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 hard to make the right boots analogy (try it yourself if you think you can), but to speak of fridges —
• The rich person's remodeller (or the developer of the house they buy) buys a commercial-kitchen prep fridge for the house's kitchen. This is a big, powerful, durable, repairable, no-frills, utilitarian fridge, that could be viewed as attractive or ugly depending on your opinion on brutalism. The rich person never sees this fridge. It's kept in the butler's pantry and only their private chef ever touches it.
• The rich person's interior designer then buys an elegant/classy half-sized in-wall glass-door fridge to live in the kitchen itself. This is intended for the rich person's household staff to keep constantly stocked with snacks and drinks for the rich person to grab. (Also, if the rich person thinks they want to cook one day, the staff will prep the exact ingredients needed in advance, keeping them in the butler's pantry until called for, but will then stage any "must stay cold" ingredients here.) This fridge is generally a piece of shit, made with huge markups by companies that make fancy-house furniture. But it sure is pretty! If (when) it fails, the staff can temporarily revert to just serving the role of that fridge, running to the butler's-pantry fridge or other cold-storage area (maybe a walk-in!) when the rich person wants something. (Also compare/contrast: in-wall wine cooler.)
• The rich person's household staff might respond to the rich person's request for more convenient access to snacks/drinks in certain areas of the house by buying + keeping stocked one or more minifridges. There'll certainly be one in the house's bar. (There's always a bar.) These are sturdy commercial-grade bricks, built by the same companies that build the ones that go into hotels; but these companies serve rich people just as often as they serve hotels, so they tend to have an up-market marque that makes the fridge look fancy while reusing the well-engineered core.
I mean, my point was that there are actually three different ways you can spend a lot of money on a fridge, and it's a lot like with PCs.
You can buy:
• a big ugly powerful repairable/durable industrial one (like a server);
• an average-sized, somewhat-fancy (because high-trim), repairable/durable commercial one (like a workstation);
• or an average-sized fancy "aesthetic" one, made by a design company rather than an appliance company, that isn't repairable or durable (like one of those bespoke "sleeper desk PCs.")
The same goes for most things you can spend a lot of money on. A sound system, a vacuum cleaner, a car, etc. In each of these cases, "premium" has these same three distinct meanings. None of which involve showing you ads. But all of which have their own trade-offs. And all of which are usually quite a bit more expensive (each for their own reasons) than the highest-trim product sold directly to the average consumer by what you'd think of as a "consumer brand."
I once bought a commercial dishwasher. It cost twice as much used as a domestic dishwasher would have cost new, and I had to add a 220 outlet and run some new plumbing; but the kitchen in that house had no space for a normal dishwasher, so I had to be creative. I put the big machine on my back porch, just outside the kitchen door: it was ugly, loud, and absurdly fast. Once it came up to temperature, it could wash a tray of dishes in three minutes flat. Great for cleaning up after dinner parties. It was certainly a kind of luxury, in a brute-force way.
I think it depends on the field or industry. I seem to remember seeing commercial TVs by Samsung when we were buying ours. Similar display specs, almost twice the price, no smarts, and 5 years warranty. They were designed for hotels I believe and came with a few features for that. Similarly hospitality aimed brands often are designed to withstand more abuse and cost a bit more. If you like whatever product you encounter or use in a commercial setting, just ask about it. There’s a decent chance you’ll be able to buy something similar.
Oh also, for vacuums at least, shop vacs are apparently the way to go. And for audio, DIY beats the pants off anything commercial (unless you don’t mind spending thousands of dollars more).
- consumer kitchen mops break in 1-2 years. Get the commercial one for 2x and it lasts
- my bike is locked to an 25mm thick toughened steel industrial eye-bolt (set into concrete) which cost < $10. A consumer item intended for that purpose costs ~$70
It's probably more like a rich person will spend $50 on a pair of boots that will last 10 years, while a poor person will spend $10 on a pair of boots that will last a year. The upper middle class person will spend the $40 on a pair of boots that comes with surveillance and useless AI, while a middle class person will spend $30 for the same, except it bricks itself on the next firmware update.
Boots and shoes are interesting because they're genuinely an area where premium materials and construction _could_ significantly improve how long they last. We're talking 1-2 years for "normal" boots and decades for $500+ boots (with re-soling) There's also a good middle ground here. I'm not saying everyone needs really expensive boots, but it nice that you can actually spend more money for higher quality rather than a horrible system on a chip that fails after a year and renders a whole product useless.
That’s actually roughly the price range to manufacture normal shoes. “The average production cost of a single pair of shoes ranges between $10 and $50. This includes materials, labor, and overhead.” https://hevashoeinc.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-manufacture...
What you actually pay is a large multiple of that covering the taxes, shipping, sales channel, marketing, etc.
The rich person goes to an exclusive London cobbler who spends 11 days carving out a model of his feet, one for left and one for right, out of expensive hardwood. Once complete, a team of masters and apprentices carefully craft him bespoke shoes out of premium leather (straight from Italy!). When finished, the shop calls his assistant and has them delivered. It only costs about $40,000.
You, the poor person, spend $150 on crappy Nike athletic footware, that isn't sized to fit, will fall apart in 6 months (3 if you're using them for actual athletics), but are unfashionable in 3 weeks (but you'll buy them for your middle school children anyway). And you'll think you're rich doing it. Never mind that the cost was $4.75 (up x2 what it was pre-Covid) in Bangladesh, plus $0.30 shipping across the Pacific. The sweatshop worker got a cut of $0.04 for the pair.
The analogy doesn't work though, because people nowdays are paradoxically even stupider than they were in Victorian times.
Not that dissimilar to Wirecutter's advice on appliances: either buy the cheapest of the cheap because it'll have the fewest parts that can break, or the most expensive since it'll be built with high quality components and hopefully be repairable.
The cheapest appliance is definitely cheap, whereas you generally have to take on trust the quality of the most expensive. The rule of thumb I use is "you don't get what you don't pay for", which is not the same as "you get what you pay for".
My point was more along the lines of the fact that below a certain price point, you can't be sure whether you're paying $3500 for actual build quality and features or marketing. A $500 fridge could last forever, or it could last exactly as long as the (very short) warranty period. Also, cheap stuff may last forever in some ways, but it's been cost optimized in a million different ways that make it more annoying to use. In my case the compressor is fine, but the plastic interior has some inexplicable cracks in it and the feet broke off. But at least it will never advertise to me.
Isn't that reversed now? You can only afford the device that is subsidized by the analytics you will be generating for them while the rich person can afford to by the non-subsidized version.
So US$3500 is 12 times the cost of a poor-person fridge (excluding used fridges and "oh, I just go over to my mom's house") and ⅓ the cost of your rich-person fridge, which puts it much closer to the latter.
