last forever.
Framed like this, the smart solution is actually worse.
makes me wonder maybe if NFC/RFID strips were cheap enough you could have all the items tagged in the house and your phone could tell you what you have.. but probably causes e-waste though
The other problem is that just an equivalent barcode but NFC product tag isn't going to tell you that you're down to half a stick of butter, it'll just say you have butter. And that's assuming you keep the packaging.
Anything you've prepared at home will also not be tracked by such a system.
Everyone is arguing over a feature that this fridge does not have.
And everyone is aware of that, because it was explicitly stated by the commenter that kicked this off, /user?id=Legend2440
It’s “wouldn’t this hypothetical feature be great” vs “my feeble mind cannot even imagine why anyone would ever want that”
Not the person you asked but I can answer that from my perspective:
I am always on the lookout to automatate as much boring, everyday tasks. A Smart Fridge like that would allow you to generate shopping lists and reduce food waste by alerting you to possible soon-to-be-spoiled food.
A bit like what roombas are doing for cleaning. You still need to do it yourself a bit, but they help.
Not necessary, not even a gamechanger but another neat home automation. Would be nice, sad to hear they don't work well.
We need smart pantries to fully realize the “auto shopping list”, though… so a smart fridge is a half solution at best.
I even store produce (ex onions) on the counter tops, so I guess smart counters as well
A car is a half solution to going to work. A stove is a half solution to preparing food.
Half solutions are what people need. They’re the solutions we are using every day.
There is this huge problem with advertising that makes consumers think a half solution is a 100% solution. Most smart product makers do that trick. But, apart from that problem, ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’
Edit: but no way would I buy any smart or connected fridge from Samsung. I don’t anticipate that being a positive experience
A working grocery tracking system is a half-solution to effortless shopping.
A half-working grocery tracking system is useless, much like a car without an engine.
Yes. Something designed to be a half solution can be useful. But a full solution which is broken is probably worse than useless.
“Half solution” seems like an odd way to say tool?
“tool” seems like a good way to describe a half solution. We use and combine various tools and our own skills to do what we want
You should be able to combine two half solutions into a full solution.
It might actually be easier to start with the smart pantry! An in-cabinet kit that can be tested entirely dry and warm and open, and then expanded to the fridge.
What I need is a whole kitchen camera that notices when I put things in the fridge/pantry and then take them out. Bonus if it can say "The lettuce in your fridge is probably expired, use it or toss it today".
The fridge/pantry camera is a useful addition, but most of the value would be a system that just tracks what I put in/take out.
Your enthusiasm is catching. I’m not sure I would ever consider a fridge with a built in camera though because of the bad manufacturer incentives. Maybe you could find a wireless camera that you put inside and the fridge related processing - the real point - is done somewhere else?
Id want to be careful of it getting cold and damp if you put a consumer camera inside a fridge. You'd ned one rated for that sort of environment
Seems like it would be better solved with a phone app you can just scan the receipt and log your usage. It would get you out of having to buy a $1000 fridge and also solve the pantry issue. Actively logging your usage vs passively might have other downstream benefits like being more aware of your macros.
That does nothing to solve my real problem, which is too little surveillance.
Why not do the more labor intensive, higher energy use, higher friction, less convenient version of anything? Why automate anything?
Why the blind insistence upon automating everything?
It’s not blind insistence, and that framing reveals a real lack of imagination on your part in my opinion. A truly smart fridge that had an inventory of all my stuff, knew expiration dates, etc. hooked up to my chat agent would be wonderful.
Do people have the memory of a goldfish or what? "I can't remember what's in my fridge" is not a problem I've ever had in my entire life. What is there even to automate? If you were talking about a smart fridge with an accompanying robot that automatically orders groceries, picked up the deliveries itself, and stocked your fridge that'd be something, at least... still an insanely, unbelievably wasteful use of both your personal and our planet's resources to save five minutes a week, but something. But that's not even what smart fridges promise. They promise to automate looking in the fridge, an activity that you must do every time you withdraw or deposit food from/into it anyways. Wonderful.
Actually a cheap microcontroller and a few cameras over the lifetime of the fridge that caused me to open it say 50% less would save more money than it would waste by my estimate.
Yeah.
Step 1: fridge with smart inventory
Step 2: hook it up to grok bot
Step 3: grok bot orders your food from Walmart+ InHome
So every piece of this exists except the hypothetical sci-fi fridge.
Again, I’m stunned by the complete and utter lack of imagination and critical thinking here. You guys are the offshore contractors of HN commenting.
This is actually a pretty good point. Many people do have poor memory for a plethora of reasons. This would be a great accessibility feature.
I take it you've only ever lived alone then? Its pretty easy for someone in my household to consume food or add food without me knowing about it. And I definitely do not take a full and complete inventory every time I open the fridge.
I'd find it very handy to look at a glance and see the current stock of stuff I have in my house. I definitely don't know exactly how much butter I have at the moment, I don't know what the date is on the almond milk versus the whole milk, I don't know how many string cheese sticks are left after the kids grabbed their snacks for school. I don't know exactly how much salt or pepper or smoked paprika or herbes de provence or curry powder or semi-sweet morsels or baking soda I happen to have on hand.
I don't know the technology to seamlessly track all of this is realistically at hand, but it sure would be nice. I do agree, every smart fridge today either doesn't even try with this or just totally sucks at it.
But hey I guess you just have all that data totally memorized and you're entirely omnicient about everything your household consumes. Sure seems nice.
I have no problem remembering what's in the fridge. It doesn't do me any good because my wife and daughter also know what's in the fridge and they eat those things too.
Knowing I might need to pick something up while I'm out, particularly when nobody is home to check the remaining stock, would be handy.
Having said that, I don't want anything to do with the modern conception of a "smart fridge". If there was a self-hostable fridge camera I could install I might be into that. Otherwise, no thanks. I like my "dumb" fridge UI the way it is.
I always just want to know how much of X or Y is on hand when I’m physically out and at the grocer. You can just buy another but that usually leads to folks storing 5 bottles of ketchup or whatever
Because you are at the supermarket trying to remember what you have at home.
Because people are mentally unwell and would rather not spend any time actually in the moment and doing life. They’d rather just free up all this “wasted” time so they can sit on their arse and watch the 8th series of the latest Netflix programme. They live to consume.
Maybe they were testing spoiled food detection /s
The trouble here is that this smart fridge put safety-critical features behind a single internet-connected piece of shit. Appliance manufacturers really need to take inspiration from automotive manufacturers in terms of redundancy and localizing failure.
I hate to break it to you, but those guy's aren't far behind on the path of enshittification.
Remember this classic? https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
You break nothing much, don't worry - I was taking about equipment failure or malfunction, not targeted attack. Like, your power brakes or ABS can fail but you can still brake. Power steering can fail but you can still steer. Hell, steering wheel can pop right off and the steering geometry should still try to relatively prefer the center (not always ideal, but like, better than going fully insane like a shopping cart wheel). My point is there's no single CPU executing the entire vehicle where any malfunction can spontaneously cause the entire vehicle to stop functioning so badly that it won't perform any of its duties. Sure an ECU could fail and not run the engine, but that won't make you lose the ability to brake or steer if it happens in the middle of a highway. Something malicious can still command the rest of the vehicle to stop functioning one by one, but there aren't many single sources of that much failure.
