This guarantees I'll never buy a Samsung appliance. If they're this willing to screw with their customers today, they'll do it again tomorrow.
Sadly, I'm including their TVs in this. I have one today, displaying the output of an Apple TV and not directly connected to the Internet because hah, no way, but I'll be shopping around when it comes time to replace it.
Pity. They make nice stuff. Not nice enough that I'm willing to tolerate their anti-customer shenanigans, but otherwise decent quality.
Samsung appliances have among the worst reputations for ease of repair and lifespan. Sadly most other brands are rebrands of Chinese conglomerates or not much better on the quality chain. But honestly it's also a lottery. We bought a fridge on sale for $500 as an emergency stopover when our expensive fridge was delayed by a month during a move, and it's still plugging along out in the garage, a hostile environment for fridges. All the parts are very accessible too which bodes well for repair, although the leveling feet did snap off.
However, when you see the viral videos of "dream fridges" from the 1950s, it's important to remember that adjusted for inflation they would be something like $10k today. Of course they also last 10x as long, but you can still find fridges in that price range today with a similar value proposition. The question is whether or not you're willing to pay that upfront. I think we've all been so conditioned to accept that appliances go obsolete that it doesn't seem possible for a fridge like that to ever pay for itself.
Boots theory yes, but there also seem to be a paradox of reliability of cheap things.
Manufacturers which are aiming at being dirt cheap and selling lots of products, have low margins and simply cannot afford too many replacements / warranty repairs. High margin products don't care, they could make you three in that price and still be ok.
hah, I also keep the samsung tv cut off from internet. It was bad enough they come pre installed with clearly sponsored apps (because they were absolute trash).
I beg to differ that Samsung makes good stuff. We had a Samsung front-loading washer. The drum and the crank that holds the drum were made of two different materials, and in the presence of the water and detergent, a galvanic reaction occurred, dissolving the drum arm. Replacing the arm was $400 in parts and over 8 hours in repair time. (There's lots of YT videos of this exact repair.)
What kind of monkey designs something like that. It's obsolescence by design.
My house came with all Samsung appliances and I can't wait for all fo them to die. The dryer already went (8 years old).
I've been replacing with mid-range LG on advice of the local repair company and been happy so far. Quirky and very few features but seems well built.
Can't wait to replace the massive refrigerator and swap the gas range for inductive. Fridge is slowly going (cracked and leaking ice maker, condensation problem with deli drawer).
I now know how my mom could justify the ridiculous expense of a Subzero refrigerator (around $6k back in 2000). That thing has only needed a couple of tune ups and no parts replacements in 20 years.
My parents fridge started it's life in the mid 1990's, and their freezer is probably a decade older, at this stage nobody knows. I don't think they were expensive models.
My Samsung computer monitor is also the stuff of nightmares. Same story: useless "smart" UI features. I'm told I can use it as a dozen different things. But it sucks as a computer monitor.
My Samsung 4k 240hz OLED monitor has an absolutely gorgeous panel but if I knew I'd need to connect it to the internet and run a PYTHON script to disable some of its "features"[1] I probably would have gotten a similar LG display instead.
That makes me sad. Many, many years ago I had a 17" Samsung CRT. It broke within the warranty period. I called their support and explained the problem. They asked for my receipt. I didn't have one, but I told them that the sticker on the back said it had only been manufactured 9 months ago, so it had to still be under warranty. Their support person agreed. They checked their inventory and found that they were out of stock on that model, and asked if I'd be OK with them upgrading me to a 19" CRT. Sure!
I was fiercely loyal to them for a lot of years after that experience.
I got their monitors from the "before" they bunged smart into everything. 2 x 4K from 2016/2017. These things refuse to die and the picture is still good.
Unfortunately all of my relatives love their phones.
I got a new Samsung TV recently, i don't get the huge hatred for their software. It has some free TV channels, it has apps for the streaming services, even a decent web browser and overall good features. It supports Airplay, Google Cast, bluetooth etc. The OS has some annoyances and rough edges, but its mostly fine. I let it connect to the internet but not any of my other LAN devices so it cant' snoop too much.
I just don't see the problem, and don't see how connecting a different box to watch the same things is much better than just using the OS to do that. If they did have ads on it that would definitely be a problem though.
I had a Samsung TV ten years ago. While watching Game of Thrones with friends, it overlayed an ad at the top of the screen recommending I play Fruit Ninja on my TV. I immediately disconnected it from my WiFi and have not bought a single other Samsung device since, except for one thumbdrive that I needed. Avoiding Samsung as a brand when buying electronics has been really easy as well.
> and don't see how connecting a different box to watch the same things is much better than just using the OS to do that.
Because then you can replace a $50-100 box when it starts misbehaving (e.g. tracking and selling your information) or not getting upgrades anymore or getting slower, rather than replacing a $1000 TV.
Well, they could easily push a software update to add ads to your TV without a rollback option and disable features if you don't allow it.
If you upgrade your TV on the regular I guess you'd just buy a new one, but treating it as a dumb display guarantees you can keep using it as long as it physically works.
Well my Samsung tv I bought two years ago has gotten progressively slower and slower despite never installing any new stuff on it and only using the basic functionality, so that is pretty infuriating. Every couple of weeks I have to unplug it (because naturally a soft power off isn’t really doing anything) and it’ll be fast again for a while. When it’s slow it can easily take 10 seconds to bring up the menu.
Same they are off my list as well though I generally have less than zero interest in smart devices, I also have a Samsung "smart" TV as well, it asked for Wifi first time I turned it on, said "nope" connected a HDMI to a Fedora box and just use that.
I control what devices in my house connect to the internet.
I never thought I would connect my Hisense to the internet, but it turns out that it runs an MQTT broker and responds to WoL packets, so control via Home Assistant was really easy to setup and is much better than the IR blaster I was using before as response is almost instant and I can get power state so I can sync it to the rest of my living room. Most smart TVs seem to do well behind a DNS black hole, and if you're knowledgeable enough for that then self-hosting a dnsmasq instance on an old box you have lying around and pointing the TV at it is a snap.
Most modern TVs are fully controllable via their HDMI inputs. My shield and gaming systems are perfectly capable of turning my unconnected to the Internet TV on and off.
The shield also has a HA integration.
There's no need to risk an update that puts ads on the TV.
> I control what devices in my house connect to the internet.
That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open? Amongst other various dark patterns?
Your statement here kind of characterizes it as user error, but the manufacturers are absolutely hostile actors here.
> That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open?
Not yet. Wouldn't be surprising, but most of the time the problem is "person holding the remote wants it to work, connects it to wifi when it offers, doesn't know that they shouldn't".
I'm going to sell this idea to Samsung and earn me some Wons:
> When showing that the user has switched to HDMI input, show the full screen information: "HDMI1, brought to you by _____ [insert advertiser here]. Best experienced with Monster HDMI cables. Gold plated for the digital clarity."
