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.
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.
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.
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.
> if forced to choose blindly I'd pick Sony over WMFSENSY.
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.
> extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure
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.
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.
> I remain baffled when people buy a 7 year old used V6 Traverse, a vehicle extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure
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.
> This information is freely available if you google “[vehicle model] depreciation curve”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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 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'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.
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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
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.
… 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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)...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> There were product managers on both sides of that decision to prioritize enabling such a stupid feature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
People don't laugh at conspiracy theorists over claims that technology will continue to get more annoying. People don't even laugh at conspiracy theorists who claim the rich engage in sex trafficking. People laugh at them over the specifics of pizzagate, qanon, etc.
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.
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.
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.
> (apparently they make left and right shoes in different countries now)
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
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.
> if forced to choose blindly I'd pick Sony over WMFSENSY.
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.
> extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure
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.
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
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.
> I remain baffled when people buy a 7 year old used V6 Traverse, a vehicle extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure
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.
> This information is freely available if you google “[vehicle model] depreciation curve”.
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.
> Nissan Altima
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.
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.
Meanwhile, my non-smart fridge continues to run just fine. Why do we need smart fridges? That was always a bad idea.
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.
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
> fridge with a camera inside
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.
Why not just open the door and have a look in the fridge?
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
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.
>”a smart fridge is a half solution at best”
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
“Half solution” seems like an odd way to say tool?
[delayed]
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.
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
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
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.
...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.
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 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
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”
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.
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
Maybe they were testing spoiled food detection /s
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.
Even if it worked right, you know they will eventually force a paid subscription just to keep the fridge running.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
We don't need this anti-innovation mindset.
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This is my fear on the car side, as smart features start leaking from isolated areas in automobiles into the larger CAN bus....
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.
Why do you own such a vehicle then?
You must not fear it that much.
A chunk of smart features are either legally mandated (eCall) or soft-required for "safety" (Euro NCAP lanekeeping etc).
all cars made in the last 15 years do it
“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?
Starting own car company is not a viable solution for a typical person.
Gilfoyle's take on Smart Fridges: > This thing is addressing problems that don't exist. It's solutionism at its worst.
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.
> There were product managers on both sides of that decision to prioritize enabling such a stupid feature.
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.
Well, they saved Pied Piper in the end. So maybe it was worth it :P
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.
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.
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.
How?! The only thing you need to do is test it on the friggin fridge?!
Yesterday I learnt that Samsung has a Royal Warrant in the UK.
TIL that they really shouldn’t.
Speaking of fridges, did anything come to light about that mass failing of gov run fridges we had here a few weeks ago?
So when will Samsung be compensating affected owners for their spoilt food?
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.
Maybe not everything needs to be smart.
Few things are truly smart.
Decidedly not the ones who approved the design of those fridges...
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
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.
If you have a fridge that new… you are probably fine.
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815381 1 day ago | 270 comments
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Sigh. Anything + computer = computer
Fridges with spyware.
Idiots who still laugh at "conspiracy theorists" deserve this shit upon them heh
People don't laugh at conspiracy theorists over claims that technology will continue to get more annoying. People don't even laugh at conspiracy theorists who claim the rich engage in sex trafficking. People laugh at them over the specifics of pizzagate, qanon, etc.