At the very least, the system that maintains the temperature of the fridge (critical for food safety) should not be brought down by an exception in the system that displays advertisements on the front panel...
Maybe some fridges have cameras with object detection and can tell you what % your milk remains, but this one does not do any of that.
Features that are smart listed on the product page[1]:
Family Hub™ 21.5”: Family Hub™ keeps your family connected from anywhere; search recipes, share pictures, stream music, access YouTube and control your smart devices all from your the fridge* (*A WiFi connection and Samsung account required)
SmartThings Energy: SmartThings lets you monitor and manage your smart refrigerator's power usage; get energy saving tips and alerts to help lower your electric bill all from your phone.
Now Brief: The Now Brief provides a daily overview of information including the weather, your schedule and latest health data on your Family Hub ™screen, when it's not in use; customize your Now Brief dashboard using your favorite apps and widgets to get a quick glance of what's relevant to you.
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Samsung-30-cu-ft-Smart-French-Door-...
Extremely uncompelling stuff. Now add in that it is probably beaming your usage habits for your ad profile, always listening for voice commands, and apparently will break into freezing mode, and I cannot imagine why anyone would even consider this. If they were giving them out for free or paying people to put in their house, their existence would make sense tp me. Now I've learned that n>1 people paid multiple thousands of dollars for this and I assume it is not the only model out there.
I'm not sure how any of that is actionable. I already know how to make my fridge more efficient - but if I knew how to get my kids to close the door instead of leaving it open while the pour their milk (on the other side of the kitchen) I'd do that.
I get mail from my utility that I use more electric than average. However that doesn't give me anything actionable to do about it. I don't need another nag about things I can't do anything about.
its not
You’re only losing cold air, which has very little mass compared to what you’re actually storing in your fridge. The energy cost to re-chill the air in the unoccupied volume of your fridge can’t be that significant, I’d imagine.
It’s be an interesting experiment to put a temperature probe in something like a block of cheese, let it cool to the ambient fridge temperature, then open the fridge door for a few minutes and see if the temperature of the cheese even measurably changes over the next few hours or whatever amount of time.
I’m still on the fence about closing the door for a short task like pouring milk. My understanding from the physics of opening the door, you’re mostly already replacing all the air in the fridge with air from outside the fridge. So convection already did its job of robbing your fridge of cold. Closing the door to open it again a minute later just gives you a second convection inducing action for air that might have been trapped the first time.
I would love to see someone at the level of technology connections do a breakdown of the physics here, and where the likely crossover point point is for different kinds of fridges. My current (probably illformed) belief from the suction and imagined resulting air exchange of all the fridges I’ve lived with is that leaving the fridge open on the order of seconds is better than opening-closing-opening-closing in terms of cold loss.
"In theory but the benefit would be pretty negligible i think. Let's say for argument that most food is water and your fridge is 25% food and 75% air. The specific heat of air is 1 kJ/kgK, specific heat of water is 4.2 kJ/kgK. But also the density of air is 1.2kg/m3 and the density of water 1000kg/m3. Assume 1 m3 volume. So that would be 250kg food and 0.9 kg air. To change temp by 1C would take .9kJ for the air and 1050kJ for the food. So the air in a fridge holds a fraction of a percent of the total thermal mass of the contents. Whether or not that air changes temperature by a few degrees won't change things much at all. You would spend far more on balloons that you would save on energy."
* https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/1618mku/would...
The air exchanges in seconds, yes (as evidenced by the post-door-closing suction), but the air doesn't stop flowing through the fridge as soon as the air changes once, and the air enters warm and leaves cold, so (by conservation) heat is being robbed from internal surfaces. So you're still losing more heat by leaving the door open longer.
Door open --> Door close --> Suction --> No further heat loss afterwards
Door open --> Continuous heat leak
Here's a tip to save some electricity on the fridge: unplug all the smart stuff.
A fridge only uses a couple kWh a day and there's not much to optimize other than "keep the door closed" and "don't overfill it".
Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.
Fundamentally due to product lifecycle expectations, I wouldn't even want that!
I hope a fridge will last 10+ years.
Unfortunately any SaaS/cloud-connected piece of hardware is going to have some combo of firmware/OS/security/app update deprecation well before 10 years is up. The last people I expect to maintain software that long is the maker of a fridge.
CalDAV has been a standard for nearly 20 years. This feature could be done in a way that doesn't require to to talk to their servers, you could just put in the URL for whatever calendar you already have.
A simple tablet holder on the fridge door would do this way better.
Good thing it's still very easy to buy simple fridges that come with none of that crap. (Oh, cool, another huge Android tablet that's several versions behind latest and is a cracked door for red team agents to hack my house with and adtech to slurp up all of my refrigeration habits. I'LL BUY TWO!)
I can see why customers might want something like this though. We have a Skylight calendar in our house. It's just a big ass calendar. The software and service that Skylight provides makes it a VERY GOOD big ass calendar, but I can see some people thinking "i use my fridge all the time; why not just have a self-updating calendar there?". (Magnetic calendars on fridges are very popular.)
But, no, Samsung and LG literally sell this concept as doomscrolling as a service. So dumb. They look super tacky also. EVERY ultra high end fridge is literally two solid doors or designed to disappear behind closet doors. Nobody's staring at their fridge while pulling out their eggs and bacon for breakfast lol
so these cameras can see thru milk cartons? Impressive
Why does it have to be a camera? Surely there are other sensors in this age of untethered innovation that could apply. Give me a "smart nose" that will explain whether the unusual smell is coming from the vegetable drawer, dairy section, or no man's land in the back of the top shelf. Give me a top-of-the-line thermometer that can warn me if leftovers are going into the fridge too hot.
These sound useful but hard. Putting a tablet on the front sounds easy but adds no value. Guess which one they picked? Apparently people will still buy.
It would be nice if that was all they were, but evidently a software update can render the fridge unable to run, so it is clearly much more. These things have transitioned from IT to OT.
What they don't tell you: when the fridge door is closed the light turns off.
(yes HN this is a joke)
More seriously, in a previous job I did inventory/POS systems for pubs which would track the obvious things like "you got ten casks of beer delivered this morning and have sold 50 pints, at what point do you need to order more beer". It would genuinely be useful to have inventory tracking for fridges. At one point this would rely on barcodes, but machine vision should be good enough for now. The problem is, as with many smart things, it needs to be reliable and frictionless enough that it's better than just the Mark 1 Eyeball.
Also it's very difficult to trust if it might end up integrated into a purchase system. Does "you always have milk in the fridge" sound good? Yes. Is it going to be like "HP Instant Ink", a massive and slightly wasteful ripoff? Well, quite possibly.
Well the camera only needs to work while the door is open. Stuff isn't going to magically appear/disappear while the door is closed.
Or turn the light on for a bit when the camera is checking things.
The state maybe change however. Would be nice to hear mold has grown on an item at the back of shelf 4.
This wouldn't work in today's environment because any engineering capacity won't be directed towards making the thing useful when Samsung or whoever can sell the inside of your fridge in return for "recommended products".
Why? Just open the door and look in it.
My idea of a smart fridge: a fridge with Zigbee Temp/Humidity sensor connected to my Home Assistant automation system that alerts me if things get out of whack.
My idea of a dumb fridge: a fridge that updates firmware, bricks itself, and lets all my food spoil.