No one in my family has an issue with it, use a years and years old integrated wireless mouse/touchpad and happy days, everything works as you'd expect, you can use it as a regular PC (surprisingly handy sometimes) and I can adblock the crap out of everything/use unhook to decrappify YT.
I happened to have an "old" Thinkpad (T470P, 7700HQ w/ 32GB RAM and the nvidia GPU) I wasn't using so it's left on all the time, runs the TV and serves movies over HTTP for family to watch via VLC (VLC will happily "stream" over HTTP)
One of those easy to do things where I'll never go back :).
The problem is that we are running out of alternatives. How long until there are no refrigerators, TVs, cars, whatever that will not work without some amount of baked in advertising?
I dunno, my family started buying LG stuff for our appliances and otherwise, and none of the stuff has forceful ads on them, at least yet. Currently I think we have LG TVs, fridge, dish washer, drier, washing machine and something else I can't remember, all of them working well, has nice and fast at-home support when needed and no ads even on the TVs.
Depends on what consumers stand for. If enough complain. If enough get bad reviews. If enough get returned. If enough buy something else is the big one. If there are other uses where they can't (some TVs are used a safety message boards in factories - if the ads ever show in this context and someone is hurt there will be a lawsuit - so there will be some demand at any price for something without ads)
I've bought GE recently with good luck (GSS25IYNFSS, specifically). No affiliation, just someone who buys a lot of appliances that need to last and be simple for longevity (housing provider). My kingdom for someone who could build the old, reliable tanks of yesteryear.
Crap crap and more crap. The quality control on GE fridges is absolutely the worst of all worst. It's possible because you are working with the economy of scale that you don't see the typical problems that individuals run into. But I went through 5 in a row and every single one had a problem. Switched to LG and never looked back
I have an LG fridge. I like it. I think the linear compressor tech is cool, even if their implementation is potentially flawed. I don't expect this thing to last a decade.
> I have one today, displaying the output of an Apple TV and not directly connected to the Internet
That's how I do it as well, and I hate that dumb TVs are getting increasingly more rare.
I know the day is coming where any new "Smart" TV will mandate you connect it to the internet to go through some initial setup process or require regular phone homes to function, and I'm not looking forward to it.
I don't want my TV to do anything except display whatever I have connected to it. It's job stops there.
Yeah - they support HDR10 (the most common HDR), HDR10+ (adds per-scene tone-mapping, but is rare to see media for), but not Dolby Vision (which requires paying a license fee to the Dolby folks).
I've heard that Netflix has added HDR10+ streams recently, but I haven't verified that myself.
That's correct. I can't use it at all with my Apple TV or Playstation 5, because the screen immediately goes dark. I don't know how to describe this exactly, but say that the TV's regular RGB display goes from 1 to 100. I'd expect that HDR would make it go from -50 to 150, or something like that. Instead, on my Samsung, it goes from -50 to 50. No amount of control fiddling can make it get as bright as it does in non-HDR mode.
Our cheaper LG works beautifully with the same inputs. The Samsung? Nope. Everything looks like the finale of Game of Thrones, even when you're looking at a soccer game played on a sunny day at noon on the equator.
There's a $30,000 bounty set up for anyone who can patch the firmware to eliminate the ads. Please consider contributing additional donations against the matching funds.
I recall Louis saying that some (or all?) solutions to these bounties cannot be revealed to the public due to being liable for DMCA circumvention measures.
> "Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams."
Recently saw this clip about a public bathroom where the toilet paper dispenser had a screen on it/qr code you had to scan, watch an ad to get the TP... interesting if true.
* How to turn off ads on your Family Hub
The widget will appear by default on the fridges as part of the software update. However, Samsung is giving users the option to turn off ads. To do this, go to the Settings page on the fridge, scroll to Advertisements, select it, and you’ll be taken to a screen where you can toggle off ads.
This will remove the widget entirely. If you think you might actually like the widget’s other features (calendar, weather, and news), you can “X” out a particular ad, and it won’t pop up again. But then you’ll get another ad.
I would call that flow "complex." So, I disagree with you.
Simple would be for the "X" button to offer to turn off Ads completely, do you disagree?
(Disclaimer: I'm a pro / lifelong tech and both are "simple" to me. And to clarify my opinion, my Mom, who is a pro musician, would NOT discover / know how to find that option.)
I've managed to mostly excise Samsung from my digital life (except for phones that family buys without my knowledge and that I have to troubleshoot), and I have been happier for it for many decades now.
(This was after direct exposure to their Tizen engineering team back in the early 2000s)
I stayed away from their phones, SmartTVs, everything.
What phones do you recommend? I have an S21 FE I got free from Metro PCS (I got laid off, had to return company S20 phone). Others in the family have Pixel / moto. I get the feeling the later galaxy phones are much worse than the S21?
They were caught uploading screenshots from content played on smart TVs. Ostensibly to sell ad tracking info like a Nielsen TV, but I'm pretty sure it meant they were capturing people's desktops with confidential corporate info etc. if you used the TV as a monitor.
At this point, anything from Samsung is a vehicle for ads, and anything with the word “smart” from Samsung is most likely a spyware. The amount of garbage I had to remove from a recently encountered Galaxy phone is on par with Windows 11 levels and some.
Unfortunately, the entire industry is racing toward this behavior. Recent LGs have also started slapping “AI” stickers on their products. I’ve been visiting Rossman’s Consumer Wiki[1] more often than I’d like before making a purchase.
After not having a Samsung device for many years, I reluctantly bought a fridge from them (price was the decisive factor). Anyway, almost immediate regret, it features an always-on wifi network begging to be connected to the web, the only way to turn it off is to disconnect a cable from a circuit board, unbelievable.
Why is this the best business model we can collectively execute on? Whether it is AI, home cameras, or fridges it seems to just come back to, welp, lets slap an ad on it.
Customers are generally low-information shoppers. They go to a hardware store and ask the salesperson for a fridge that fits their requirements. The rep will show them a few options, and then the customer gets to try them out. This is where the animal brain takes over: Samsung designs for the animal brain. It's sleek. It's futuristic. There's so many doors. It has a beverage drawer. A condiment drawer. You can customize the panels. The animal knows the Samsung fridge is better, and customers likely won't know any better if the salesperson doesn't tell them (and would they? They make a better commission on the more expensive fridge)
I think it's mostly about squeezing consumers for more money, even after they already paid a premium, because they simply can and nobody will do anything about it.
Unlike conventional businesses where a good or "binary" service (it works or not) is sold, advertising is a much more nebulous good whose efficiency can't be accurately measured. This means there are tons of inefficiencies where middlemen can skim something off the top:
* a product manager decides to include ads in some digital product. Their analytics show plenty of "engagement". The engagement is actually people accidentally clicking on the ad while hunting for the tiny "close" button, but even if the PM suspects it, they have no reason to volunteer that information. They keep getting their salary paid and even earn a promotion based on the engagement numbers.
* the developers are tasked with implementing the advertising infrastructure - they get paid while padding their resume about how they're building "scalable" systems.