But I wouldn't be surprised if Wolfgang Puck or Gordon Ramsay has a custom walk-in fridge that cost a lot more than US$10k.
Certainly, the truly rich person has never seen the main fridge their staff uses to store the ingredients for their meals.
But said rich person has at least one more fridge: a relatively-small, usually very elegant (in-wall, glass-door) fridge, located in the [badly designed for cooking, but pretty] "kitchen" that adjoins the butler's pantry [= nearest, usually secondary, real kitchen].
They use this "kitchen" to whimsically prepare avocado toast when hosting "guests" (e.g. people from Architectural Digest); or when vlogging / hosting their reality TV show about all the cooking they love doing. (At any other time, e.g. when hosting actual guests, if they want to make use of this kitchen [rather than simply speaking in their lounge until dinner is served in their separated dining room], it won't be by cooking there themselves, but rather by sitting around the kitchen island or the [probably open] secondary dining arrangement nearby, watching their private chef cook there, while they or their assistants try desperately to cover for how gimped their workflow is by having to use the faux-kitchen.)
And of course, even if the rich person does some whimsical/performative hobby cooking, the staff will have prepped and mise-en-placed anything they'll need from the butler's pantry onto the (huge) kitchen island in advance. (Like a cooking show!) So even then, they won't be needing the "kitchen" fridge. With the extreme edge-case exception of needing something to stay cool until the very moment it's needed; or needing to repeatedly chill it (think "making croissant dough", though I doubt a rich person would ever try.)
Having been closely acquainted with a woman worth north of a billion dollars, and having met a number of people that are worth probably at least hundreds of millions, I can tell you the kitchen experience for the wealthy (maybe barring like top 10-100 billionaires) is really frankly kind of pedestrian. Are the kitchens nicer? Yeah sort of, I have fixed a bunch of stuff on a couple of certified real money mansions, and a lot of it is gimmicky stuff, some of it is good heavy expensive stuff, but honestly nothing that's doing some sort of extra magic a whole lot better than all of the plain old Whirlpool kit in my own home. Do they have help? Yeah for cleaning, and sometimes from what I've seen the one or two people helping around the house will help cook, but they're not dependent on it and it's more a "hey we're cooking for family, I need to delegate", as well as the sort of person I've met with that kind of money tends to skew much older anyways.
Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know, but the regular old very wealthy (the sort you don't know who they are, and I think they prefer it that way) live what you would probably consider mostly very pedestrian lives. More trips? Yes. Multiple homes in nice places? Yes. A couple of nice cars and a (reasonably sized) boat? Usually. Chartered flights? Absolutely. An army of staff and never doing even basic shit themselves? Nope and no on the doing basically nothing unless they're really geriatric (and then can you blame them anyways).
It sounds like you're describing idle-rich people. Which makes sense.
Yeah, if you're "rich" as in "retired", your life is usually pretty mundane. Most such people don't even live in any kind of mansion these days†, but rather just in very nice homes that are perfectly-sized and perfectly-cozy for them and what they like to do — with some verrrry long driveways, if they're in the right part of the country for that.
† (Mansions as a concept evolved from palaces; both exist mostly to provide enough rooms to host guests when some other rich person decides to pilgrimage themselves and everyone they know over to your place to stay for three months — in turn because that was really the only good way to visit someone with full amenities, back before air travel. Nobody needs to do that these days. Any modern mansion exists either as a status symbol, or because the owner likes hosting parties [or imagines they might one day host a party, but never actually does]. Mansions are especially useful, in the modern day, for people who throw fundraiser galas, like politicians.)
> Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know,
I don't think it's SV people doing this. (The SV entrepreneurial "grindset" is a form of protestant work-ethic mindset; most tech millionaires find it hard to allow themselves to have staff. They might have a lot of people on retainer — lawyers, personal trainers, private-practice doctors, etc — but they would find the idea of paying the full salary for the exclusive use of even a maid to be a bit strange, instead preferring to just "hire a service" for that. Right up until they have a security scare, that is... but I digress.)
Rather, the personal-staff (private chef, limo driver, landscaper, several maids, etc) setup is, these days, something for the busy rich — think "runs ten businesses because they don't know how to stop", or "has an infinite queue of people needing them to make a decision about something" [politician, chaebol owner], or "thrives on fame, and so can't stand to turn down packing their schedule with ever-bigger gigs" [celebrity actors]. You find it in LA and in DC, not in SF.
These groups "have people" because they literally wouldn't be able to fit self-care into their schedule without "people."
This reads like fiction rather than informed ethnography.
I think I've only been in one hectomillionaire's kitchen, though it can be hard to tell, and the only resemblance to your description is that he had a large household staff. But it wasn't his main house, and I don't know if you consider someone who isn't even a billionaire to be "truly rich".
I'm guessing that most rich people do not want the inside of their mansions to appear on a YouTube channel, especially one about mansions. Most of these mansions do not cost even US$100M and so probably do not belong to truly rich people.
> I'm guessing that most rich people do not want the inside of their mansions to appear on a YouTube channel, especially one about mansions.
1. He doesn't film these walk-throughs himself. Real-estate agents film walk-throughs of these places to try to get them sold (it's well worth it for the commission they'll make), post them publically, and then he reviews those videos.
2. The homes in the walk-throughs are always vacant; there are no actual rich people involved to worry about their privacy. (They do almost look lived-in, yes, but that's all stuff that comes with the house. Not even staged; a lot of it is "design flourishes" added by the developer to match the architectural style.)
> Most of these mansions do not cost even US$100M and so probably do not belong to truly rich people.
When this guy records a review, it's to point out the flaws in a property's architecture + developer-furnished interior design. (Because that's the professional service he offers to his clients: inspecting properties for design flaws that lower the place's perceived resale value. His videos are a demonstration of that service.)
Thus, due to needing something worth spending 10 minutes talking about, the mansions he bothers to cover are always the ones that are badly designed.
My understanding is that these mansions exist in markets, and are built at scales, such that they actually should cost a lot more than they do. But their bad design has caused them to sit on the market for a long time; and that means the seller often gets desperate and lowers the price. (This isn't speculation; he often covers the market offer-price + resale-price history of a property as well.)
That being said, they still have all the features a truly-rich-person mansion should have. That stuff repeats over and over; you recognize it like MVC in software. These places are just the architectural equivalent of spaghetti code, putting things in inconvenient arrangements (I recall a recent review of a property where you had to walk down three hallways and cross two great rooms to get from the dining room to the nearest bathroom), stacking things so that rooms you'll spend a lot of time in don't have a great view (another property built into a hill made two bedrooms sub-grade with window wells, rather than just putting the bedrooms on the other side under the living room, where they'd get a panoramic picturesque view), and so on.