You can get a Zigbee temp/humidity sensor and throw it inside the fridge.
Why do you want that? Generations of humans have existed just fine with modern refrigeration without any of these extra... What you would call features and I would call simple bullshit.
They have started trying it when the problem was much more difficult than it is now. I think a fridge that does this itinerary well is not too far away.
Yes! I've been thinking about placing a tiny camera in the fridge for such a long time. This is especially important if you have a summer house or another apartment — you never know/remember what is in the fridge.
Taking photos of the fridge is a solution, but then phones were too stupid until recently to be able to find those. Even know it's a mixed bag.
We live in a world of dumb devices that could be so much smarter.
I just open the fridge and look. It's not an onerous task.
Thankfully, we were born with eyes and brains.
We don't need this anti-innovation mindset.
I genuinely cant tell if this is sarcastic. Im all for innovation where its productive, but some things already just work.
There's innovation [nods head] and innovation [shakes head].[0] We've seen what kind of "innovation" "smart" fridges have been.
[0]https://youtu.be/OvUr00GPcIo?is=zSoGzA6fV49JTSpV
I think it’s at least equally important to be sceptical of bad ideas, in order to let good ideas win. From a consumer perspective, smart fridges are usually bad.
You think smart fridges are bad, my wife bought this $300 "smart toothbrush" that I'm just like... facepalm. All it does is connect to an app and reminds you to brush your teeth or something. It's so dumb I'm just waiting for it to break.
Are you sure that's all it does?
My $150 "smart toothbrush" (some Oral B iO model) has accelerometers to track its head position and the app lets you know if you're not covering certain areas well enough. Since using it properly (i.e. checking the app and adjusting my brushing) I don't have to go to the hygienist as often.
Pretty much all electric toothbrushes have a mode that tell you how long to brush in an area, you're describing a gimmick to justify $150.
Because the fridge company can make more money by displaying ads on your fridge, and consumers can save more money by buying the fridge with the ads and taping cardboard in front.
Have any data that the savings are passed on to the consumer? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't see any modern, late-stage capitalism companies doing anything that actually benefits the consumer.
They aren’t. The smart features are more expensive to make and the added features justify a higher price. Most people don’t care either way and will buy it when they see a discount and feel like they got a good deal.
My parents are of the generation where they put a TV in every room and just keep it on 24/7 news all day long. They don’t understand a world without ads and certainly don’t go out of their way to avoid them
any instances of this in the wild? it seems like fridges are pretty cheap anyway and ones with smart features are more expensive? i don't think this a tv-like scenario.
It's apparently common enough for funny things like this to happen.
https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/1ow6cpu/appa...
https://old.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1pi2ax1/woman_...
Reddit now requires login. What are these?
There was a fake story that went viral last year about a woman being sent to the psych ward after seeing the Pluribus ads on her Samsung fridge.
The ads were real though: https://ibb.co/5hbG7ymS
https://archive.ph/U3CVN
Cant manage to get an archive link for the second one.
Does anyone know of an xcancel like service but for Reddit? OP links just lead to a login page.
They now require login for old.reddit.com. You can remove the subdomain and access the modern JS laden slop without an account unless they deem it 'Adult Content'
Redlib works. Either self host or use a public instance: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib#instances
I'd love to text my fridge from the grocery store and ask it how much cheese is left. It's a good idea. It's just that these days, we're just not making the kind of company who can be trusted to implement it. Gotta fix that first.
Smart appliances just seem like a ticking time bomb.
I want my appliances to last far longer than devices like my phone or computer.
There is absolutely no way these manufacturers will continue updating them even close to as long as I want to own them. So then you're stuck with an insecure and functionally useless, bad looking (in my opinion) appliance. That you paid extra to own and see ads on.
Just solder a jtag connector to them and let AI dump the firmware, decompile, reverse engineer and flash a non-updating, sanitized version.
That does sound like a fun project! Not on an appliance that I rely on working 24/7 though. Maybe an idea to apply to a broken unused one.
Well, they break anyway.. so might aswell break into the ones that are destroyed
"I want my appliances to last far longer than devices like my phone or computer."
... and hopefully be simple. My washer and dryer (made in late 90s) are dirt simple inside, with parts readily available. I recently had to replace the belt in the dryer, and a water valve in the washer. It was a diy job, with the help of a few youtube videos.
My neighbor guest's car got stuck in their driveway recently when an electronic parking brake malfunctioned. It really feels like all the gadgetry is a step backwards.
Even if it worked right, you know they will eventually force a paid subscription just to keep the fridge running.
I've had a wifi-connected[0] Samsung fridge for 6 years. A few connected features that I like but aren't life-changing:
- Reminders to change the ice/water filter get sent to my phone. There's an indicator light, but the phone notification is nice, too. The app also records when the filter was changed—useful to confirm that I'm "tasting" that the filter needs changed early.
- When we had a teenager living with us, getting remote notifications that the refrigerator door was left open probably saved us a few fridge-fulls of food.
Other than that, it's just a fridge that works reasonably well. My one complaint has nothing to do with smart features: about once per year I have to spend 5 mins to defrost the ice maker with a hairdryer. Just infrequent enough for me not to investigate the source of the problem.
[0] I don't say "smart" here because nothing's really smart/automated and it doesn't have a screen, speaker, microphone or camera. RF28R7201SR/AA if you're curious.
The filters I buy come with little date stickers to put on it.
Those are undoubtedly useful features, I just question why they should need the cloud:
How do you deal with all your other maintenance tasks around the house? with other appliances? with your car? Why not use a central system, like a task/reminder app?
I would understand a child leaving the door open but a teenager doing it that often is kind of wild? Regardless, wouldn't a reminder beep that starts when the door has been open for 5 minutes be better? Must everything be on your phone? It's not even actionable if you're not in the house, where you'd hear a local beep.
I do. I have OCD. Redundant systems and being able to confirm things are key for me.
Teens can be absent minded. You might be shocked by how common it is for families with teens to replace a set of forks that just disappeared one by one.
It does beep when opened too long.
Remote notifications are the point. They are actionable: when I get the remote notification, I shoot off a text "close the fridge".
Our fridge is a smart fridge, though it doesn't have a screen on it, AI in it or anything like that, and the smart fridge capabilities can be easily removed (it's a pluggable module).
I like knowing if I (or someone visiting our house while we're gone) left one of the doors open or when it needs maintenance done on it.
That one tweet that went viral was funny
Why is the fridge's cooling system is one with the smart features? They should be kept completely separate
or at the very least go back to safe default when the computer part fails which is (should be) design 101. designing failsafe systems was one of the first thing we learned in engineering class (that was a while ago but still)...
Right lol. How is there no default fallback?
It's cheaper to not implement one.
Most expensive if statement
The "smart" side has access to the temperature sensor for whatever reason. Then somebody notices that they could remove a component and save three cents per unit if they drive the compressor in software.
Driving the compressor with software is not intrinsically a problem, but critical functions have to be isolated to a minimal safe kernel that will always run, like the kernel space/user space distinction. Smart features can read and send messages to the minimal kernel, but should not themselves be in the critical loop. Boggles the mind that this is not standard practice.
I like how escalators gracefully degrade to stairs, and electric toothbrushes to regular toothbrushes. That a smart fridge can't act as a dumb fridge is absolutely ridiculous.