* the "scalable" system runs on a cloud provider and earns them a ton of money. Cloud provider is happy.
* some marketing agency is given a budget to go and spend on ads. The person there maybe even knows that advertising in the aforementioned product is a bad idea because most of their clicks are fake... but if their client is tasking them with burning money, why would they refuse?
* a marketing person at a big company that doesn't actually need any more advertising to succeed is given a budget and spreads it across a few marketing agencies including the aforementioned one. They get paid, why should they refuse?
At every layer (and I haven't even listed them all), people get paid by skimming something off the top. It doesn't matter whether the advertising works, because nobody in the chain has any incentive to admit it while the status quo is so lucrative, so the rational thing to do for everyone is to not rock the boat.
What the outcome actually happening is indicative of however is that consumers are very very very bad at their job (consuming the best products) and do not have enough rights.
If a customer was entitled to a working product without this kind of deficiency, and we had courts that actually applied punishments to large corporations (instead of unilaterally and without justification, significantly reducing fines to nothing) we wouldn't have this problem. It wouldn't be possible to profit off of this kind of advertising because you would be too busy signing court documents about how you suck at building stuff.
There's only so many human beings who can buy your fridge. There's only so cheap you can build your fridge. There's only so much you can charge for your fridge. But line must go up.
This is simply what it looks like when the people with money and resources decide that a stable and reliable profit is a Failed business.
It's an inexpensive revenue stream; the secondary effects and risk to customers are considered relevant insofar as they can negatively impact the company's future profitability (if then).
There's no way that this was ever /not/ going to happen under current laws (US).
Internal incentives not overall profitability drive such behavior.
An executive can point to a profit stream and suggest that’s beneficial to the company while ignoring externalities that cost the company 5x as much. Nobody inside has complete knowledge if someone was a good idea or not so the appearance of benefit often replaces the search for actual benefit.
Because it's a dual revenue stream. The retail customer pays you, and then the advertising customer pays you. Why make only $1 when you can make $2, $3, $4 over time?
If your next question is "why do they need to keep making more money?", the answer is capitalism.
Yay to living in the EU! Since I would be allowed to get a full purchase-price refund if they'd try to pull this shit in the Europe, they limited the new "Cover-Screen-Widget" to only activate within the US.
I know, I know, I suffer daily from government overreach ;) But have you tried lobbying for your fellow humans?
Not yet it seems, but if history is any good indication of the future, someone at one point will have their "You won't give me API access to my own goddamn fridge?!" moment and GNU.V2 will be born.
Contextual means based on related taxonomy of interest.
How that interest is measured and what "related" means is proprietary.
This is distinct from demographic (trends based on physical attributes, like age) or geographic or behavioral (your buying patterns) and they already know the device targeting because it's their fridge.
Don't some of these have "smart" features to detect what is actually in your fridge and tell you if you run out? I would think removing the last piece of butter could trigger an ad for whatever cow-milk-fat substitute won the highest bid on the brainfuck raffle that day would be shown to you.
Such a smart feature would most likely include reading labels, which means that the system would also know some of the medicines you consume. The fridge would most likely also record the user's interactions with the fridge, so the system will also know what your prescription amounts are. The possibilities of abuse are endless.
Another one: "you have consumed 20 units of alcohol this week, and run out. Should I order this 25 pack that is cheaper?"
Personalized ads are based on your user profile (ads for motorbikes because you're tagged as someone who loves motorbikes). Contextualized ads are based on where and when they're being displayed (ads for food delivery on the fridge late at night) but not on your user profile. This is the advertising industry, so they're probably lying, or they're not lying yet but they plan to add personalized ads later.
The headline is so insane. I’m not very interested in Samsung in general, because I use apple products and they don’t offer Dolby Vision on their TV’s, but the headline lol.
Disagree. Smart can be good, if you're actually in full control (whenever you contract the implementation to a company or own it).
The real problem is, there's not much on the market that respects the consumers in this regard. Ask for an SLA on a smart fridge functionality and you'll be met with a confusion and possibly a revelation there's nothing of a kind.
It's all ignored because most consumers don't ask questions about reliability, functionality, security and control - they don't think of those. And it's not a matter of technical or specialized knowledge, I'm sure even a caveman can understand "will this work tomorrow the exact same way it works today?" or "what happens to my fridge if you go out of business?" - it's a matter of awareness. People simply don't know yet how those new things can fail them.
Eventually people will learn about the issues, and start asking maker companies those questions. But it's all too new today.
I bought a vented Samsung washer/dryer combo recently. I have to say I like it a lot, probably because its a combo and I no longer have to transfer clothes from washer to dryer. The fact that is Samsung definitely makes me feel nervous however (how long will it last?). Unfortunately, they were the only one to make a vented combo so far (I should have waited for more options, but I'm still OK with it).
We have a frame TV also and it worked nice for the very narrow use case we had.
I don't buy smart devices, unless they work fine without the smart stuff and it's a good buy. I have a "smart" TV because it's a great TV, but it only has HDMI cables plugged into it and no internet connection.
Why would I ever connect my fridge to the internet? I cannot fathom any feature on a fridge that would incline me towards giving it the wifi credentials.
What if your fridge could do an AI thing and the groceries to refill itself would just arrive? Could be a fantastic way to control your diet by only buying foods that satiated/goal oriented you approved (as opposed to hungry you walking down aisles of product placements in the grocery store)
Why do you need a fridge to do that? An AI agent with access to your Instacart account could do it. If you only buy groceries with that it knows roughly how many calories it purchased and you should've consumed since the last order.
That's probably because you're a developer, and as developers it's really easy for us to develop tunnel-vision for some reason, and really hard to see the perspective from a "regular person", the sort of person who a salesperson can say "You can now get alerted when you're low on eggs, no matter where you are!" and the person will think that's a cool feature with no drawbacks.
It got nothing to do with someone being a developer and having tunnel vision. In fact I would argue that many people that work in tech would be the most likely to sold on such a feature.
It has everything to do with being frugal and whether you see the utility. There is very little benefit in being alerted when I am low on eggs because I can simply open the fridge and look. I can also normally buy eggs anywhere, at any time of day.
Yeah, which is easy to reason about because you're probably used to reason about stuff, sometimes even a lot.
But lots of the average person don't do much of that sort of reasoning, lots of people live life basically on impulses. They buy stuff based on their feelings, not based on "does this solve an actual problem I have that actually needs solving?".
At this point they start to demand it, whether that's setting up the product or registration needed for warranty protection. But you obviously can still cut them off on router.
Soon though they won't ask, LTE-M / NB-IoT, both chips and plans are becoming very cheap and unless you are living in a faraday cage it will take control away from the user completely.
> Samsung fridge owners can also opt to avoid the latest software update altogether. However, they would miss out on other features included in the software update, such as a UI refresh and the ability for the internal camera inside some fridges to identify more fruits and vegetables inside the fridge.
The level of absurdity here with respect to "miss[ing] out on other features" strains credulity.