A lot of truly rich people live in houses that haven't been on the market for generations, or centuries, or ever. The particular hectomillionaire's vacation home I spent a few months in wasn't one of those (he's self-made) but also didn't have the kinds of features you're talking about at all. No separate hidden "main fridge", no butler's pantry, no second kitchen, no kitchen island, no great rooms, no panoramic picturesque views. It did have a dining room and bedrooms, though. It had been built as a small hotel, so it had five bedrooms (on the upper floor), an atrium, and a small swimming pool. From the street it just looked like a regular house. You could walk from the bedroom overlooking the swimming pool down the hall, down the stairs, down the other hall and dining room, across the patio, up the other stairs, and into the last bedroom, in about two minutes.
My in-laws live near but outside of a community that has been vacation homes for the 0.5% for over a century. Those homes never go "on the market". The owners will quietly put the word out and a year later someone new is spending a month of their summer there.
It used to be industrial powerhouse families. Today, it is more likely to be a hedge fund manager.
The fridge example is an interesting problem. A middle class person would probably be much better off just buying a used or cheap fridge. ~$100 - $1000. It will last as long as the $3500 - $5000 fridge and will cost a fraction as much. (and due to not being premium-aka-huge will be much easier to cart inside and outside of your house when it does break down.)
In _principle_ the truly rich person would be better off with a really expensive fridge. Except the chances that it performs better or lasts longer are tiny. So for 4x-10x the price, you have no improvement. The only way to improve your outcome is to spend enough time doing research such that you can figure out if _any_ refrigerators aren't pieces of crap. A for-real rich person has more money than time, so this isn't worth it either. Yes, they might settle on the first fridge that's available and looks nice -- and this _could_ be a premium fridge -- but they really don't get any benefit from a premium fridge either. ie, there's nothing to really push them from a $2k fridge to a $5k fridge unless it's just something like capacity.
In other words, poor-to-middle class should NEVER buy a premium fridge -- but only because the market is terrible and "premium" _usually_ does not mean "more reliable." (if premium meant "much more reliable" then they should buy premium when they can afford it, as it would cost less over time due to longevity.) However, a rich person also accrues almost no benefit from a premium fridge, as the real cost to them is research time and not money.
So, who are these products for? Probably middle class people who want to _appear_ rich.
Sometimes buying a longer-lived fridge for more money is still a bad bargain. If the short-lived fridge lives 20 years and the longer-lived one lives 100 years, the longer-lived one is a bad bargain if it costs twice as much, at any discount rate over about 3.34%. If it costs 4×, it's a bad bargain at any discount rate over 0.59%. At a 3% discount rate, the 4× fridge is a bad bargain even if you have to replace the short-lived fridge every 10 years.
However, probably the major cost of fridge failures is not replacement but the destruction of the fridge contents. A friend of mine recently lost their freezerful of food. Apparently after a power outage the freezer forgot whether it should be a freezer or a regular fridge and defaulted to "neither". This is an example of a "premium" feature making the freezer worse.
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.
Not quite accurate as a blanket statement. Munro did a very detailed tear down series of a sub zero refrigerator that’s very interesting. Youtube link: https://youtu.be/KAYj6m9QtDU
I wish more content like this existed. It’s the only type of review that is worth paying attention to.
Long story short if you live in an energy market like california the energy savings of the sub zero will likely offsets its additions cost over the lifetime of the unit.
It's a little funny that, by far, the worst power and internet I've ever had [0], both by cost and by quality, has been in the Bay Area. The easiest way I'm aware of for me to cut my internet bill in half, cut my power bill 4x, have 30 fewer days per year containing electrical outages, and get back up to normal fiber speeds is to move to the Midwest.
[0] Excluding anywhere I lived for less than a couple months, like the middle of the Pacific or an exceptionally rough road trip through Wyoming.
When was that? Lots of people have solar here, we’ve had maybe 2 power outages for an hour or so in the last decade, and I pay $60 for 10Gbps fiber. Sure, electricity’s cheaper in the Midwest. We’re not exactly deprived of it in the Bay Area though.
Here and now, for the last nearly a decade. I pay $70/mo for, on a good day, 20Mbps down, 100Kbps up, 400ms ping, with a data cap. I have at least two major power outages each year and dozens of minor incidents (with the general quality -- phase stability, surges, etc being less than elsewhere I've lived even when it's working). Good utilities are localized in the Bay.
It's so crazy that even though California is in some ways the center of the technology universe we have had a dysfunctional electrical grid and market for decades. This has been an ongoing governance failure across multiple administrations and political parties. If we ever want to build stuff here and cut the cost of living then cheaper electrical power is a necessity.
Commercial and consumer dishwashers are only the same in that they're both called "dishwashers" and use water. The former expect little to no food, have cycles measured in minutes, and run at temperatures that would eat more sensitive dishes alive.
A commercial dishwasher will cut right through amounts of food that a normal residential dishwasher wouldn't touch (pre-wash is more for efficiency and to keep crap from piling up in the bottom tray of the dishwasher) and it will actually be ever so slightly less harsh on whatever goes in it (plastics are the problem mostly) because while it washes and rinses way hotter it doesn't have a stupid heating element that runs to dry things.
It will also use fucktons more water and more power and make more noise.
Haven't worked in a commercial kitchen, and I've been wrong before (in this chain, no less), but how would the water be hotter without a heating element? Consumer dishwashers are plumbed into the hot water, so it can't be a difference in a direct hook-up. Without it's own heating element, I wouldn't assume it has its own built-in and ready-on-demand hot water tank, either.
My last guess is more frequent cycles, meaning hotter water already at the spigot / dishwasher outlet, similar to the consumer recommendation to run the hot water for a minute prior to starting the dishwasher?
Plastics / tupperware were actually what I had in mind lol
The water is hotter in a commercial dishwasher. I forget the exact numbers but it's substantially more. What the commercial dishwasher doesn't have is an "oven style" heating element running around the perimeter of the bottom (or somewhere thereabouts) to dry the dishes. Most residential dishwashers have this. This is why some dishes say "top rack only". The water coming out the top isn't any different. It's that you're moving the dish farther from the hot element. So a dish that goes through a commercial dishwasher sees higher average temp but substantially lower peak temp.
At least the commercial ones I've been using on and off do not have a drying cycle at the end of the program; they just steam the heck out of whatever is inside, then once the cycle is through, you are expected to remove the tray with whatever you were washing and let it air dry on the bench.