Escalator manufacturers actually don't recommend having people use stationary escalators as stairs, as they're potentially in a problem state and may experience additional failure and become very unsafe.
If you have an option of regular stairs or stalled escalators, use the stairs.
Ngl, I’d like to see a broken escalator failing more than being stairs. I don’t know if manufacturers tell that as an abundance of caution or if they even say that, but a broken escalator becoming a danger seems highly unlikely to me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE2Lv-t9BHk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krXj69fJjgA
If the brakes aren't operating properly the stairs could start moving uncontrollably.
Wow that’s terrifying
Don't get me wrong, these kinds of things are very rare, and are extremely unlikely even with a stalled one. I'm not trying to suggest every stalled escalator is a death trap waiting to happen. If there's really no other option I'd probably feel fine using them as stairs. There's a lot of safety planning that goes into escalators.
But the thing is, you don't know what it's state is, and it's clearly not in the "everything is OK" state. At least if it's running you can guess the operator is intending for you to use it.
To add to it… I can’t find the video of it right now, but a while back I saw people taking a stopped escalator, and the escalator failing into an open hole essentially. Since then I’ve started following said recommendations on not using stopped escalators.
“Sorry for the convenience!”
https://youtu.be/vrIw2i4WtA4?is=AWJK7ywVgImbVcTD
some numb skull product engineer at Samsung thought remotely controlling the temperature of freezer/fridge was a "must have" or "quick win". Or maybe engineer was feature-maxxing to pump the yearly eval.
Optimization? The new Rivian merged a bunch of ECUs together, cutting lots of wires, but how the fallout of a failed ECU is much larger.
Maybe not everything needs to be smart.
Few things are truly smart.
Decidedly not the ones who approved the design of those fridges...
This is my fear on the car side, as smart features start leaking from isolated areas in automobiles into the larger CAN bus....
Why do you own such a vehicle then?
You must not fear it that much.
“Ahh, and yet to participate in society.”
This is a direction all manufacturers are going into, so there is little actual choice. And buying used is not a real solution; where do tomorrow’s used vehicles come from?
My vehicles save one of my motor bikes are all over 20 years old.
That works for you personally, but what are people going to do 20 years from now? Fight over the dwindling stock of 40 years of vehicles?
To say nothing of the tradeoffs that come with an older vehicle (safety and pollution).
There are people today driving 40 year old vehicles. Or 60 year old vehicles. I even saw a model A at the grocery store lot once. There will be used cars for me.
You really don't get it, right. The age is not a problem.
And let be real, the 60 years old car, while there are some aspects they do better than modern one, overall they are much worse than mordern car.
Ehh. I'm still going to own a manual transmission car the rest of my life. New market isn't marketing to me going forward so I just won't participate in it. I'm sure there will be a million likeminded people keeping these puppies going as they've done.
Most people will continue to be useful idiots borrowing money they don't have to buy cars to impress people they don't like.
all cars made in the last 15 years do it
My cars are all older than this.
None of them have turned into pumpkins.
Economy cars like base model corolla are still normal cars.
Starting own car company is not a viable solution for a typical person.
A chunk of smart features are either legally mandated (eCall) or soft-required for "safety" (Euro NCAP lanekeeping etc).
As others pointed out, your argument is a fallacy. Technically a "Tu Quoque", in practice this explains it better: https://iea.org.uk/yet-you-participate-in-society-in-defence...
My car has two screens, one screen for things like showing the speed / the indicator lights and one screen for maps / music.
You can hard reset the latter one by holding down the home button for ten seconds, but while it turns back on the indicators don't function... even while driving
I’ve been in a Rivian during two infotainment crashes. It’s scary but the car still drives. Everything not screen related worked, and you can just pull over like any other car breakdown.
They take this type of bug very seriously but obviously any platform will have bugs. It’s the legacy automakers I worry about, since their software has always been outdated crap and this problem needs the best in test automation
Having worked in software at a legacy car company (Mercedes specifically), I wouldn't actually be too worried about most of them either (note: in this regard specifically, I could certainly criticize plenty of other things). There's a lot of institutional discipline keeping the stability and operation of the driving stuff separate from the screen stuff.
It's not just the screen. Microchips and sloppy firmware are everywhere.
My 2015 Jeep Cherokee had a freakout one day: the power steering stopped working mid-drive, on the highway. I was 50 minutes from my house, had to turn around and drive back home (an exhausting exercise given that modern cars are not built to function without power steering). I got to the dealer, parked in the lot, turned the car off, wait 30 seconds, turn it back on, everything worked fine.
That never happened again, but once is enough to put somebody in a dangerous-to-life situation.
It's not just the infotainment system we should be worrying about. Most modern cars are now distributed computer systems.
Yes! Pretty much everything the driver touches is no longer directly controlling anything. THe brakes are anti-lock (electronic control can disconnect them). The steering depends on assist motors. The throttle is just a suggestion.
Even my rear-view mirror is a camera, and currently it has failed (shows matrix style drippy blue lines instead of a picture.
That's exactly how it should work however, even if power steering goes out the steering still works. Albeit in a degraded state.
If you reboot infotainment in a Polestar 2, all HVAC stops working until the system is finished booting...
A relative recently bought an electric Renault. When you open the door and sit in it you are greeted by an annoying voice assistant talking to you (can be disabled at least). It's also got sound effects for everything, but you cannot throttle its charging speed and the charging status shown in the app is often delayed by hours.
There was a YouTube video of (I think) a Kia that was towed into a shop because it would not start on the side of the road. The reason for no-start turned out to be a failed backup camera module. So, the car stranded the owner because it could not communicate to the backup camera.
I also remember an incident where a rental car refused to start the engine because the driver made the mistake of parking it in an area without reception and it wouldn't start without phoning home to a server.
i know it's maybe an unpopular thing to say to OEMs, but i do think some should adopt an open firmware stack to prevent post-discontinuation bricking and flex that somehow in their marketing. I'd buy that, especially for a larger appliance.
There's a name for when they don't: e-waste.
I had a samsung fridge. Every year it would spoil all of the food inside of it. The temperature reading on the outside would say 35 (1.5 c) but the food inside would be warm and spoiled.
It only happened when it was particularly cold outside. I eventually figured out that there is an external temperature sensor that causes the fridge to stop cooling below a certain external temperature. And that space in the kitchen was particularly cold in the back. But I could never read it below 55, so I think the sensor was faulty.
But the reading on the front is what really annoyed me. I had to keep a thermometer inside the fridge so that I didn't accidentally eat food that felt cool enough but was bad.
This happened every year. I eventually gave it away for free, with a warning to the person.
What a profoundly idiotic way to design a smart fridge. Shame on Samsung for designing their product in such a way that this was even possible.
Granted, I think the very concept of a smart fridge is a bad idea no matter how you execute on it... but they still managed to take a bad idea and execute on it badly. Amazing.
Funny that so many people in this thread are arguing that a bad idea should also be engineered well. It was already a bad idea, so no it won't be. They are a package deal.
I don't think this is a good argument to make in general, as the contrapositive is that if it has good engineering, it was a good idea to build.
For example, nuclear weapons are certainly well-engineered, but I think it's reasonable to disagree on if they were a good idea or not.
Gilfoyle's take on Smart Fridges: > This thing is addressing problems that don't exist. It's solutionism at its worst.