I don't know why I would connect a fridge to the Internet at all. Maybe there is a use case where you can get a picture of the contents of your fridge on your phone when you are out and about? Like you're at the grocery store and can't remember if you need to pick up milk or not?
I could come around to a fridge that keeps track of the contents, including use by dates, prompts me to throw away things that are going bad and adds replacements to a periodic supermarket order.
Just replaced a Samsung fridge. It was the worst I have ever had, and it wasn't even kludged up with smart-ai-internet-advertisement bullshit yet. The compressor went out after about 12 years (which is apparently good for current refrigerator manufacturing - yikes). But the ice maker and operation panel had been on the fritz for at least 4 years before that. I went with a Frigidaire + 5 year extended warranty. Much better use of internal space, nothing smart, dual ice makers. Only negative is it's kinda noisy and runs often due to the compressor being sized for "efficiency". Fingers crossed.
Samsung makes bad fridges. I bought a Sub-Zero. It has 2 compressors (1 for fridge and 1 for freezer), is made of high quality parts so will last 20+ years, has excellent service guarantees, and is made in America. Highly recommended.
This is stupid. Companies are really trying to get people to hate everything tech related. From "smart" beds, to "smart" fridges, and with the "looming" job displacement due to "AI" and robotics, I could see how a "human-centric" economy or new wave of businesses and startups with a "human-centric" approach could develop in few years.
This ad nonsense aside, don't buy Samsung refrigerators. They are so awfully made and difficult to service that almost no appliance repair companies will touch them. I got suckered into buying one a few years back and it was awful. The ice maker didn't work, every few weeks I would sop up a gallon of condensation at the bottom of the cheese drawer, and eventually it just died. I went to a local appliance store and they chuckled when I told them. They would never carry that brand. Just fridges, don't want to talk about other appliances.
So I recently (last two years or so) bought a (non-Samsung, non-smart) fridge. It's a very nice fridge. It cost, IIRC, about $1000-1500. No internet connection, no ads, no screen to play them on.
Why would I pay $2000 more for a more annoying fridge?
This annoyed so much I actually wrote them a physical letter denouncing the practice and mailed it to their US corporate HQ. I haven't mailed a letter in years. Feels odd.
I have a samsung fridge, and that's enough for them to already be on my shit list. if you put a screen in my kitchen and force me to watch ads I'm going to physically shatter the screen, I don't care what other functionality it may have.
So a digital calendar with ads seems reasonable. What they don't mention is how much work they plan on putting into the maintenance. A $3k fridge should last decades, including the screen, software, and WiFi connection.
Last decades? wipes the tear You surely forgot /s at end, I hope. The evil incarnation what is called "Samsung fridge" that I have in my kitchen required repairman's attention just 3 months after the purchase. And then every 3 months after. And children sacrifices, sorry - steam baths, for the ice maker every month or so.
Samsung appliances - never again.
PS. Repairman told me that Samsung have fixed already one of the problems my fridge has by the time he looked at it, kind of hidden recall and fix. Fridge's version (yes, they have versions) have advanced like 7 iterations already from the time I bought it. That means there were at least 7 serious design/manufacturing problems that they had to fix.
I mean.. that's based on the assumption that they actually care about delivering a working appliance.. As long as the spyware works, they don't really care about the "cooling food" part..
This guarantees I'll never buy a Samsung appliance. If they're this willing to screw with their customers today, they'll do it again tomorrow.
Sadly, I'm including their TVs in this. I have one today, displaying the output of an Apple TV and not directly connected to the Internet because hah, no way, but I'll be shopping around when it comes time to replace it.
Pity. They make nice stuff. Not nice enough that I'm willing to tolerate their anti-customer shenanigans, but otherwise decent quality.
Samsung appliances have among the worst reputations for ease of repair and lifespan. Sadly most other brands are rebrands of Chinese conglomerates or not much better on the quality chain. But honestly it's also a lottery. We bought a fridge on sale for $500 as an emergency stopover when our expensive fridge was delayed by a month during a move, and it's still plugging along out in the garage, a hostile environment for fridges. All the parts are very accessible too which bodes well for repair, although the leveling feet did snap off.
However, when you see the viral videos of "dream fridges" from the 1950s, it's important to remember that adjusted for inflation they would be something like $10k today. Of course they also last 10x as long, but you can still find fridges in that price range today with a similar value proposition. The question is whether or not you're willing to pay that upfront. I think we've all been so conditioned to accept that appliances go obsolete that it doesn't seem possible for a fridge like that to ever pay for itself.
It's the boots theory at work.
Boots theory yes, but there also seem to be a paradox of reliability of cheap things.
Manufacturers which are aiming at being dirt cheap and selling lots of products, have low margins and simply cannot afford too many replacements / warranty repairs. High margin products don't care, they could make you three in that price and still be ok.
The issue is that the 10k fridge is not actually any better.
The "luxury" appliances can be double that and are still shit.
> you can still find fridges in that price range today with a similar value proposition
Does anyone have examples of consumer fridges like this?
sub-zero or thermadore maybe?
hah, I also keep the samsung tv cut off from internet. It was bad enough they come pre installed with clearly sponsored apps (because they were absolute trash).
I beg to differ that Samsung makes good stuff. We had a Samsung front-loading washer. The drum and the crank that holds the drum were made of two different materials, and in the presence of the water and detergent, a galvanic reaction occurred, dissolving the drum arm. Replacing the arm was $400 in parts and over 8 hours in repair time. (There's lots of YT videos of this exact repair.)
What kind of monkey designs something like that. It's obsolescence by design.
I will never buy another Samsung product.
My house came with all Samsung appliances and I can't wait for all fo them to die. The dryer already went (8 years old).
I've been replacing with mid-range LG on advice of the local repair company and been happy so far. Quirky and very few features but seems well built.
Can't wait to replace the massive refrigerator and swap the gas range for inductive. Fridge is slowly going (cracked and leaking ice maker, condensation problem with deli drawer).
I now know how my mom could justify the ridiculous expense of a Subzero refrigerator (around $6k back in 2000). That thing has only needed a couple of tune ups and no parts replacements in 20 years.
8 years is pretty good. I personally like Bosch. Is a fridge with an icemaker not always problematic? How about biofilm?
What is the advantage of an inductive stove? Will they even work in the US? I think in Europe they work with 360 V if I remember right.
I realized two things:
1. You can cook nearly everything with a ricecooker. Just throw everything inside. Yes, even the minced meat on top.
2. An airfrier is better and faster than a shitty oven.
My parents fridge started it's life in the mid 1990's, and their freezer is probably a decade older, at this stage nobody knows. I don't think they were expensive models.
My Samsung computer monitor is also the stuff of nightmares. Same story: useless "smart" UI features. I'm told I can use it as a dozen different things. But it sucks as a computer monitor.
Not cheap either!
My Samsung 4k 240hz OLED monitor has an absolutely gorgeous panel but if I knew I'd need to connect it to the internet and run a PYTHON script to disable some of its "features"[1] I probably would have gotten a similar LG display instead.