This in contrast to the consumer unit at home which heats the interior of the dishwasher for 45 minutes or so after it has done its washing cycle to dry things while still inside the dishwasher.
for commercial there are 2 options chemical and temp sanitization. From fda food code has to reach 171F to sanitize. most use a inline OnDemand heater with a couple taps so constant temp is close to 170 but will also pipe off steam to do a final sanitize. restaurants will also hand wash their plastics in a 3 sink setup water only needs to be 110F
Commercial products usually require knowledge (expertise?), and have their own limitations. Even repairability can be an issue in a different way.
I don't know for dishwashers, commercial printers are expected to be serviced by the maker or affiliated business and getting parts as a mere peasant can be pretty complex. Surely rich people can just throw money at a contractor, but that's not what we're talking about I think (otherwise having a new one delivered everytime would also just work)
I mean, repairing anything requires knowledge. The problem with most home devices is they are not repairable at all and you can't get parts.
While I'm a computer farmer for my day job, I can repair a vast amount of different devices as long as they don't take specialised equipment like vacuum pumps. And while I don't consider myself a rich person, between my wife and I we're in the higher income brackets in the US, I still service as much of my own stuff as possible. And in general commercial stuff is in the same price ranges as the higher end consumer stuff.
The good/bad part of modern consumer appliances is that they are largely giant computers with fewer mechanical parts to fail. They can be more reliable but when something breaks, it almost always requires replacing a main board that costs 25-50% of the replacement cost of the entire unit.
I've had two boards die on appliances this year. Fortunately, warranty coverage paid for the parts. So now I have a practically new refrigerator and furnace. At least until they fail again in 3-5 years.
Miele did the best advertising ever, and I believe it even got a news story. A woman had been using their washer for 25years and Miele reached out and asked if she wanted a new one for free, for no other reason than to upgrade. Iirc she declined as the one she had worked perfectly.
I have a vacuum from them, a cheap model, been working for 12 years so far.
It’s probably the only appliance brand I would trust, even if I’m sure they have bad stories too.
I got another way of looking at it: it's not worth it having appliances that last 20 years, because in that time the tech itself can and does improve a lot.
Ready example is my aunt: a very good and expensive Miele washing machine, that was made to last as things were before. But now 10 years have elapsed and modern washers come with bigger drums, much lower noises, optimized water and electricity usages, and more effective washing patterns.
But she's stuck with her old and trusty one, because she feels that it's working "like new". And she's not wrong, it works well, so it became a sort of a "golden cuff" so to speak (not knowing any better metaphor). So good and expensive, that now getting rid of it for a new one feels like a waste of money for not much gain.
She’s not stuck with her appliance unless she has FOMO anxiety, she paid for her appliance once and if it’s still working then all is good. Marginal improvements don’t justify buying the same thing over and over.
Counterpoint: some appliances reach "good enough" status and the only "improvements" are cost-cutting that makes them more fragile or less reliable.
My friend has a microwave from the late 70s. The time/power are set by turning knobs - no fiddling with a bunch of buttons and modes - the turntable is metal so it can't break. The only thing I would consider missing is a popcorn mode, not a big deal.
Edit: Another great example is toasters. Toasters have not gotten better in my lifetime and older toasters are probably more reliable than what I could buy today.
Inverter microwaves are a noticable improvement over regular microwaves. True variable power instead of time slicing means I can precisely heat up almost any food evenly all the way through.
I often want to set my microwave within 5 seconds for small items, so no knobs for me please. And I like having a delayed start option. Modes never happen without me asking for them.
Direct drive models are a little quieter. Modern drums are slightly larger. Many people live where there is plenty of water, so increasing water efficiency isn't very valuable. It's not worth increased fabric wear or energy consumption!
There isn't much gain. That's the point! She's got a device that's nice to use, repairable, is well-designed, and isn't serving her ads. She's fine! Really. If she wants a new washer, Miele washing machines hold value and can be resold.
She probably doesn't think about it, which is the real gift. She's free to think about literally anything else! I have an extension to the Vimes boot theory, where you don't even notice your boots when they're working like they're supposed to. Most of us aren't enlightened enough to notice and appreciate that our feet are dry. This reduced cognitive overhead increases capacity for creativity and play, which further amplifies the life outcomes of people buying cardboard-soled boots vs leather boots.
I have a similar dilemma with my car. I drive a 25-year old Lexus with a bizarre electrical glitch. The ABS sometimes goes off as you come to a stop, for no reason at all. It only ever happens below ~10mph, and only when decelerating gradually. Never happens under heavy braking. It's not a safety hazard, and honestly you get used to it. Yet, anyone who test drives this car will run for the hills because it feels spooky.
It's still a terrific car. Comfortable, well made, fast enough for all practical situations. Unusally low mileage for its age. An engine that's sought after in the tuner community. But, it's unsellable. I'm stuck with it, whether I like it or not.
The good news is that I like it. The funny news is that I took a new job that will move me to the Bay, and whatever my new employer is paying to move my car out there is definitely more than my car is worth.
I've had 2 dealers and an independent mechanic check them, and they all swear the wheel speed sensors appear to be reading just fine. One dealer has a crusty old Lexus-specific diagnostic tool that indicated it may be the ABS control module, which is a part that hasn't been made in over a decade.
Maytag/Whirlpool washing machines in the past 10 years come with nylon hubs instead of the metal hubs they used to have. The splines wear out quickly and you’ll need to replace it. Most people will just buy another machine.
We have a high end bosch (the absolute best model of the best brand the year we bought it), and it’s been wonky for three of the five years it has lasted so far, and now rubber noiseproofing is falling out and the racks are rusting through / breaking.
Definitely keep the old dishwasher till it dies.
(The bosch is quiet and cleans well, fwiw. The magic heat free drying minerals are nice. It’s a shame they’ll be in a landfill in a few years.)
Sunk Cost is usually something we encourage people to avoid, but in the case of the capital infrastructure of your home, we have to factor depreciation. The aunt is not likely going to re-sell the washer for market value (like a car). It would be recycled when the new more high tech model comes in. A total loss.
Theoretically it would hold its value and there would be a secondary market. Then she'd pay for the upgrade and not an entirely new machine. I wonder if that's the case for Miele.
Do you really believe that a newer washer actually somehow makes clothes appreciably more clean? Quieter, perhaps, and maybe a little less water, but so much so that you'd ever notice if a persons clothes came out of a multi-decade old machine that's in good shape versus a new one, I would wager you'd never notice, and frankly every generation of machine I've owned, even the expensive ones manages to get worse, harder to repair, and last less and less time. If you've got something that works and doesn't require a dozen elves at some factory in Shanghai or Berlin to do ancient satanic rituals just to replace a knob or repair a switch, I think you'd be crazy to get rid of it.
I wonder if those expensive fridges are any more serviceable. I'm guessing someone with $10k to spend on a fridge doesn't care how easy it is to fix because they'll never do it.