Well, they saved Pied Piper in the end. So maybe it was worth it :P
There is SO much of this in IoT / smart / 2010s-2020s tech.
Recent household BS: music playing out of my thermostat.
Wife tried playing music out of Sonos, but the clunky app was laggy and had also signed her out of Spotify. No problem, you can also just play direct from Spotify app into Sonos speakers. She opens Spotify, selects "Living Room" and next thing you know our THERMOSTAT was playing music.
Neither of us know this was possible, neither of us enabled it, apparently it's existed for years but for some reason Saturday was the day that "Living Room" thermostat beat out "Living Room" Sonos in the Spotify sort order.
There were product managers on both sides of that decision to prioritize enabling such a stupid feature.
I'd pay for it to not be possible. I'd disable it on either/both ends if they had a toggle, which of course they don't. MVP baby.
Probably not. And that is why it happened - nobody thought about this at all until everything working as designed fails.
That is the thermostat probably is an off the shelf tablet with a speaker that they put other things on to make it a thermostat - this is the obvious thing to do and a lot cheaper than making your own completely custom hardware for this job. The software on the thermostat is likewise off the shelf (probably android) which has spotify in the base install and nobody took it out. Then you set the thermostat to be in the living room - again because that is the obvious thing to do. Finally your wife plays music and spotify sees two devices in the living room and picks one - which happens to be the wrong one but they have no way to know that.
The above is entirely likely and at no point (until know when I point it out) has anybody thought of it.
Wildly its an Ecobee and they added the feature on purpose some years back.
Apparently a firewall rule is about the only way to stop this.
I also experienced this, albeit deliberately. I saw that it was possible, and out of morbid curiosity, enqueued a song to play through it. I immediately questioned why anyone would want it, stopped play, and disabled it. There are settings on the thermostat you can change such that it isn't used for playback or recording.
You know its interesting, the physical thermostat has more settings than the app.
I couldn't find a "disable Spotify" setting, only disable Alexa (already was) and to turn the speaker down to zero (did that).
How did you disable?
Sorry, I was unclear / misunderstood your statement. I haven’t tested this with Spotify, but disabling the thermostat’s mic (Settings / Device Microphone) disables Alexa and Siri implicitly, and also seems to remove it as an AirPlay target, which is primarily how we stream music to Sonos.
Suck it, Jin-Yang.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gPRyq0Vu0Tk
Yesterday I learnt that Samsung has a Royal Warrant in the UK.
TIL that they really shouldn’t.
"Smart" is stupid. It's primarily just a way to tie subscription shit and advertisements, and lock in DRM (and laws protecting DRM) on what used to be perfectly fine hardware.
"Smart" that I can back is simple sensor acquisition over open protocols. I would appreciate being able to MONITOR my fridge/freezer/stove/oven/washer/dryer. Changing shit over those connections is not needed, nor wanted.
Samsung smart appliances in general seem to occupy a similar place in the market to vehicles like the Chevy Traverse or Nissan Altima, where people with technical knowledge in that area know them to be absolute horrific maintenance and repair liabilities and yet the consumer base places them second to God.
Obviously the review of a brand-new device or vehicle with 100 miles on it is going to have a disconnect from the realities of 60k miles of rocky ownership but I remain baffled when people buy a 7 year old used V6 Traverse, a vehicle extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure, and if I question their decision I get a "the reviews were good!". It seems like journalistic malpractice to not retroactively update reviews with a warning when critical widespread shortcomings are found later in a products life.
Haha, so true, even when I was a kid I thought Samsung LCD monitors were a bit shiet compared to the alternatives.
Goes to show how long brand name goes, especially on appliances.
My Samsung 3D TV is still going strong after 13 years.
People's algorithm for purchases is usually "what's the best bang for the buck where the name rings a bell".
I'm guilty of it as well, if forced to choose blindly I'd pick Sony over WMFSENSY. But I'm beggining to wonder, with the recent casualness with which brands lower quality, whether they'll be a generational change and people will start ignoring brands entirely.
I'm starting to change my mind myself. My last Nike shoes weren't even the same size/shape (apparently they make left and right shoes in different countries now). At that point might as well go for the knockoffs.
This feels like a joke about just in time inventory and globalization, but I'm worried that it might be true.
It probably significantly reduces theft by employees though
I'm curious of source on this being more than anecdotal?
The most natural way for shoe mismatches is from the showroom. Customer grabs 5 pairs, tries some on, they get mixed up when returning to stock. Same shoe and size (hopefully, lol), but different production number and different factory/origin.
How often do you really expect a customer is grabbing multiple pairs of the same size/model/color of shoe to try on? Maybe it's just where I shop but it's rare that there's even more than one example of the size I need in the style/color I want to allow such a scenario to occur.
I looked (briefly) online for evidence of the factory claim and found none.
GP didn't give enough context ("MY shoes are weird so I extrapolated" vs "I know this is true; here's proof."), but the casual one-off scenario is absolutely a showroom level of "random happens".
Babysitting all those individual shoes and styles and sizes seems ... expensive, logistically.
In fact, if this were a thing, I'd imagine they'd start offloading them as though it were a cool feature. "Want to mix-n-match shoes? buy just a left!"
All the time? I don’t know if it is still true, but at one point Zappos had free returns. I know a few women who would buy a range of sizes, keep the one that fits, return the rest.
There was a Seinfeld joke to this effect that men just take whatever clothing, even if it barely fits. Women are likely to be choosier and insist on a good match. Some might intentionally mix and match shoe sizes if one foot is bigger than the other (leaving the store with a mismatched pair)
When you find a style or size you like, it’s so great being able to just grab another without having trawl shops or malls.
I wish it was a joke, I was being serious. I guess it keeps them from the factory producing extra to sell as knockoffs, or the product being "lost in transit" or whatever.
I find it amusing that they go to those lengths rather than just using factories/employees that they can trust. I suppose you don't get loyalty if you treat people like crap.
imagine the overhead of an extra location to box pairs of shoes. Where these employees steal these boxed pairs. good joke.
It’s really not that unusual to manufacture in bulk at one facility and package in another.
Also let’s multiple “competitors” consolidate packaging into one big operation. Or localized to destination. Also a space thing: can ship more in bulk and make it all fluffier closer to point of sale.
Shoeboxes, among other packages, are a lot of air, why fill your truck/container/aircraft “unit load device” with it.
That would be easily noticed when units-in != units-out: https://www.messynessychic.com/2021/07/08/the-secret-world-o...
Wild guess : It might be to make it harder to steal a pair from the factory if you can only get half of it ?
Only at the same price. If there's a big discount, I'm going to prefer the random letter jumble from China because it's probably a standard design that a lot of factories are producing because it works well enough.
The only reason I lean towards Sony all things being equal is because I know that Sony gets sued when things go wrong, and won't just drop the brand and close up shop like the random letter jumble.
Also I would prefer Sony if lead would be a problem somewhere in the thing I'm buying.
And then you find you’re powering a residential proxy bot net.
Oh, definitely nothing that goes on the network whose firmware that I'm not in control of. But that goes double for Sony.
edit: I must add - except for this cheap Android phone from the carrier. But I head it off at the router.
You know that. Most people don’t.