[^1]: https://pfy.ch/programming/disable-samsung-game-bar.html
That makes me sad. Many, many years ago I had a 17" Samsung CRT. It broke within the warranty period. I called their support and explained the problem. They asked for my receipt. I didn't have one, but I told them that the sticker on the back said it had only been manufactured 9 months ago, so it had to still be under warranty. Their support person agreed. They checked their inventory and found that they were out of stock on that model, and asked if I'd be OK with them upgrading me to a 19" CRT. Sure!
I was fiercely loyal to them for a lot of years after that experience.
I got their monitors from the "before" they bunged smart into everything. 2 x 4K from 2016/2017. These things refuse to die and the picture is still good.
Unfortunately all of my relatives love their phones.
I got a new Samsung TV recently, i don't get the huge hatred for their software. It has some free TV channels, it has apps for the streaming services, even a decent web browser and overall good features. It supports Airplay, Google Cast, bluetooth etc. The OS has some annoyances and rough edges, but its mostly fine. I let it connect to the internet but not any of my other LAN devices so it cant' snoop too much.
I just don't see the problem, and don't see how connecting a different box to watch the same things is much better than just using the OS to do that. If they did have ads on it that would definitely be a problem though.
I had a Samsung TV ten years ago. While watching Game of Thrones with friends, it overlayed an ad at the top of the screen recommending I play Fruit Ninja on my TV. I immediately disconnected it from my WiFi and have not bought a single other Samsung device since, except for one thumbdrive that I needed. Avoiding Samsung as a brand when buying electronics has been really easy as well.
> and don't see how connecting a different box to watch the same things is much better than just using the OS to do that.
Because then you can replace a $50-100 box when it starts misbehaving (e.g. tracking and selling your information) or not getting upgrades anymore or getting slower, rather than replacing a $1000 TV.
Well, they could easily push a software update to add ads to your TV without a rollback option and disable features if you don't allow it.
If you upgrade your TV on the regular I guess you'd just buy a new one, but treating it as a dumb display guarantees you can keep using it as long as it physically works.
Well my Samsung tv I bought two years ago has gotten progressively slower and slower despite never installing any new stuff on it and only using the basic functionality, so that is pretty infuriating. Every couple of weeks I have to unplug it (because naturally a soft power off isn’t really doing anything) and it’ll be fast again for a while. When it’s slow it can easily take 10 seconds to bring up the menu.
Same they are off my list as well though I generally have less than zero interest in smart devices, I also have a Samsung "smart" TV as well, it asked for Wifi first time I turned it on, said "nope" connected a HDMI to a Fedora box and just use that.
I control what devices in my house connect to the internet.
I never thought I would connect my Hisense to the internet, but it turns out that it runs an MQTT broker and responds to WoL packets, so control via Home Assistant was really easy to setup and is much better than the IR blaster I was using before as response is almost instant and I can get power state so I can sync it to the rest of my living room. Most smart TVs seem to do well behind a DNS black hole, and if you're knowledgeable enough for that then self-hosting a dnsmasq instance on an old box you have lying around and pointing the TV at it is a snap.
Most modern TVs are fully controllable via their HDMI inputs. My shield and gaming systems are perfectly capable of turning my unconnected to the Internet TV on and off.
The shield also has a HA integration.
There's no need to risk an update that puts ads on the TV.
Yep, HDMI-CEC is pretty common these days, Samsung call it Anynet+ for..reasons I guess.
> I control what devices in my house connect to the internet.
That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open? Amongst other various dark patterns?
Your statement here kind of characterizes it as user error, but the manufacturers are absolutely hostile actors here.
> That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open?
Not yet. Wouldn't be surprising, but most of the time the problem is "person holding the remote wants it to work, connects it to wifi when it offers, doesn't know that they shouldn't".
I'm going to sell this idea to Samsung and earn me some Wons:
> When showing that the user has switched to HDMI input, show the full screen information: "HDMI1, brought to you by _____ [insert advertiser here]. Best experienced with Monster HDMI cables. Gold plated for the digital clarity."
Linux box to Samsung TV here as well. It's awesome, best of both worlds. Stable Debian with Plasma DE in my case.
It's really too bad that Plasma's big picture mode is very WIP these days; once it's stabilized it should be a good option for this kind of thing
I just run it as a desktop and boost scaling.
No one in my family has an issue with it, use a years and years old integrated wireless mouse/touchpad and happy days, everything works as you'd expect, you can use it as a regular PC (surprisingly handy sometimes) and I can adblock the crap out of everything/use unhook to decrappify YT.
I happened to have an "old" Thinkpad (T470P, 7700HQ w/ 32GB RAM and the nvidia GPU) I wasn't using so it's left on all the time, runs the TV and serves movies over HTTP for family to watch via VLC (VLC will happily "stream" over HTTP)
One of those easy to do things where I'll never go back :).
The problem is that we are running out of alternatives. How long until there are no refrigerators, TVs, cars, whatever that will not work without some amount of baked in advertising?
I dunno, my family started buying LG stuff for our appliances and otherwise, and none of the stuff has forceful ads on them, at least yet. Currently I think we have LG TVs, fridge, dish washer, drier, washing machine and something else I can't remember, all of them working well, has nice and fast at-home support when needed and no ads even on the TVs.
Same, regarding LG slowly occupying all the home appliances spaces. As long as they behave like a good guest in my home I’ll keep buying their stuff.
Depends on what consumers stand for. If enough complain. If enough get bad reviews. If enough get returned. If enough buy something else is the big one. If there are other uses where they can't (some TVs are used a safety message boards in factories - if the ads ever show in this context and someone is hurt there will be a lawsuit - so there will be some demand at any price for something without ads)
At least with Vizio I kinda expected it. I can't imagine paying $3500 only to have it have the "benefit" of ads added after the fact.
I've bought GE recently with good luck (GSS25IYNFSS, specifically). No affiliation, just someone who buys a lot of appliances that need to last and be simple for longevity (housing provider). My kingdom for someone who could build the old, reliable tanks of yesteryear.
https://ncph.org/history-at-work/rethinking-the-refrigerator...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator
Crap crap and more crap. The quality control on GE fridges is absolutely the worst of all worst. It's possible because you are working with the economy of scale that you don't see the typical problems that individuals run into. But I went through 5 in a row and every single one had a problem. Switched to LG and never looked back
LG with their faulty Linear Compressors and craft ice makers that are doomed to fail? The one with the big lawsuit for their faulty fridges?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y54QbkCtFE4
I have an LG fridge. I like it. I think the linear compressor tech is cool, even if their implementation is potentially flawed. I don't expect this thing to last a decade.
Agreed. Showing ads on TVs is beyond the pale.
(Sorry, I just had to. In fact, thoug, I would be furious if my tv injected ads onto my source material)
> I have one today, displaying the output of an Apple TV and not directly connected to the Internet
That's how I do it as well, and I hate that dumb TVs are getting increasingly more rare.