I'm not sure about that. The issue that I'm having is that if I could spend $10,000 and not have fridge issues for 10, 15, 20 years I might be tempted.
The problem is that there might be problems with the equipment or problems caused by the installer.
A few years ago, we ended up replacing a Sub-Zero fridge (27 years old) with another one because the repair bills were mounting. Because of the way the previous owner did the kitchen, using any other kind of fridge other than the 2' deep, 7' high kind would have involved remodeling. It wasn't quite $10k but it was close.
At our new house, we had a repairman fix the ice maker in our current fridge. It's 17 years old and could have come off the floor at Best Buy or Home Depot (NOT a Sub-Zero, in other words) but he recommended keeping it until it failed because the quality of current appliances is not as good.
Our water heater is going to need to be replaced because it's 17 years old and showing signs that it's getting too old. I want a heat pump water heater because the gas water heater is the only gas-powered appliance we have. Trying to assess reviews of heat pump water heaters and of the local plumbing companies is not fun.
>I'm not sure about that. The issue that I'm having is that if I could spend $10,000 and not have fridge issues for 10, 15, 20 years I might be tempted.
What kind of fridge issues are you having?
I just buy a $1000 Miele/Liebherr and it's fine for 10+ years. 0 repairs.
Is Liebherr not a thing in the US? At least in Europe all the Miele fridges are basically Liebherr with different interior setup and the Miele logo slapped on them. No smart things, unless you buy the smart box that you can attach, but otherwise they are quite reliable and solid.
Eh, I've got a very reasonably priced Haier fridge that I've had no issues with at all. Maybe I'm just lucky, and it definitely helps that there's no built in ice maker or water dispenser (those things seem to break first) but it's lived longer than the refrigerators that the rest of my family have.
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.
Ours died with a “cannot communicate with board A” error. The wiring harness (yes, an irreplaceable harness) between A and B looked fine. We replaced boards A and B, which were half the price of the machine and not returnable. Same error code. We threw it out and got a Speed Queen.
Our Samsung fridge’s manual says it’ll automatically and silently mesh network with any Samsung TVs in range, use AI and hidden cameras to recognize what’s in the fridge and when we use it, then have the TV inject targeted ads into programming based on its findings.
I’m glad to have avoided it - when I moved from sharing with room-mates into my own place and had to buy new appliances, there had just been a spate of Samsung appliances literally randomly catching fire in the news. Those models have all been recalled but it put me right off.
Otherwise I might have considered them but steered well clear, and am very happy with the decision a decade later. Went Bosch for the washer and Electrolux for the fridge, had zero issues.
Also, I'm wondering if any other manufacturer would make the crank and the drum from the same material. Wouldn't it be like $100 extra to make a stainless steel spider?
I can't recall, but I think it was about 7 years. Some will say that's an acceptable lifetime, but I think I did the math once, and estimated it was only a little less than laundromat pricing (less opportunity cost).
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.
We purchased a low-end LG OLED TV in 2022. A few months ago it started inserting LG text ads with a little bullseye at the bottom of the screen while watching OTA programs or using streaming apps. It wasn't clear how to remove them without stopping the programming or accidentally triggering some other ad display, which I didn't want to do. So the text ads sat there for 15 or 20 seconds before fading away.
LG tvs have ads now. In fact, there are no TVs that are ad free at all anymore. At least keeping them unplugged from the internet usually prevents the ads… for now. True dystopia.
My LG TV got an update which started pushing ads. I had to take it off the internet and use a Chromecast instead. But I fear it's not long before products straight up refuse to function without an internet connection, or they have their own way to access the internet you can't disable.
This. Parents bought LG OLED TV. It is absolutely lovely, has super nice picture. (not an ad!:D) I insisted they never connect it to network. Probably it would be usable on network cut off from internet, but there is high probability of some mistake. I wasnt sure what happens if it got out for just a tiny bit so decision was clear. We've seen zero ads there (except the standard-ads-iterrupted-by-actual-programming).
> The problem is that we are running out of alternatives.
But why is that? HN told me that ads were just reserved for people who refused to “pay for the product”. By inference we must conclude that for-pay products shall not have ads on sheer principle. Where’s that smug scolding at now?
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)
Also, people don't realize that sometimes it doesn't even matter
Enough people don't care, don't notice, or in the worst case, even when they do, if the companies band together and don't give people a choice, eventually they will cave and thats what i predict will happen here
In the future i suspect most people's homes will have ads, except for nerds who will have rooted their devices. and hopefully their moms.
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.
Mid range samsung phone here, great performance but even with their keyboard disabled on a non-rooted phone it still copies your clipboard on every copy/paste. I will be buying something else next time.
Haven't disassembled it yet so i don't know but when i turned on clipboard notifications i started getting two messages. One for my password manager and a second for the disabled branded keyboard.
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.
When I bought my new fridge I told the sales guy I wanted the least features possible. "You don't want an in door ice maker" "How many of those have you seen that aren't broken" "not many. no through door window?" "I know there's milk in the fridge why do I need to see that there's milk in the fridge?" down and down the list. Eventually we settled on a very bare bones whilrpool french door. It's very simple. My previous fridge I could fix with a screwdriver and a piece of wire. These things push cold air from a compressor that lasts 50 years if it's not fucked with by electronics and some boxes that are all passive insulation. They were solved problems 30 years ago.
The speed queen washer that came with the house failed. The 30 year old lid switch literally fell apart. $10 on amazon next day. Took me 10 minutes and youtube to take the machine apart. It's meant to be serviced and I'm handy. I don't get engineers who won't try and fix their appliances. It's like a free weekend day entertainment for me.
Only eight years for a dryer is definitely not pretty good in my mind. It's barely acceptable unless you have a huge family and are doing laundry daily. I had a low-end Capri (Sears house brand) that was 21 years old and still going strong when I moved away. It was serviced once, by me, to replace a fuse. If I'd paid twice as much and gotten only eight years out of one, I'd be furious.
Yeah-- I was thinking that 8 years isn't even broken-in. My old Sears dryer was 27 when I had to replace a pulley and a thermal fuse. It ran just like it was new after that. I left it with that house but, hopefully, it's still running today.
1. Better air quality. You don't have combustion byproducts in the kitchen.
2. More efficient than both gas and conventional electric stoves.
3. Faster to heat than gas/conventional electric (due to the efficiency improvement)
4. Easier to clean (except for glass top stoves).
I've yet to own a full-on induction stove, but I do regularly use the 120V induction hot plates in my kitchen. In fact, I use them more than the gas stove that came with my house. I'm eagerly awaiting the day that I have a full induction stove.
I've had the full permanent install induction stoves and the portable ones. The in counter ones are massively better. They have much larger heated areas so you don't get heat only in the middle of larger pans. They also have a much higher top power so you can boil water incredibly fast.
