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- cross-posted to:
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Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.
Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.
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Sorry boss gotta take the week off. I’m in mourning.
The can perfectly design these devices to work even when the “smart” part is bricked.
This is just hostile design to steal your data, just keep this shit out of the house.
I’m guessing none of these idiots will learn their lesson either. The next appliance they buy will still have network connectivity and useless spyware.
Earn social credit while pouring juice
Don’t connect your fridge to the internet. Just don’t.
And don’t buy fridges and other appliances from big techs. Period. Get them from industries specialized on that, who have been manufacturing appliances for a long time, like people did all this time
Better yet, buy them used on the second-hand market.
I can’t imagine spending more than, say, $60 on a fridge. If you’ve got time to wait and look for good deals, you can often even find working ones (or easily repairable ones) for free.
In some countries, the biggest appliance makers got into tech or bought by them, so there’s not a huge amount of choice there. I’m not sure about SK in particular. Thankfully, dumb fridges are still a thing here in Japan, but I don’t know how long that will last given how many of the major brands are also high-tech companies (Panasonic, Sharp, etc.)
I agree, we don’t need smart fridges, we need dumb fridges
Don’t buy appliances with network capability at all.
Don’t buy a fridge that can, because eventually it will probably connect even if you don’t do it yourself via an open WiFi network or Amazon sidewalk or some shit.
But how else will it get important updates that protect it from the latest online threats?
Right? Just because a networked version exists, doesn’t make it a good idea.
I just don’t see the utility. I can be pretty pro “smart” stuff, especially if I can run it without an internet connection, but what’s the point for a fridge?
Like an oven I get, though I don’t have one. It’s laziness but there is some utility in being able to preheat the oven without getting up, or double check the oven was turned off. Although newer ovens tend to have rapid preheating that really can be quick (unlike my 1996 oven that takes 15-20+ minutes)
But a fridge? What are you going to do? Ensure it’s running? Except when something like this happens lmao. The only real thing it could add is an advertisement and data collection vector, which is the opposite of utility. I’ve also seen smart toasters. Not toaster ovens, but like pop in two slices of bread and push the plunger. Why? You have to come to the device to load it. Do you leave bread overnight getting stale and save the 30 seconds and greatly raise the risk of cold toast? Ridiculous
YEAAAAAAAAAAAA.
And if you really want “smart stuff”, just fucking use Home Assistant or something local-first and self-hostable as it.
I went to buy a steamer, because my last one finally fell apart. And I happen to mention I’ll be after a toaster next, did they have the brand/model I like (it’s just been tested to toast well) the salesguy says oh have you heard about the ai one, I’m getting one, they’re such a saving atm, down from $600 to $400! I straight up said wtf, why. He said oh it looks at your toast while you toast it. It was so hard not to let him know he is a fucking idiot. He wasn’t trying to sell me on it, he genuinely wanted to buy it for himself.
Eh, for a toaster it at least makes some sense to have ‘smarts’ for ensuring various types of bread reach the desired crispynes (Lathough none of that needs internet or anything close to 400$ in value). So it would still be more usefull then smart fridge.
Toasters could do that in the fifties. Crispiness is directly related to surface temperature and you can detect that with nothing fancier than a bimetal strip and some clever engineering. If you want to use modern technology you could use an IR sensor and a two cent microcontroller.
Using AI for the task suggests that they stuck a camera in there and use image processing to badly simulate an IR sensor. Less reliable than two metal strips welded together but also way more expensive.
I have a wall oven that’s a couple months old and it preheats very rapidly. Unfortunately, it seems to achieve this by just lying about what temperature it’s at. It’s consistently 50°F to 75°F below the set temperature, as measured by a separate oven thermometer. The manufacturer anticipated this potential problem by including a boldface section in the manual saying not to use oven thermometers because they’re “wildly inaccurate”. Oh the irony of an electric oven using gaslighting.
For bonus points, even when the oven reaches the set temperature (which I now set higher than what I theoretically need) it doesn’t bother to maintain that temperature, so I have to frequently turn the oven off and then back on again just to cook something properly. Once again ironically, this was the reason I replaced the old oven. Fortunately it was only $2500.