I know the day is coming where any new "Smart" TV will mandate you connect it to the internet to go through some initial setup process or require regular phone homes to function, and I'm not looking forward to it.
I don't want my TV to do anything except display whatever I have connected to it. It's job stops there.
Their TVs still don’t support all the HDR formats right?
Yeah - they support HDR10 (the most common HDR), HDR10+ (adds per-scene tone-mapping, but is rare to see media for), but not Dolby Vision (which requires paying a license fee to the Dolby folks).
I've heard that Netflix has added HDR10+ streams recently, but I haven't verified that myself.
That's correct. I can't use it at all with my Apple TV or Playstation 5, because the screen immediately goes dark. I don't know how to describe this exactly, but say that the TV's regular RGB display goes from 1 to 100. I'd expect that HDR would make it go from -50 to 150, or something like that. Instead, on my Samsung, it goes from -50 to 50. No amount of control fiddling can make it get as bright as it does in non-HDR mode.
Our cheaper LG works beautifully with the same inputs. The Samsung? Nope. Everything looks like the finale of Game of Thrones, even when you're looking at a soccer game played on a sunny day at noon on the equator.
There's a $30,000 bounty set up for anyone who can patch the firmware to eliminate the ads. Please consider contributing additional donations against the matching funds.
https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/samsung-familyhub-refrige...
I recall Louis saying that some (or all?) solutions to these bounties cannot be revealed to the public due to being liable for DMCA circumvention measures.
I lieu of a donation I'll continue to not pay for ad-laden garbage.
That website has never once paid out a bounty? hmm...
> "Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?"
> "Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Mansion_(film)
Ah, lightspeed briefs fit everywhere, on the beach and on your the fridge.
Futurama right? When fry buys that underwear?
More than technically correct—the best kind of correct—you are plain correct.
(I've used em-dashes since before LLMs and I'm not fucking stopping now)
EDIT: s,',,
I feel you on the em dashes lol
My proudest typographical accomplishment is that use of em-dashes once got me a tinder date.
...it didn't go anywhere after that date. But I still have the anecdote.
Recently saw this clip about a public bathroom where the toilet paper dispenser had a screen on it/qr code you had to scan, watch an ad to get the TP... interesting if true.
FYI: Out of curiosity, just googled it
"No, Samsung fridges do not run on webOS; they use Samsung's own Tizen operating system. LG is the brand that uses webOS in its smart refrigerators. "
Apparently, you can turn off ads quite simply.
* How to turn off ads on your Family Hub The widget will appear by default on the fridges as part of the software update. However, Samsung is giving users the option to turn off ads. To do this, go to the Settings page on the fridge, scroll to Advertisements, select it, and you’ll be taken to a screen where you can toggle off ads.
This will remove the widget entirely. If you think you might actually like the widget’s other features (calendar, weather, and news), you can “X” out a particular ad, and it won’t pop up again. But then you’ll get another ad.
I would call that flow "complex." So, I disagree with you.
Simple would be for the "X" button to offer to turn off Ads completely, do you disagree?
(Disclaimer: I'm a pro / lifelong tech and both are "simple" to me. And to clarify my opinion, my Mom, who is a pro musician, would NOT discover / know how to find that option.)
Samsung marketplace on the phone used to have this- now it's just 'don't show this again today' button.
The simplest way is to not connect a refrigerator to the internet.
I wonder how many ads are coming down the pipeline; can I remove all of them if I sit in front of my fridge for 15 minutes?
Cmon. You know better than that.
For now.
Its only a matter of time until your toilet starts telling you where to get high fibre cereal at 20% off.
I've managed to mostly excise Samsung from my digital life (except for phones that family buys without my knowledge and that I have to troubleshoot), and I have been happier for it for many decades now.
(This was after direct exposure to their Tizen engineering team back in the early 2000s)
I stayed away from their phones, SmartTVs, everything.
What phones do you recommend? I have an S21 FE I got free from Metro PCS (I got laid off, had to return company S20 phone). Others in the family have Pixel / moto. I get the feeling the later galaxy phones are much worse than the S21?
> except for phones that family buys without my knowledge and that I have to troubleshoot
It's okay to say no. After decades of being the computer tech in my family, I started saying no and have been a lot happier for it.
They were caught uploading screenshots from content played on smart TVs. Ostensibly to sell ad tracking info like a Nielsen TV, but I'm pretty sure it meant they were capturing people's desktops with confidential corporate info etc. if you used the TV as a monitor.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/samsung-smart-tvs...
I would rather go without household refrigeration than have the refrigerator that I own play ads in my house.
I'd rather put foil tape over the display than go without refrigeration.
Does the door unlock if if the in-display camera can’t recognize your face though?
I didn't think that these fridges locked the door. Is that a "child proofing" feature you can enable or something?
Hopefully DNS level ad blocking will help here, and even more hopefully consumers will reject smart appliances. I'd never buy one
They won't. Smart devices tend to be cheap because the manufacturer is double-dipping by selling telemetry and advertising.
Just wait till you have to watch N adds before the door will unlock. And good luck getting it open in a power/internet outage :lol:
Millions of people sit through minutes of the worst ads I've ever seen to watch mr beast exploit homeless people. We're boned.
We noticed you have Coca-Cola in your refrigerator... please enjoy this Pepsi ad and this QR code for 25% off your next purchase.
It's probably work like IMDb does on your phone. All ads are piped through the same domain as useful data.
I'll never ever buy a 'smart' appliance. I'll go caveman first. Keeping food cold and/or cooking it does not require the Internet.
Or import one yourself
The backlash from this doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet so here we go!
At this point, anything from Samsung is a vehicle for ads, and anything with the word “smart” from Samsung is most likely a spyware. The amount of garbage I had to remove from a recently encountered Galaxy phone is on par with Windows 11 levels and some.
Unfortunately, the entire industry is racing toward this behavior. Recent LGs have also started slapping “AI” stickers on their products. I’ve been visiting Rossman’s Consumer Wiki[1] more often than I’d like before making a purchase.
[1]: https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Main_Page
After not having a Samsung device for many years, I reluctantly bought a fridge from them (price was the decisive factor). Anyway, almost immediate regret, it features an always-on wifi network begging to be connected to the web, the only way to turn it off is to disconnect a cable from a circuit board, unbelievable.
Why is this the best business model we can collectively execute on? Whether it is AI, home cameras, or fridges it seems to just come back to, welp, lets slap an ad on it.
Customers are generally low-information shoppers. They go to a hardware store and ask the salesperson for a fridge that fits their requirements. The rep will show them a few options, and then the customer gets to try them out. This is where the animal brain takes over: Samsung designs for the animal brain. It's sleek. It's futuristic. There's so many doors. It has a beverage drawer. A condiment drawer. You can customize the panels. The animal knows the Samsung fridge is better, and customers likely won't know any better if the salesperson doesn't tell them (and would they? They make a better commission on the more expensive fridge)
I think it's mostly about squeezing consumers for more money, even after they already paid a premium, because they simply can and nobody will do anything about it.