But even the portable ones are preferable to gas imo.
My common model IKEA stove – rebranded Siemens or Electrolux – runs at ~400v (Northern Europe). I know because it broke and I almost poked at it, until I got spooked by the warning labels. It's on its own circuit. Not an expert but as far as I know, most houses in Western/Northern Europe have a three-prong stove/oven connection in the kitchen for a ~400v feed.
My understanding is that many of them can be wired as 1, 2 or 3 phase at least in Nordic countries, though admittedly the ones which allow 3 are somewhat rarer especially when looking at stove top-only models (not combined stove+oven).
As far as I can tell, there are a single digit number of municipalities on the planet where two phase power is available. Do you have more details on that I can read? There's not a ton of.info on Wikipedia and I'm interested to know more.
That link isn't really a source for residential 3-phase power.
Almost every electrical network is 3 phase distribution, the matter under debate is if you bring every phase to each house, or if a phase reaches every third house.
Anecdotally I have never seen an electrical panel without three phases, but when I went looking it was like trying to find a source for the fact the sky is blue.
I'm pretty sure most of them just use a higher amp circuit. A 40 amp circuit at 230v is 9kW which is more than enough. I've also seen one particularly high end stove which used a battery to cover the extra power needed for the highest setting. Also means you could use it in a power outage.
No, they simply get connected with all three phases, which are available in-house anyway, with a standard 16A circuit breaker on each. That's what installed in our house and that's what I've seen in various holiday homes.
I can easily use all the power my largest induction burner gives me on a 240v outlet. I really want one of those battery boost units for my next big purchase.
Honestly just browning 4 chicken thighs at once is too much for 240v. (My gas range couldn't do any better!)
We have that particular model because it was literally the only induction cooktop on the market that would fit the existing hole in our stone worktop.
Quite a lot of them can be wired either one, two or three-phase when you look into their installation instructions, it's just that not that many houses have three-phase power and not many people are willing to pay to get that upgraded just for the hob.
All inductive ranges pretty much use the same 2700 watt elements. In the US, you have to do a dedicated circuit (50 amp required but I had bigger wire pulled because of resistive heating and sag potential with some ovens triggering circuit breakers).
Inductive tends to be much more efficient than gas (which is what I have) and vastly more efficient than straight electric.
Bosch 800-series dishwashers are amazing. I’ve bought one at every house I’ve lived at, regardless of what’s installed. They’re quiet, they get everything clean no matter what, and they dry without a heating element, and without popping the front open.
Re: washing machines, I tentatively put forward LG. I bought one (and matching dryer) in the early 2010s, and it lasted 7 years before needing me to replace some balancing parts.
It lasted years after that. Hoping for the same on this next move in a few days (yes, I move a lot).
My parents have a Bosch 800 series dishwasher and it is excellent... frickin pricey for a dishwasher though (about 3x more than the cheap GE one in my place)
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 parents are moving out of their house of ~50 years.
The garage fridge was in the house (as the kitchen one) when they moved in. The chest freezer in the basement moved with them in '77.
They have had at least three kitchen fridges in the time since the fridge got moved to the garage. I've lost track of the number of dishwashers. The current one was out of service for a few months, partially due to wifi/firmware issues. The super expensive oven clock doesn't work anymore, since it broke after the last time it was fixed for an $800 callout.
I can relate. Same for my parents. Washer and dryer still going strong after 30 years, same for the fridge which has been relegated to the basement since the paint has begun to chip. Microwave still works. And out of the three AC units they have, only one needed service. Maybe they are just exceptionally lucky compared to me. And these were not very expensive appliances for that time. I used to offer washers and dryers in rental properties for convenience, but their reliability has become so bad lately that it is not worth it.
I bought a Samsung phone back in like 2014, and shortly after bought smartwatch to pair with it. A year later, Samsung released an update that removed the pairing functionality so my smartwatch could no longer pair. They did this in conjunction with releasing their own smartwatch and some proprietary pairing protocol.
I'm not a fan of vendor lock in, but their decision to retroactively remove functionality that I was depending on led me to never buy another Samsung product since.
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.
Yes, but good luck finding a way to integrate CEC with Home Assistant, or anything else for that matter. Even modern GPUs don't support it. You usually have to buy a USB dongle that MITMs the connection for a disgusting amount of money. It looks like Raspberry Pis support it, but then you have an SBC and its power source dangling off of your TV just to run a single lightweight daemon that may not even fit your use case. CEC is not designed for total control, and on many TVs it's even a bit flaky. I had to disable it on mine because misbehaving devices would randomly turn the TV off and on when I didn't want it.
> 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".
This nonsense keeps getting repeated over and over again for years now and I have yet to find a single documented case of it happening. You'd think that with all the attention, someone would've actually documented it by now.
Enough people connect their TV/smart devices willingly to the internet that there is no need for adversarial approaches like this (which are not trivial to set up - they'd need to maintain per-country partnerships with Wi-Fi hotspot providers, pay them and hope the ROI is worth it).
I think it originated on Reddit and it's since been parroted here in the comments on basically every smart TV thread but I have yet to see actual evidence. It seems like a trivial theory to test - disconnect from your wifi or change its password, wait for ads to suddenly reappear on the TV (evidence it got a network connection from somewhere).
Similar FUD is being spread around HDMI's Ethernet channel; a way to carry network data over an HDMI cable. I have basically never seen it in the wild on any consumer device, but even if it were, it would still require the other device to cooperate and act as a switch/router to share its connection to the TV. Yet despite that every time smart TVs and privacy comes up someone mentions this.
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 :).
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."
Until they start installing 5G modems in the things anyway. Or put a time bomb in the OS so the TV starts shutting down if it hasn't been connected to the internet after a week.
For a short while, I worked at one of Samsung subsidiaries on their TV firmware, mostly fixing Linux kernel bugs introduced by the product teams cannibalizing upstream features to serve their needs (including intentionally disabling reasonable kernel security measures that happened to be in their way). I've seen things, both technical and organizational, that led me to pledge never to give my money to that company, or have their devices connected to networks I care about. I don't trust any of it, if not due to evil intent, but just incompetence.
I was out when they decided to change their authentication, with only two weeks notice, and (from what I read) incorrect documentation, causing it all to not work with HomeAssistant for a month [1].
Hopefully you don't have a neighbor like me. I keep an open wifi channel. So far the only customer has been the neighbors samsung tv phoning home. I felt bad about that and blocked it. But wow are they aggressive trying to get that telemetry out.
If you're buying chips (other than Flash) made with cutting-edge semiconductor processes, your options are only Samsung and TSMC. How long will it take Samsung's foundries to start adding malicious hardware implants to their customers' designs?