I have a compressor travel fridge. I’ve had it for about six years. The display died this summer, so I had a hard time knowing what temperature it was set to, or if it was even on. (Crotch goblins love to press buttons that go beep).
Anywho, I got a new display circuit for it with Bluetooth. The only reason I paired my phone to it is so others can’t fiddle with the settings at the local campground.
Same thing with my e-bike. I don’t want someone else pairing their phone with it and locking me out.
Same thing with my e-bike.
Oh shit, man. I kind of want an e-bike, but I’d never want one with a phone app. It had better be usable without one, or I’m saying fuck it and building my own. And if I had the misfortune of accidentally buying one with any sort of wireless connectivity, I’d be sorely tempted to tear its electronics apart and find some way to permanently and physically disable that connectivity.
I’d never want one with a phone app. It had better be usable without one
My e-bike has a phone app, and it’s great. Of course it works without the app, but it’s super useful to be able to plan a ride from the comfort of my couch and send it to my bike instead of entering it on the bike’s screen. Especially if it’s a route with multiple waypoints.
You don’t have to pair it with you phone… but if I don’t, what’s doing somebody else from doing it and e-locking it when I leave it on the street.
My (not yet installed) heat pump water heater wants to be connected to the internet. Can’t imagine why I’d want to do that. I know its for peak rate electricity management or whatever, something my town doesn’t seem to do due to being mostly hydroelectric, but it has a whole button pad and screen and shit built into the side of it, I think I can manage without the app syphoning my phone data, thanks. Besides, it uses so little electric I probably won’t even bother programming that.
And I’ll bet if it fails the pump stops too and the whole board has to be replaced for $500+.
Likely for ToU rates, I could imagine looking out for weather updates, if there’s a likely power outage I could see it heating the water another 5 or 10 degrees so it’ll last longer/provide “more” hot water?
le sigh. I’d like to have a home with systems that do things like…synchronize to a clock more accurate and reliable than one I can feasibly own myself, that others such as the utility companies are using. I’d like to be able to get weather alerts and have the refrigerator automatically get a degree colder the water heater get five or ten degrees hotter, run the HVAC a bit, charge batteries, etc.
What I don’t want are a thousand little ARM computers each one a member of three different botnets trying to scrape my home network, sending audio, video, FLIR and radar telemetry straight to Kim Jong Fuck’s third testicle from the left, while also DDOSing Amnesty International and waiting for the cpu.detonate() command to come down so it’s time to buy another fucking desk lamp.
My electric toothbrush has bluetooth. How much free time does someone have to track and analyze their toothbrushing?
Sticking it in a toaster reminds me of when LCD clocks first came out. They stuck them in EVERYTHING. Even table lamps had little clocks stuck in them. Then when LED lights came out everything had to have super bright led lights all over them. One to show you it was off, one to show you it was on, etc, etc. Same with everyone had to have a website in the 90s or a mobile app later. Now everything has to be connected to the internet because, well they can. There is no real reason for it except marketing.
tft lcds got in this too because they’re so dirt cheap and capacitive touch interfaces are cheap as fuck to manufacture. Even if the parts costs are a tiny bit higher relative to physical buttons and interfaces the money saved on assembly makes up for it (and in some cases the parts actually are cheaper
Plus in a kitchen or bathroom setting this is much easier to make water and dust resistant, which is an actual benefit tbf, but at the expense of ergonomics and accessibility
You can literally go on Amazon right now and search LCD toaster. There’s the $4-500 ultra bougie American designed (not made lol) smart one but then there are a ton of Chinese designed ones that are like $50-60 because it’s a $20 toaster with a (when bought at scale) $0.95 lcd strapped on
Marketing is dumb, this is why I left ui/ux/hci work. You can create an ergonomic and intuitive system that is evidence based and the ad men will be like “but can we pander to the lowest common denominator by ruining it with some useless feature that’s objectively worse to use?” And then they just dropped the pretense and said fuck ux, embrace dark patterns
I could bitch about this for days
My electric toothbrush has bluetooth.
Someone bought it before it got to you. There is likely a version without bluetooth that was not purchased.