I bought a "mini retro TV" device from China. It's basically a cheap motherboard from an Android TV device MacGyvered into a case with its own small LCD display. It's got two old-timey toggle switches in the back: one for power and one for input select which doesn't work. I figured out what device it originally came from and put a build of Armbian for that device on it. I won't let its stock Android OS connect to the internet or my network for all the tea in—er, well...
Yes, Sony has a known history of respecting the user's security...
Yeah, I'd never want to do business with a company known for their products hacking your home equipment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Phew, thankfully we're safe buying a big brand device: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/07/lg-to-ban-residential-pr...
:)
To be fair mentioning Nike is kind of a straw man here — unless being explicit with the model/style. They manufacturer to many different price points, more than an auto maker.
I'm not immune. I recently bought some New Balance shoes from Sheels, figuring I'd be getting reasonable quality footwear. Both sets had hole damn near worn through the soles and delamination in multiple locations after ~6 months of wearing them as an office worker who does no abnormal amount of walking or exercise in them. Come to find out their "non flagship" models are cheaply made garbage as opposed to the quintessential white leather model that costs, iirc, the upper $300 range and is made in America.
There's so many companies reputation-tarnishing themselves by doing this "we sell a lesser line thats actually terrible" thing. Why do you think I will now trust you with more money for an upgraded model? You've just made me skeptical of your brand entirely.
I've sworn off Bosch appliances after a 2 year fiasco of service calls with one of their dishwashers. The thing was still about $900 plus install. At what price point am I to believe it's not the worse-on-purpose line, as they cheapen the product every year. They seem to have models from $700 to $2000.
A bad $900 model sours me on gambling that the $1200, $1500 or $2000 model is the good one this year.
“Selling the brand” or whatever it’s called. Lots of money to be made.
Exactly. To a ruthless MBA, what good is a reputation if you can't get rich ruining it?
It's called liquidation for a reason. You don't have the asset afterwards.
The Bosch 800 series dishwashers are god-tier, or at least they were as of 5 years ago, when I last bought one. I've had one in the last 3 houses, and went so far recently as to swap my new house's dishwasher (I think a Whirlpool something-or-other) with my old house's Bosch 800, because it was a cross-town move, and I could.
I don’t understand modern shoes.
Seems like almost everything moderately priced has soles made of a extremely lightweight, squishy soft plastic that neither has much traction nor any toughness — worse than cheap flip-flop material.
Shoe companies should be embarrassed to put their name on such crap, yet they try to pass it off as premium.
Enshittification is only going to get worse just like everything else.
A more likely scenario is that display shoes of the same nominal size/model can be made in different factories, and when they are reboxed to be sold, they end up in a box from the wrong factory. Different factories make the same model but can have differences in processes so the shoes are noticeably different. Having left and right made in separate factories, much less countries, would be a total nightmare of inventory management.
One problem is that business forces keep turning brands into rugpulls.
After enough of this nonsense, brands are less of a reliable indicator.
Amazon pushed that to its inevitable endgame, where each product is a unique look-at-reviews situation. (and coincidentally the amazon advertising business is there while you run the product choosing guantlet)
Older brands have a motive to care for their reputation, because if people know *oldbrand* is bad. they will avoid *oldbrand* and it dies.
On the contrary, *insertanynonenglishnamebrand* (*newbrand*) doesn't need to have any care in the world. If the product is trash, they would replace the name next year, bonus points if they declare bankrupcy and don't pay their obligations.
There's a gap between "old brand makes bad product" and "people knowing old brand is bad". There lies the short term profits.
This is something that frustrates me to no end. How are clothing item sizes not standardized yet?
For example, I recently went to buy new Jeans, so I went to the same store where I got my current Jeans, asked for a size 28, and tried it on. How is it possible that my size 28W Basic Straight Jeans from Fox fit me, while a pair that fits the exact same description is too small?
I later went to a different branch, and there I found another pair which fits the exact same description, and it did fit me!
I have encountered this type of thing inany places, like when buying shoes one of the employees at the store told me "We don't have this in size 42 in stock, but we do have 41 and our sizes are larger".
Imagine if you went to McMaster Carr and asked for an M3 screw, and being told "We are out of M3, but our M2.5 is larger so it should work for you"
Someone shopping for an M3 screw would not be interested it trying out a smaller one, but research has shown that people are interested in trying on a smaller size with clothes ;)
However, clothes are nearly impossible to simultaneously standardize and commoditize: people (and their feet) come in all shapes and sizes, so different brands in particular, but also different lines of those brands, will have different proportions.
As a tall guy, I hate that clothes keep growing in width with larger sizes, but rarely grow in length (pants/trousers included), but only because you can't get things without trying them on in multiple sizes.
If you do not understand why standardized sizes are not mandated or something similar, just look at any bespoke garment creation and all the variable measures being taken for a shirt, pants or jacket — just make realistic combination of all of them in different sizes, and you are looking at ~1000 "standard sizes" or more.
Humans have this same problem, which I suspect is the root cause.
The problem with this is it's a bit hard to put "well known" in a news article about a negative piece of news, because the manufacturers tend to threaten to sue you unless you have some kind of source or some kind of actual numbers. So this ends up just circulating as received wisdom within the car-knower community but not to the general public. Unless they get lucky with Reddit search results.
I noticed today that Autotrader.co.uk have recall warnings for certain cars, though.
This is fair. I should have been more explicit that my wonderment is how something that is gospel in the car guy/mechanic community has somehow completely avoided filtering into the greater consumer discussion with regards to catastrophic failure and reliability.
I’m puzzled as well, buying a car that depreciates 60-70% in 7 years seems like a horrible idea, you could spend roughly the same on a Toyota Highlander or Honda Pilot and only face 30-40% depreciation after 7 years. This information is freely available if you google “[vehicle model] depreciation curve”.
Nissan (and Stellantis, Mitsubishi) decided to stop making better cars and focus almost exclusively on subprime lending, the rest of the story tells itself once you have that information.
That's just one of those secrets that you need to know, though. It's like knowing to ignore the unemployment rate (in the vast majority of cases) and instead to look at the prime-age employment rate. People rarely think of something like that without being told.
Cars are also one of those things that can be an emotional purchase and people do weird things. I spent way more than I needed to in order to get the car I wanted and I wanted it because it's a cool vehicle that, when I squint, still fits my needs. It wasn't smart financially but I'm extremely happy I did it. My wife could not care less about a vehicle outside of it being ergonomic and not having a payment. We'll be looking at depreciation curves and the like during that exercise.
I bought a car that seemed cheap for what it was. Turns out is was unpopular because of the timing belt in oil. Can't say I've had any issue with it though (with basic maintenance) but it's only 8 years old.
Can you possibly elaborate on the timing belt in oil? I’ve only known of dry timing belts or lubricated timing chains/gears
Certain models of the Mk3 Ford Focus (2011-2018) have a wet timing belt.
Needs changing at 100,000 to 150-000 miles or every 10 years.
The 10 year service is a spendy one.
Ford's recently designed engines were designed with a timing belt internally that operated in an oil bath.
They are currently walking that decision back and attempting to make it look as if it wasn't planned obsolescence (dry cambelt engines or proper timing chains means that the engine would last almost longer than the person who bought it if they did the regular maintenance. A cambelt that cannot be changed because its internal means that there is a limit to how long the engine would last.)