Samsung makes great components and terrible appliances. Buy a monitor with a Samsung panel or a Samsung SSD and you'll be a happy camper. Buy a Samsung fridge or washing machine and your life will be hell.
Do they? I've never owned a Samsung phone, in large part because I was always turned off by reports that they liked to skin Android in annoying/lame ways. I have a Samsung fridge/freezer (old and not-smart), but the in-door ice maker has a design flaw that causes condensation to drip, freeze, and clog it, so we've given up on it and just make our own ice with regular old-school trays in the freezer.
I'm not going to say they make crap, but their stuff is... okay, I guess.
Samsung once sold a fantastic phone. It had a wonderful camera, a great 432 PPI OLED screen, a battery that could be swapped in seconds with no tools, a headphone jack, an SD card slot, NFC, optional wireless charging, USB 3.0, HDMI output over MHL, an IR emitter for shenanigans, heart rate and blood oxygen saturation sensors, and at 8.1mm thick it was also waterproof.
It was hackable, rootable, and it ran aftermarket ROMs like a dream.
It was the Galaxy S5, and it was released just over a decade ago.
I've had a few Samsung products over the years. The only one I haven't regretted is their SSDs, both internal and external. Those seem to be good. Everything else has been awful.
I'm also one of those who never buys Samsung. So when it came to a new NVMe, the main options were Samsung and WD, and I kept the track record by going with WD.
They make nice stuff? I’ve stopped buying samsung 10 years ago and even before then not a single device was decent (and I bought phones, screens, home appliances, a TV)
i have good memories of my Note 3. samsung was pretty cool back then. i bought some galaxy s 5 years ago for a lot of money, then it got splashed with water and died. stupid waste of money. i've had my current oppo for 3+ years and he's a trooper, and it was about half the price of a similar-spec samsung. samsung is overpriced shit.
Even when they aren't loaded with ads, Samsung products are built to fail almost immediately. My Samsung vacuum has been a total piece of shit that's falling apart. I will never buy another Samsung product again.
Other than probably flash storage, there's never been a Samsung product that's ever been better than just throwing at least the equivalent amount of money in a fire pit and incinerating it. They've never sold an appliance appropriate even as a boat anchor, and I'm amazed at this point that people even consider buying their junk.
I would never buy a roku tv with its built in ads. Unfortunately my partner did that for me. Most people simply don't care about this kind of stuff. If it has the gleam of newness, hell the ads are kind of flashy I don't mind em at all!
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.
There is no such thing as consumer GE products. They haven't existed for several decades. The name has been licensed to various brands in China, but the only thing actual GE made in it's last several decades (It suffered existence failure in 2024 after a series of spinoffs) is aircraft engines.
Anything sold as "GE" is just re-badged somebody else's crap, mostly Haier.
The dishwasher that came with my condo was GE, and when it stopped draining completely, I found the instruction manual, and it was mostly ads for other GE products. Ironically, I replaced it with a Samsung dishwasher with a clearer instruction manual and easy repair investigations.
Of course I am no longer inclined to purchase Samsung products based on this new info. I honestly think that if a company pushes an update that makes its product worse, they should be obligated to refund you 100% of the original purchase price.
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.
Some of the old US-based GE appliance factories and engineering offices are still operating though, but iirc fridges were the first to go straight overseas.
I think washing machines and dryers, maybe dishwashers, are still designed and manufactured in the US.
I won't buy Sony TVs any more because of their software, because it started displaying ads on the home-screen.
It's Google TV, and I don't mind ads for content on the home screen. I use a bunch of streaming services, I might want to watch whatever's up there, that's not entirely incongruous. Then about a year after purchase we started getting ads for L'Oreal shampoo and other products. Nope.
Sony acted confused when I sent a support ticket, and eventually said "Oh, that's because it's Google TV, nothing we can do about it". I replied saying perhaps they had given too much control over their tv experience to a third party. I was able to activate "App Only Mode" to make them go away, but you lose a bunch of the features and have to disable it to get to the play store if you want to install anything else.
Pisses me off. I paid a couple of thousand dollars (AUD) for that tv, I shouldn't have advertising shoved in my face.
> 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.
Your approximation isn't really better than theirs.
It's true that you can't go below black, but SDR has extremely bad precision below 1 nit. HDR can accurately represent scenes at least 100x darker than SDR, in addition to bright spots at least 100x brighter. https://2.img-dpreview.com/files/p/TS940x940~forums/66687985...
You're right about how HDR should work. I'm reporting how my Samsung TV does work. It's terrible, and clearly a bug. There are many, many forum posts about "samsung hdr dark", often with random advice about adjusting the gamma, etc., that sounds like it should work but only helps a little bit.
You know, the ad they display on the home annoys me and I've never thought much about it. The prevalence of ads is so much that I think I already expected it there.
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 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.
I've used the built-in apps at a friend's house, and they were awful compared to the Apple TV versions. Everything was sluggish, like it was running on something without enough RAM and swapping out to an SD card. If I hadn't used anything else but that, or maybe the Dish Network DVR we had years ago, I'd probably think it's just fine. However, I have used something else, and it made the TV's own apps feel unbearable.
Imagine you're using a brand new maxed-out MacBook Pro, and someone hands you a 2013 HP laptop. The HP is... fine. It displays web pages, lets you load a word processor, and otherwise looks and acts like a laptop. If you hadn't ever used another computer, you probably wouldn't think anything of it.
BTW, I bet a Fire TV or various other options would be fine, too. I just don't have the personal experience to vouch for those. I'm not using this anecdote to shill Apple TV specifically, just to say that there are much better options than the built-in apps.
> 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.
> "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."
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.
Keep the bounty, but target the cause and not the effect. Who made the decision? Send a drone army once a month to spray paint their house with PSAs about consumer rights.
I recall Louis saying that some (or all?) solutions to these bounties cannot be revealed to the public due to being liable under DMCA circumvention measures. IANAL.
They can be revealed volunarily by the author, but FULU can't require or condone it. Because of the DMCA section 1201, trafficking in circumvention tools to violate digital locks is a felony punishable by 3-5 years in federal prison.
Yeah maybe this would be an exception since patching firmware to disable ads probably doesn't constitute circumventing digital locks, unless in the process of doing so they do.
The US has successfully bullied many countries around the world to adopt their same insane IP laws, at the cost of cancelling trade agreements with those countries if they don't comply. So no, it affects many countries.
In fact the first DeCSS trial was in Norway. Which started the whole internet wide civil disobedience campaign of mirroring it, putting it in haikus and t-shirts, etc.
> Include instructions for carrying out the functional method which are accessible and easily usable by a non-technical individual
Good luck for anyone to claim this bounty if that's one of the requirements. Does the fridge have any exposed ports at all that the average person could access without removing anything from the fridge?