If people keep spending more money for it, they will keep making it.
Maybe, I got it because it was discounted and I didn’t know it had that feature when I got it.
In a perfect world, operating totally on my local network I’d love if my fridge and freezer took pictures of things as I was putting them in and taking them out to automatically maintain an inventory. If it didnt require external servers, it really could be great. Hell, even if it gave me the option of local execution it could be great.
But this is the real world and we can’t gave nice things. This should never have been a failure mode at all. If the computer in these things decides to stop working, it takes fairly few things make it run like a dumb fridge. They just decided that was unacceptable, so here we are.
I have similar feelings about washers and dryers. I’d love to hook it up to my mqtt broker and get local notifications when it finishes. But there is zero reason whatsoever for it to reach the internet.
I just don’t see the utility. I can be pretty pro “smart” stuff, especially if I can run it without an internet connection, but what’s the point for a fridge?
About ten minutes ago I installed a smart bulb in my fridge. I plan to set up an automation in Home Assistant to tell me when the fridge has been open too long. I also have a temp sensor near the compressor because I had an issue with the fan going out and now if the temp is too high I get an alert to check on it.
I also have a temp sensor in the freezer and the main fridge, again to alert me when things go wrong.
I installed a smart bulb in my fridge. I plan to set up an automation in Home Assistant to tell me when the fridge has been open too long.
My fridge just beeps at me if the door has been open more than a minute or two.
It’s not a ‘smart’ fridge, either. You don’t need anything complex to accomplish that. I guess that the interior fridge light is wired in parallel with a simple timer circuit, and if that timer circuit is energized long enough for its pre-set timer to run out, it energizes the beeping circuit.
You could do a similar thing with your fridge. No need for network connectivity and computers to be involved. Just find the circuit that goes to the light bulb and wire in a simple electronic timer in parallel.
See that’s utility and depending on the sensors you choose that can definitely be local only
But skimming the page for a Samsung smart fridge none of this is in the features. It’s that it can play music, you can put notes and pictures and shit, there’s an “ai camera” that can tell you what you need to buy (though something tells me that struggles if your fridge isn’t set up like a stock image and is actually loaded with like food and condiments and shit like a normal person)
A Bluetooth speaker can do the music part likely with much better sound quality, a smart speaker can handle the typical kitchen tasks like setting timers (which can be done purely in HA, you don’t need Alexa or whatever), a dry erase board and magnets can cover notes and pictures, and the reminders app on your phone can probably do a much more accurate job of keeping a shopping list. Then you can buy a fridge that doesn’t have a 32” proprietary lcd that is a major point of failure, and you can literally save thousands of dollars (quick search shows these fridges are 3500-4k, which is insane for a fridge, even a fancy huge one).
The market for these is people who have too much money (or are willing to take on credit debt) but also can’t be bothered to spend the 1-2 hours it takes to read up on how to do what you’ve done. Samsung, Apple, Google, Amazon, etc prey on these people
The top of the line one can make spherical ice though, which is admittedly super cool
there’s an “ai camera” that can tell you what you need to buy (though something tells me that struggles if your fridge isn’t set up like a stock image and is actually loaded with like food and condiments and shit like a normal person)
What do you mean? You don’t individually label and color coordinate Tupperware containers every time you put leftovers in the fridge?
*looks at three brown grocery bags of vegetables I didn’t bother to unpack and five rubbermaids, one upside down, tossed randomly in fridge*
looks at three brown grocery bags of vegetables I didn’t bother to unpack and five rubbermaids, one upside down, tossed randomly in fridge
AI: “You seem to be running low on Nvidia, Alphabet, and Tesla stock. Let me order more shares for you.”
The market for these is people who have too much money (or are willing to take on credit debt) but also can’t be bothered to spend the 1-2 hours it takes to read up on how to do what you’ve done.
Nah. The market for this is people who go shopping for a new fridge and then see this shiny, flashy thing that the other fridges don’t have. And then “Ooh, shiny!” And then the salesman comes by and gives them a quick pitch about how this is ‘the way of the future’, soon all fridges will be like this and they don’t want to be left behind with a soon-to-be-obsolete dumb fridge, do they? And due to having more money and/or credit than sense, they nod along and sign on the dotted line, because obviously, they want ‘the best’ fridge, right? And how can any other fridge be ‘the best’ if it doesn’t have this flashy, eye-catching feature on the front of it?