Cheap and poor decision by a company not acting in good faith. Right up there with the globally popular Ford Ranger whose oil change needs to be completed in under 10 minutes because thats how long it takes the oil pump to drain residual oil and it has no self priming capability, so itll run dry and seize the engine despite the oil sump being full.
Is not designed by Ford. Those are (most probably) the same as the infamous Puretech motors developped by PSA. Is a Peugeot car disguised as Ford (or a Ford car with a Peugeot motor if you prefer). Several brands use it, under different names. Most probably they bought them under a big discount.
That motor was durable, tested and approved, But... Europe said: You must adjust this and that for the new legislation, and the change made a little bit of gasoline to mix in the oil and reach the belt. Problem: Gasoline eats rubber over time, and the timing belt is made of rubber.
The real problem was not so much that the timing belt could root entirely and break, leading to a catastrophic failure.
Much before that, the pump that sucks oil into the motor gets slowly clogged with rubber bits, triggering a "pressure oil failure" warning. Also the computer reacts to a slow lubrication reducing the power to protect the motor, so you have a car with random power failures and alarming warnings. If you ignore this, eventually the rubber dust accumulated could block entirely the oil from entering into the motor. And then your motor is destroyed in no time.
Nobody suspected that when Peugeot sold thousands of cars. A few years later, many cars that were still basically new, started to die or require expensive reparations. The makers warned on the manual that the belt must be changed often and this avoids entirely the problem. Second problem: Only car freaks follow the manual specifications. Every common owner expected the timing belt to last for the same as a traditional one (160,000 to 240,000Km or so), when it must be changed at 60,000 or so. Changing the time belt is not cheap and they ignored the warning as a grabbing cash trick.
For a while, common people were still buying cars with big discounts that mechanics didn't wanted to touch with a teen foot pole. Spanish influencers started to rebrand the pure-tech motors as pudre-tech (in Spanish: it-rots-tech), and the term slowly reached the public opinion.
Even following the specifications, you are stuck with a car that is more expensive to maintain.
Peugeot fixed the issue changing the belt material, but the reputational damage was done and was eventually absorbed into Stellantis, a superbrand created with Chinese, Italian and American investors.
If your car uses gasoil you don't have this problem. Only gasoline. Peugeot declared in jun 2026 that those family of gasoline motors are about to be finally discarded and replaced by a new motor (with a chain belt and designed for better integration with hybrid systems).
The surface-level problem, sure. The root cause is that the "engineers" (and I lose that term loosely) decided that running a rubber belt in an oil bath internal to the engine was a good idea.
It obviously isn't a good idea, even if you could guaranteed that petrol will never mix with the oil. In the best case scenario, when the belt starts degrading (because all belts degrade), you're throwing pieces of rubber into the oil pump.
Even in the best-case scenario, the effect of that design was to reduce the cap on engine life.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48776185
Ford EcoBoom?
All I can imagine is they must be on massive amounts of drugs at Ford given the FCA level or worse crap to come out if there in recent history.
Just make sure that belt gets changed on time if not a bit before. Its unpopular because if that belt breaks before replacement the motor will self destruct and you can't put off the not insignificant cost of it.
Now interference engines detonating when the timing belt breaks isn't new, but putting a belt in a bath of dirty and burnt oil that makes it a mess and expensive to replace and basically impossible to inspect is pretty silly. A chain would not have had such problems and become an efficiency and running issue from a stretched chain instead of sudden and catastrophic failure of a broken belt.
It also has the problem of rubber belt pieced clogging up the oil system.
Its fine for people that get all the regular maintence and oil changes strictly on time. But not everyone does it so diligently. And if you buy it as a random used car you have no way of really knowing how good that belt is without a list of every oil and belt change and how hard they drove it.
OK, that's a fair statement, but!
My 2017 Altima has been great. Comfortable to drive, bluetooth connection that doesn't drive me crazy, space for passengers and cargo, manageable maintenance, I even use it to tow a small trailer with lawn equipment, no issues! I'm up to 190,000 mi with only minor repairs that I could do myself. I got my money's worth out of this one.
That said... I do avoid smart appliances, especially LG and Samsung. The additional features do not seem to add enough value to overcome the potential problems.
Must be the more recent models. My main complaint with my 2012 Altima is the sunroof drainage hoses leaking in the winter. I've had zero mechanical or electronics problems with it.
Google "jatco CVT nissan altima" and realize how extremely lucky you have gotten.
You don't have the CVT, do you?
yea, it's awesome, super smooth acceleration from stop to highway speed
Those CVTs were fucking terrible for years. They were so bad that loads of them ended up on buy-here-pay-here lots after the transmission blew and the Altima is now widely known as the highway missile of choice for drivers with a credit score in the 400s and no insurance. You lucked out.
TBH, I have heard that a small number of those JATCO transmissions didn't shit themselves soon after the warranty expired; congratulations :-)
I've got the exact transmission in a Renault SUV (2.5 NA petrol engine), and at 160000km the belt started jittering. Not noticeable to the passengers or driver, and no codes thrown up on the dashboard, but the OBD2 tool I use shows that the belt was, in fact, starting to fail.
If they get the fluid changed on time and drive like a granny I don't think they are that bad. But a lot of people overlook/skip the cvt fluid change and others drive them hard because "Wow CVT can pull pretty hard!"
I know atleast one dealership that never even mentioned a cvt fluid change despite the schedule for it being only 1000 miles away, but it was the last service before being paid off and if you don't come back and replace it on yoir own dime thats a potential new sale in 2 years.
The CVT is a steel belt though so that fluid should be replaced sooner rather than later because metal particles build up in oil. And at some point its not far from throwing a handful of sand inside of it and it will eat itself alive.
Interesting. I've never heard that about Altimas but I used to own one and it was hands down the worst vehicle I've ever owned. It had more issues in two years, including leaving me stranded multiple times in the middle of the night, than I've had in a decade with any other vehicles.
Some of that might just be bleed over from their non-smart devices. My dumb Samsung washer, monitor, etc have been great. And yes, part of my decision involves the ratings/reviews. They are point-in-time and wont catch an issue 5 years from now, but they will help you avoid models that have immediate issues.
I’ve taken to sharing this clip [1] with anybody expressing the kind consumer behavior you outline… once they’re done laughing I simply say “now replace wa’er with [insert item of debate]” if they’re still arguing with me I share this clip [2]…
Maybe cruel, but I haven't found a better way to get someone to realize the error of their ways… because logic has obviously failed them.
[1] https://youtu.be/GceNsojnMf0 [2] https://youtu.be/-fC2oke5MFg
[1] "Video unavailable It was blocked due to the claimed content by Zodiak Entertainment."
someone did not like you linking that!
This feels unfair given this is clearly the work of the state actor what defrosted all them military freezers last month. https://signalandsilence.substack.com/p/i-think-someone-hack...
Thank-you that link - it is very interesting. The cause I wonder about is another A.I. agent attack.
That doesn't seem very "clear" to me. The article you linked mentioned those were made to go into defrost mode (and it didn't mention any brand). Meanwhile the affected Samsung devices are located in Korea and Samsung admitted it was due to their firmware update.
Also I don't see how it's unfair to expect refrigerators that cost a grand to do their one job without firmware.
Stay frosty, sheep. Or otherwise woolen mammal.
My guess is that the main culprit might be marketing. We underestimate how advertisement shown to us online can shape our reality.