Unlike conventional businesses where a good or "binary" service (it works or not) is sold, advertising is a much more nebulous good whose efficiency can't be accurately measured. This means there are tons of inefficiencies where middlemen can skim something off the top:
* a product manager decides to include ads in some digital product. Their analytics show plenty of "engagement". The engagement is actually people accidentally clicking on the ad while hunting for the tiny "close" button, but even if the PM suspects it, they have no reason to volunteer that information. They keep getting their salary paid and even earn a promotion based on the engagement numbers.
* the developers are tasked with implementing the advertising infrastructure - they get paid while padding their resume about how they're building "scalable" systems.
* the "scalable" system runs on a cloud provider and earns them a ton of money. Cloud provider is happy.
* some marketing agency is given a budget to go and spend on ads. The person there maybe even knows that advertising in the aforementioned product is a bad idea because most of their clicks are fake... but if their client is tasking them with burning money, why would they refuse?
* a marketing person at a big company that doesn't actually need any more advertising to succeed is given a budget and spreads it across a few marketing agencies including the aforementioned one. They get paid, why should they refuse?
At every layer (and I haven't even listed them all), people get paid by skimming something off the top. It doesn't matter whether the advertising works, because nobody in the chain has any incentive to admit it while the status quo is so lucrative, so the rational thing to do for everyone is to not rock the boat.
Because simply selling a refrigerator isn’t good enough anymore. How else do you fuel infinite economic growth?
If it was legal to kill for money they would do that too. In some ways that already occurs.
> Why is this the best business model we can collectively execute on?
Attention is the ultimate resource.
The line must go up.
By a percentage every year.
Compounding.
This was always an obvious outcome.
What the outcome actually happening is indicative of however is that consumers are very very very bad at their job (consuming the best products) and do not have enough rights.
If a customer was entitled to a working product without this kind of deficiency, and we had courts that actually applied punishments to large corporations (instead of unilaterally and without justification, significantly reducing fines to nothing) we wouldn't have this problem. It wouldn't be possible to profit off of this kind of advertising because you would be too busy signing court documents about how you suck at building stuff.
There's only so many human beings who can buy your fridge. There's only so cheap you can build your fridge. There's only so much you can charge for your fridge. But line must go up.
This is simply what it looks like when the people with money and resources decide that a stable and reliable profit is a Failed business.
It's an inexpensive revenue stream; the secondary effects and risk to customers are considered relevant insofar as they can negatively impact the company's future profitability (if then).
There's no way that this was ever /not/ going to happen under current laws (US).
The System rewards the business model that also covertly enables the most surveillance.
because it's essentially free money with no consequences.
Internal incentives not overall profitability drive such behavior.
An executive can point to a profit stream and suggest that’s beneficial to the company while ignoring externalities that cost the company 5x as much. Nobody inside has complete knowledge if someone was a good idea or not so the appearance of benefit often replaces the search for actual benefit.
Because it's a dual revenue stream. The retail customer pays you, and then the advertising customer pays you. Why make only $1 when you can make $2, $3, $4 over time?
If your next question is "why do they need to keep making more money?", the answer is capitalism.
To be fair if you're gonna advertise to someone, people who buy $3500 fridges are ideal
Where is Gilfoyle when we need him so much?
Yay to living in the EU! Since I would be allowed to get a full purchase-price refund if they'd try to pull this shit in the Europe, they limited the new "Cover-Screen-Widget" to only activate within the US.
I know, I know, I suffer daily from government overreach ;) But have you tried lobbying for your fellow humans?
Europoors seething they can't afford ad-ridden fridges. /s
Is there an alternative OS scene for these types of appliances?
Not yet it seems, but if history is any good indication of the future, someone at one point will have their "You won't give me API access to my own goddamn fridge?!" moment and GNU.V2 will be born.
I’m in the market for buying two new fridges for our new house; this post reminded me to filter out Samsung immediately. I LOATHE ads.
boycotted for life. All products.
> Samsung also said that its fridges will only show contextualized ads, instead of personalized ads, which rely on collecting data on users.
What is a contextualized ad?
Probably ads for things that you would think of buying when you're standing near the fridge in the kitchen. So not Clash of Clans but La Croix.
Well, they probably won't be able to sell enough ad space to supermarkets, so people will get ads for "World of Tanks" and sports betting.
Contextual means based on related taxonomy of interest. How that interest is measured and what "related" means is proprietary.
This is distinct from demographic (trends based on physical attributes, like age) or geographic or behavioral (your buying patterns) and they already know the device targeting because it's their fridge.
Classic digital advertising vectors.
"I noticed you had Yoplait brand yogurt in your fridge. Here's a coupon for $0.75 off your first six-pack of Chobani!"
Don't some of these have "smart" features to detect what is actually in your fridge and tell you if you run out? I would think removing the last piece of butter could trigger an ad for whatever cow-milk-fat substitute won the highest bid on the brainfuck raffle that day would be shown to you.
Such a smart feature would most likely include reading labels, which means that the system would also know some of the medicines you consume. The fridge would most likely also record the user's interactions with the fridge, so the system will also know what your prescription amounts are. The possibilities of abuse are endless.
Another one: "you have consumed 20 units of alcohol this week, and run out. Should I order this 25 pack that is cheaper?"
Ads for things it overheard you talking about recently.
Personalized ads are based on your user profile (ads for motorbikes because you're tagged as someone who loves motorbikes). Contextualized ads are based on where and when they're being displayed (ads for food delivery on the fridge late at night) but not on your user profile. This is the advertising industry, so they're probably lying, or they're not lying yet but they plan to add personalized ads later.
I'd understand if the ads were subsidizing the purchase price significantly, but this still seems to be in line with their highest pricing.
I’ve seen enough of these stories to know that I will never buy any Samsung product. They are a repeat offender.
The headline is so insane. I’m not very interested in Samsung in general, because I use apple products and they don’t offer Dolby Vision on their TV’s, but the headline lol.
You do not buy a smart appliance. Period. A fridge, oven, toaster, washing machine, bed do not need to be smart.
Smart is the consumer that is able to spot all this BS ideas that are putting in front of us and avoids it as much as it can.
Disagree. Smart can be good, if you're actually in full control (whenever you contract the implementation to a company or own it).
The real problem is, there's not much on the market that respects the consumers in this regard. Ask for an SLA on a smart fridge functionality and you'll be met with a confusion and possibly a revelation there's nothing of a kind.
It's all ignored because most consumers don't ask questions about reliability, functionality, security and control - they don't think of those. And it's not a matter of technical or specialized knowledge, I'm sure even a caveman can understand "will this work tomorrow the exact same way it works today?" or "what happens to my fridge if you go out of business?" - it's a matter of awareness. People simply don't know yet how those new things can fail them.
Eventually people will learn about the issues, and start asking maker companies those questions. But it's all too new today.