We’re kind of describing the same people I think
I have a tiny, battery powered temperature/humidity sensor in my fridge, connected to Home Assistant.
I don’t actually need it there, but I was interested to know if it would work, and it did. So now I know that my fridge maintains a steady 5⁰C.
You know those influencers who get like a few million views from building silly Rube Goldberg Machines?.. That’s the only thing I can think of to justify the toaster, and then it’s literally just taking the place of an RC actuator.
As for the fridge, the only thing I can think of is you’re one of those people who constantly forgets what they went shopping for, and need to video stream the interior of the fridge to check if you’re out of something.
As for the fridge, the only thing I can think of is you’re one of those people who constantly forgets what they went shopping for, and need to video stream the interior of the fridge to check if you’re out of something.
But how is that smart? It’s just a fridge with a camera connected to the internet. Oh, it’s like my washing machine with “AI”*: it connects to the internet, and all it can go is start and stop, but there’s a caveat… If enabled through online, you cannot start it physically it’s my brothers old one, never connected to the internet in my house.
*
AI stands for American Intelligence. It’s a hill I’ll die on.
I didn’t say it was a good solution. Especially when you make the whole fundamental function of the fridge dependent on the network.
Skill issue. Put it on an IoT vlan or subnet and keep it off the internet. Tunnel in and reap any benefits without internet exposure. Only thing that needs to stay updated is the tunnel and it’s host. Headscale is nice
Seems like a lot more work than just remembering to make a list before you leave home.
Or just get a tablet and stick it to the fridge with magnets if you want a place for your digital calendar or whatever
Leave the fucking compressor out of it
What benefits could you reap from having your fridge connected to the internet? I’m seriously asking because the thought never occurred to me, but then again, I live in a tiny apartment, I can walk like 8 steps and I’m opening the fridge door. Maybe other people have bigger houses and takes half a day to get to the thing.
Also, don’t get Samsung appliances. They’ve always been utter trash. Washers, dryers, fridges, and dishwashers all suck.
But how else am I going to get on that sweet sweet subscription service for keeping my food cold?
Temperatures below 35F require Chilly-Tier pro or higher
You already have that; it’s called the electricity bill
This is such a 2026 headline…just wow. There is no crying over spoiled [sic] milk
Don’t buy a smart fridge, simple as.
Sadly I can see a future where the non-smart option will no longer be available. Or very limited in choice for the consumer.
It’s already the case with TVs. The next logical step is to make it so it will refuse to work unless you connect it to the internet to “activate” it or even worse have it connect to the cellular network to be always on-line whether the owner of the device is aware of it or not. The vast majority of the consumers are still completely ignorant about this and buy this crap.
Fortunately appliances seem to still offer plenty of “non smart” options for now. But who knows what it will be in 10 years?
I feel like the difference is that basically everyone who is non-techy wants a smart TV, but practically nobody wants a smart fridge or toaster.
With tvs, The smart part has some use for most people. They want to connect to the internet and see their shows and movies. The data stealing, obsolescence, etc are things that most people fail to notice when buying, because they don’t have much knowledge on it. But smart fridges? They simply offer no benefit at all, and with a higher price. I find it very unlikely that they will become the norm on a global scale.
At some point it will be impossible to buy one that isn’t.
This is why we shouldn’t buy them now. If they don’t sell well, they will follow a similar fate of 3D TVs.
I think a big difference is that many people (in the US, at least) don’t choose their own fridge. Renters often have the fridge included with the home. There’s far fewer people who could reasonably inflict such a boycott.
Landlords will be the last ones to buy premium appliances. Your average apartments are always gonna have the workhorse basic Frigidaire and Whirlpool type appliances.
Oh, man… That would be such a nightmare, moving into a new apartment and finding it full of smart appliances you’re not allowed to replace…
Oh someone else beat me to it nvm. If everyone buys the basic rectangle then they won’t sell “smart” crap is the only key point.