Last I checked Samsung had the most engagement on Facebook just behind Netflix. This means that they are spending tons of money to put their products in front of their customers via social media marketing. Go out and ask any normies for the top 3 brands for electronics, especially that of home appliances, Samsung will definitely be up there somehow, because most people think that big brand = good. How do they know it's big? Well, you see them everywhere!
So I imagine that, "the reviews were good!" is just the surface. The truth is that they ignored all the writings on the wall. In the reality created by the constant exposure, the manufacturer is a big brand, thus they make good cars. Unless someone runs a counter advertisement to tell them about the critical problem the same amount of time or more than when they're shown the car whooshing through multiple scences sytlishly.
More like buying a Range Rover if you get a high-end Samsung/LG. Beautiful, packed with features, terrible reputation for reliability.
I've only ever bought one thing from Samsung, a small TV about 10 years ago which, it turns out, has a _variable audio lag_ bug; the audio lag changes seemingly at random, so impossible to compensate for. I can't imagine how that even _happens_. As a result of that experience, I'll never buy anything from Samsung again.
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815381 1 day ago | 270 comments
This is the perfect story of 2020s era tech.
Just total engineering incompetence of forced updates with new features for no reason that degrade core workflows and introduce needless instability.
And the best part - nobody learns, and people in general won't change their buying habits much.
I would guess it had new 'features'. Certainly nothing that improved things for the consumer since 'keep food cool' isn't something you need to periodically revise (or have an internet connection for). Probably some combination of "new ToS so we can collect more data about customer" and "collect more things about customer we can sell on the third parties".
Sure but the infotainment/smart BS should be firewall off from the "keep the food cold" life safety part of the appliance.
Even Tesla which plays fast & loose with some things.. the car does not come to a halt if the infotainment/GPS/etc tablet reboots. It's VERY disconcerting as you have no speedometer, the car is eerily silent, etc.. but the car still drives.
Just sloppy, cheap, lazy engineering.
Telsa answers to the NTSB. There are rules. A fridge? As long as it doesn't catch fire when you plug it in, it's 'let the market decide' sloppy, cheap, lazy products.
There are a lot more rules than that.
But it is true that the rules don’t anticipate a fridge that cannot refrigerate food if the advertisements aren’t playing properly.
And fail (food)unsafe design. What the hell.
"2020s-era tech" is a bit late. An unnecessary and destructive home-appliance update is a big part of the comedy film Popstar, shot over a decade ago already.
Never owned a Samsung appliance, but I had a Samsung smart TV for about year. Worst piece of technology I have ever owned and threw it in the trash and got a Roku.
Roku-being-sued-for-illegally-collecting-and-selling-children's-data Roku?
Yes I don't care. I like it a lot better.
Roku sucks. Is that the bar? Can barely do anything on it without an internet connection or Roku account.
You can just not connect it to the internet
The lesson here is that technology doesn’t always move in a positive direction. “Primitive” technology (e.g. simpler ICs, electro-mechanical machines, purely mechanical machines) can often be far better than the “modern” solutions.
This extends all the way up to software. Be wary when someone pushes a modern replacement of a reliable and effective tool you already have.
Besides Samsung incompetence, I think smart fridges were probably solving the right problem (some sense of efficiency / time saving in grocery management) the wrong way (sensors/cameras/connected fridge).
It turns out that grocery stores with real time inventory on websites & pickup/delivery are a much better solution.
I have my weekly order I add my usuals to, and then add items to the cart all week as I noticed I am out/low while making dinner.
Thanks to AI and IoT, we can now have vibe coded fridges and ovens that might have fantastic features and work 80% of the time!
The future truly is incredible
If you have a fridge that new… you are probably fine.
So when will Samsung be compensating affected owners for their spoilt food?
Sigh. Anything + computer = computer
Need #1: we need a fridge. Need #2: we need it to be smart Need #3: we need it connected to internet Need #4: we need it to be controlled by the seller.
Excessive needs bring you excessive pain.
Speaking of fridges, did anything come to light about that mass failing of gov run fridges we had here a few weeks ago?
My parents still have the fridge they received as a wedding present in 1969 from my mom's parents. Still running as the second fridge in the garage.
I've given up on not buying "smart $thing". It seems nearly impossible in many cases. However I absolutely refuse to connect them to my wifi which mostly makes them "dumb" for me.
How?! The only thing you need to do is test it on the friggin fridge?!
What is the best quality fridge that is just a compressor connected to an insulated box?
Liebherr. You can buy a smart box add-on to it, but by default they are just fridges without any smart features.
Why would any company have firmware updates pushed during a holiday? For that matter, why would you do a lot all at once, rather than spreading them out? I didn't see any info about some critical "vulnerability." Maybe I missed it.
They intended to deploy to a test environment and accidentally deployed the update to customer devices.
https://mnews.sbs.co.kr/english/article.do?newsId=N100876742...
To err is human, to really mess up your software you need a hardware engineer.
Can't wait for refrigerators to require 2FA.
... and then get their clocks reset on the next power outage.
That would be totally awesome for eating disorders. "Please text your recipe to your PCP for approval and unlock code."
https://www.computersecurity.com/products/refrigerator-lock
Except for all the eating disorders that make people eat too little.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
Makes me think of all who hope to return to life from cryonics one day :)
Smart fridges are a waste. Why would you need AI on your fridge - maybe to brick them so people need to buy more fridges?
I was at the store and one fridge had built in cameras so you could get pictures of your fridge all the time. :S
For anyone looking to disconnect their Samsung appliances from the web while keeping local control through Home Assistant, there's LocalThings[0].
I found it after learning that Samsung is planning to start charging $5 a month for API access but another benefit is reducing the risk of something like this.
[0]: https://github.com/mbillow/localthings
My garage door motor did the same thing. How can an APi to open and close be $5/mo
Why can't we have dumb appliances please. It used to be a Joke used to sell java claiming it would be great in your toaster...
In the wake of the IoT hype, the fridge is among the top items that will never be "smart" for me.
Ha ha ha. But were the ads shown OK?
https://www.techradar.com/home/smart-home/samsung-launches-a...
Why does a fridge need firmware? Compressor and thermostat IC should do the trick. Maybe a fan to circulate some cold air.
If there's one thing to point to as an example of why we should make "smart fridges" and similar appliances not worth developing, it's things like this. Way way too easy for the company to just publish an update that breaks something like this. Imagine if you have a smart oven which gets an update and starts a very bad electrical fire because the company was stupid and decided it was a really smart idea to make an Oven that can connect to the internet. Wouldn't even surprise me if that's already happened.
First world problem if there ever was one.
I have no idea why a fridge would need to be connected to anything but a power source.
I can understand some people would like their heating/cooling systems to be available online as a convenience, but a fridge?
This could escalate to much worse problem. Spoiled food can literally kill people. Yet the safety standard we put those "smart" fridge under is nowhere near medical device standard.
Wait until they put AI on it...
The French comedy movie « Yves » from a few years back is quite fitting right now
So a "smart" refrigerator is actually kinda "dumb".
Meanwhile there's a 60's era fridge in our garage that still runs fine. For three generations it's reputed to keep beer at just the right temperature. To think that a machine like that would need an update... You'd never want to change something that works so well for so long.
What is its annual power usage?
It might not "run fine" when you take that into account.