I bought a vented Samsung washer/dryer combo recently. I have to say I like it a lot, probably because its a combo and I no longer have to transfer clothes from washer to dryer. The fact that is Samsung definitely makes me feel nervous however (how long will it last?). Unfortunately, they were the only one to make a vented combo so far (I should have waited for more options, but I'm still OK with it).
We have a frame TV also and it worked nice for the very narrow use case we had.
I don't buy smart devices, unless they work fine without the smart stuff and it's a good buy. I have a "smart" TV because it's a great TV, but it only has HDMI cables plugged into it and no internet connection.
Why would I ever connect my fridge to the internet? I cannot fathom any feature on a fridge that would incline me towards giving it the wifi credentials.
What if your fridge could do an AI thing and the groceries to refill itself would just arrive? Could be a fantastic way to control your diet by only buying foods that satiated/goal oriented you approved (as opposed to hungry you walking down aisles of product placements in the grocery store)
Why do you need a fridge to do that? An AI agent with access to your Instacart account could do it. If you only buy groceries with that it knows roughly how many calories it purchased and you should've consumed since the last order.
> I cannot fathom
That's probably because you're a developer, and as developers it's really easy for us to develop tunnel-vision for some reason, and really hard to see the perspective from a "regular person", the sort of person who a salesperson can say "You can now get alerted when you're low on eggs, no matter where you are!" and the person will think that's a cool feature with no drawbacks.
It got nothing to do with someone being a developer and having tunnel vision. In fact I would argue that many people that work in tech would be the most likely to sold on such a feature.
It has everything to do with being frugal and whether you see the utility. There is very little benefit in being alerted when I am low on eggs because I can simply open the fridge and look. I can also normally buy eggs anywhere, at any time of day.
There isn't really a problem that needs solving.
Yeah, which is easy to reason about because you're probably used to reason about stuff, sometimes even a lot.
But lots of the average person don't do much of that sort of reasoning, lots of people live life basically on impulses. They buy stuff based on their feelings, not based on "does this solve an actual problem I have that actually needs solving?".
At this point they start to demand it, whether that's setting up the product or registration needed for warranty protection. But you obviously can still cut them off on router.
Soon though they won't ask, LTE-M / NB-IoT, both chips and plans are becoming very cheap and unless you are living in a faraday cage it will take control away from the user completely.
> Samsung fridge owners can also opt to avoid the latest software update altogether. However, they would miss out on other features included in the software update, such as a UI refresh and the ability for the internal camera inside some fridges to identify more fruits and vegetables inside the fridge.
The level of absurdity here with respect to "miss[ing] out on other features" strains credulity.
Well, I wouldn't say I was missing them.
I don't know why I would connect a fridge to the Internet at all. Maybe there is a use case where you can get a picture of the contents of your fridge on your phone when you are out and about? Like you're at the grocery store and can't remember if you need to pick up milk or not?
I could come around to a fridge that keeps track of the contents, including use by dates, prompts me to throw away things that are going bad and adds replacements to a periodic supermarket order.
Buy the milk anyway, worst case so you’ve got 1L extra.
Can’t wait until I get those Lightspeed briefs adverts transmitted into my sleep.
Samsung does make really great ad-free computer displays... that's as much as I'm willing to buy from them.
It is kinda ridiculous to see this written "add-free computer display".
Previous outrages:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45291107
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45262808
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292666
Just replaced a Samsung fridge. It was the worst I have ever had, and it wasn't even kludged up with smart-ai-internet-advertisement bullshit yet. The compressor went out after about 12 years (which is apparently good for current refrigerator manufacturing - yikes). But the ice maker and operation panel had been on the fritz for at least 4 years before that. I went with a Frigidaire + 5 year extended warranty. Much better use of internal space, nothing smart, dual ice makers. Only negative is it's kinda noisy and runs often due to the compressor being sized for "efficiency". Fingers crossed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3pYZwol6Dc
Silicon Valley parodied smart fridges nearly a decade ago.
In my opinion it is plain fraud: intentional deception to deprive a victim of a legal right or to gain from a victim unlawfully or unfairly.
Samsung makes bad fridges. I bought a Sub-Zero. It has 2 compressors (1 for fridge and 1 for freezer), is made of high quality parts so will last 20+ years, has excellent service guarantees, and is made in America. Highly recommended.
> It has 2 compressors (1 for fridge and 1 for freezer)
Is this a feature? It seems like making more parts to break.
Surely there's a better way to get independent cooling control. E.g. one compressor with valves to control which side(s) the coolant flows to?
This is stupid. Companies are really trying to get people to hate everything tech related. From "smart" beds, to "smart" fridges, and with the "looming" job displacement due to "AI" and robotics, I could see how a "human-centric" economy or new wave of businesses and startups with a "human-centric" approach could develop in few years.
This ad nonsense aside, don't buy Samsung refrigerators. They are so awfully made and difficult to service that almost no appliance repair companies will touch them. I got suckered into buying one a few years back and it was awful. The ice maker didn't work, every few weeks I would sop up a gallon of condensation at the bottom of the cheese drawer, and eventually it just died. I went to a local appliance store and they chuckled when I told them. They would never carry that brand. Just fridges, don't want to talk about other appliances.
So I recently (last two years or so) bought a (non-Samsung, non-smart) fridge. It's a very nice fridge. It cost, IIRC, about $1000-1500. No internet connection, no ads, no screen to play them on.
Why would I pay $2000 more for a more annoying fridge?
They’ve been doing this for years. The Galaxy S III (yes three) shipped with an indelible Pizza Hut bookmark.
This annoyed so much I actually wrote them a physical letter denouncing the practice and mailed it to their US corporate HQ. I haven't mailed a letter in years. Feels odd.
I have a samsung fridge, and that's enough for them to already be on my shit list. if you put a screen in my kitchen and force me to watch ads I'm going to physically shatter the screen, I don't care what other functionality it may have.
I got smart appliances not a single one is connected to the internet and never will.
Way to punish your customers for paying you more.
I know it's a trope, but this is the absolute textbook definition of enshittification.
So a digital calendar with ads seems reasonable. What they don't mention is how much work they plan on putting into the maintenance. A $3k fridge should last decades, including the screen, software, and WiFi connection.
Last decades? wipes the tear You surely forgot /s at end, I hope. The evil incarnation what is called "Samsung fridge" that I have in my kitchen required repairman's attention just 3 months after the purchase. And then every 3 months after. And children sacrifices, sorry - steam baths, for the ice maker every month or so.
Samsung appliances - never again.
PS. Repairman told me that Samsung have fixed already one of the problems my fridge has by the time he looked at it, kind of hidden recall and fix. Fridge's version (yes, they have versions) have advanced like 7 iterations already from the time I bought it. That means there were at least 7 serious design/manufacturing problems that they had to fix.
I mean.. that's based on the assumption that they actually care about delivering a working appliance.. As long as the spyware works, they don't really care about the "cooling food" part..