This.
An appliance should turn on when I turn it on, turn off when I turn it off, do the task I instruct it to when I instruct it to, and do nothing that I do not instruct it to. Its status should be clearly indicated to the user with a few LEDs, or a numerical display if needed. Its behavior should be entirely predictable at all times, until eventual mechanical failure due to wear.
If an appliance design fails any of these checks, it is a bad design.
If any function of the appliance is dependent on a network connection, it fails the checks because:
- it will do things that I did not instruct it to
- it might fail to do things that I instruct it to
- it might not fully turn off even though I’ve pushed the power button
- it might not fully turn on if it can’t find a network connection
- its status may be shown on a garbage-quality failure-prone LCD, in a UI designed by a CS intern with 3 months of classroom experience in Java (or worse, an LLM)
- it may behave unpredictably due to bad software design by said intern, and will typically be exposed by poorly designed network security, leading to behaviors controlled by malicious third parties
- it will fail early, if not because of the shoddy bottom-of-the-barrel electronics, then because the manufacturer decided they weren’t going to support the companion app anymore (6 months post-purchase) so fuck you, buy our new product that doesn’t actually have a complete companion app yet! (the intern is still working on it)
Don’t buy “smart” appliances. Ever.
Have the day you paid for!
Did you pay your $4.99 monthly subscription to remove ads from the fridge’s screen?
Did you pay your $4.99 monthly subscription to remove most of the ads from the fridge’s screen?
As long as they can play Doom, all good
no food sounds pretty doomy to me
Maybe eventually the moldy food in the back of the fridge will evolve into something complex enough to play Doom on?
rather than mourn, are they going after Samsung to replace said food? When I worked best buy our warranty covered food spoilage up to 2 years I believe (if it was the fridge/freezer’s fault, not just a random power outage or something). I’d expect Samsung to do the same.
During Chuseok, which is Korean Thanksgiving on Fri no less. Samsung must be grateful it’s a chaebol and controls at least half the country
Perfect timing
I had a Samsung fridge-freezer from around 2012, and it developed a fault where it would stop trying to be cold after two days. The engineer diagnosed a faulty motherboard and wanted about 1/3rd the cost of a new fridge to fit a new one, so instead I fixed it with a timer plug that switched it off and on again every day at 3:15am
I’ve got a Samsung fridge. Don’t be me.
To use the buttons inside the fridge (for temp control, etc), you have to push the “unlock keys” button for 3 seconds. This isn’t a nuclear missile launcher, it’s a fridge. Idiots.
To clean the bottom shelves, you have to uninstall them… this is an absurdly difficult task. I had to look up how to do so online. It’s infuriating. It’s a shelf.
The ice maker has one vulnerability; ice. If the fridge temperature is too cold (under 38f) the ice machine doesn’t work.
Fortunately, I didn’t connect it to network. I hate it.
To use the buttons inside the fridge (for temp control, etc), you have to push the “unlock keys” button for 3 seconds. This isn’t a nuclear missile launcher, it’s a fridge. Idiots.
You’d appreciate that if you had dumb kids who enjoy nothing more than pushing buttons just to hear them beep. (And then you come back and wonder why your freezer is set at 60F and your fridge is set at -20F…) In theory, any kid smart enough to figure out the ‘unlock keys’ button should also be smart enough that you can instruct them to not fuck with the fridge controls.
Why would a “smart” fridge even have an option to not refrigerate?
Only thing I could think of is some sort of ‘moving house mode’ where it warms back up but dries everything out to prevent mold growth on the coils due to condensation.
Why are people still buying Samsung and LG appliances? After my 1st Samsung stove died just over a year, I learned my lesson. Wake up consumers and quit spending money on garbage!!
Samsung should be responsible for reimbursing everyone for the value of their spoiled food.
AI line of fridges
excuse me ?? smart fridge ?? AI ?? I don’t want to talk calories or nutrients, I just want a cold beer and fresh milk & vegetables. There will be a cold day in hell before I buy an AI capable fridge. I’ll go to a root cellar long before that! (i live in the woods, so yes, I CAN do that easilly)