It's also not clear in the bounty, if I add funds to the campaign and it gets fully funded, does that mean that software/hack will be released publicly? Or only to "backers"? It's not clear what the donation goes to, besides for the person who makes the hack to claim.
It helps to read into the personality and psychology of Louis Rossmann a bit, who is running this. He does component-level repairs of MacBooks, and entirely understands that custom firmware will likely require JTAG to flash the MCU.
FULU / Rossmann isn't handling the public release ... at all. They're worried that doing so would violate US law or at least cost a lot in court fees. They'd be super stoked if whoever made it released to to the public and absolutely not just to "backers".
I pay for Spotify and the app now shows paid suggestions (cough ads), to paying users. When you tap the ellipsis and choose "Not interested", it doesn't respond with "OK, we'll stop" but something like 'We'll show less of this'.
No, don't show less, I want you to not show it at all.
I did the same, and switched to Apple Music. Soon after that, Apple Music started injecting their F1 movie soundtrack into suggested music for me. There really is no escape from this. They haven't done it since, so at least it's not as bad as what Spotify does. If I come across a good offline music player for iOS I will probably cancel my Apple Music subscription.
Last time I checked the sky tv financials, subscription revenue outweighed advertising revenue about 10:1, is for every £30 subscription they took £3 in adverts.
I guess that's part of the sentiment for the current resurgence of physical media, specifically vinyl and CDs. It's refreshing to be able to just enjoy media without mega corporations tracking your listening habits or serving you ads.
Might seem funny for some more senior readers, but as somebody who almost exclusively only listened to music through MP3s and streaming, I found the included artwork and other goodies in vinyl / CDs to be incredible. Who would have known that my favorite albums often had not just album covers, but lyrics sheets and entire booklets filled with interesting trivia and additional artwork?
I imagine a modern hacker needs to basically shun all fo mainstream media to get away from such behavior. No Google, no Meta, no Microsoft, etc. apparently no Smart devices either.
my XM app with a paid subscription now has in-app popups advertising concerts. it sucks.
I will say that they’re typically concerts related to the channel I am on, but there is no world in which I want to attend live music, and of course there’s no way to tell them that. so I have to tolerate getting interrupted periodically despite already paying them.
I was also infuriated by this, so much so that I switched to TIDAL. Migrating was easy— I used their recommended webapp ti migrate all my playlists. Have been using TIDAL happily ever since. Never any popups or ads.
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.
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.
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.
Tizen was launched in 2012, not sure that would count as early 2000s! But I had colleagues who were also working with the Tizen team, and that's when I learned it'll never fly. Samsung just didn't have the software engineering mindset required for it.
The short version of the story is that I was working with one of the Samsung mobile engineering teams for Vodafone 360 (look it up). The other team was the Galaxy team.
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?
Second hand Pixels which then get GrapheneOS installed on them (GrapheneOS doesn't support Google Wallet payments via NFC, which can be a deal-breaker for a lot of people).
i've been using android since the iphone 4s (i had one of those and thought it was very cool). i wanted freedom. but these days i'm thinking of changing up, back to iphone, and getting a mac laptop to replace this old thinkpad ashtray. i won't ash on the mac, at least not to start with. i'm tired of the crap. ubuntu is crap. why am i using a janky kde connect? i'd like to try xcode and other apple stuff. seriously, i think apple is going to start getting more marketshare in both phones and computers. i think people are tired of google and microsoft, and linux desktop distros. ps. i'm too old to care about pc gaming. i have a playstation for that.
I bought a Samsung notebook in ~2008. No crapware! Nice and small, it survived long beyond the guaranty date.
My cellphone decided to die last month. It was near retirement, but still working until it didn't. I bought a Samsung phone. First it asked twice if I wanted to share all my life with Google (using some dark patterns) and then it asked twice if I wanted to share all my life with Samsung (using more dark patterns). (After that, I installed WhatsApp, so I'm not sure I bothered.)
Next the phone offered to install the app from my carrier, TikTok and a ¿third? app-store. I didn't want them so in the screen with the offer I disabled the first and the other two were disabled by default. Anyway, I got TikTok and the other app for some reason! (I uninstalled them inmediately.)
I still get random notifications, like complaining that I'm using the phone too much. Or a notification that they upgraded something, restarted the phone and all apps notifications were disabled until I unlock it. (Lucky, I didn't miss any important urgent message.)
How does anyone watch youtube these days? I wouldn't mind seeing an ad or even 2, but it feels like youtube is singling me out for special treatment. I'm not going to watch anything if i'm scared a 30 second ad will interrupt the video.
i use the rss feed of the channels i am subscribed to and download the videos i want to watch with yt-dlp. i may browse the homepage every so often but i just copy the links and download them.
It might be coincidence, but I've noticed the ads get slightly less obnoxious if I religiously abandon the video and close the browser tab any time the ad is more than 10 seconds long and unskippable. I'm sure they're monitoring closely to see what people will and won't tolerate.
Even the unnecessary microcontrollers in modern devices irk me. A fridge does not need a microcontroller. (My issue is primarily repairability - discrete components can be sourced and replaced, microcontrollers with the correct programming usually cannot.)
Neither. In a world where everyone is trying to be more eco conscious, it seems like a joke that manufacturers are slapping screens on the most menial of things.
This is why I have so few 'smart' devices in my life. It is obvious that all of these devices are predatory. They start off 'helpful' and 'useful' and then turn malicious when you can't easily replace them. Lock-in bait and switch should be illegal.
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.
Of course they would do this. They did this with their top of the line 4k tvs when they first came out. Everything was great, their OS and such worked wonderfully then they started to inject ads for gamefly into notifications and it went downhill from there. Ads in a 200 dollar tv I understand. Ads on a 5 thousand dollar tv? Absolutely unacceptable.
I know it's not your intention, but it does illustrate another divide between rich and poor. I guess some would say they'd rather a cheap TV with ads over no TV, but I imagine TV companies could still make an affordable TV without ads if mandated to remove ads. They just choose the ad route for more profit.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Why do you address us as if we collectively went down to the town center and three dozen times in a row and decided on the same thing by consensus? For most of us this was shoved down our throats by sheer force of violence. And why always this oh shucks apologia about the “business model” that they are supposedly forced to adapt? No, this fridge already costs a lot of money. The ads don’t have to be recouping losses. They could just be for more profit.
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.
When you get downvoted for making the obvious statement that you have to maximize profits as a capitalist entity, well, you know you’re in a venture capital forum.
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.
integrated 21.5- or 32-inch (depending on the model) screen
I don't want a fridge with a screen or any connections except power. All it needs to do is keep my food cold. I've had others very surprised to see my house containing mostly mid-century dumb appliances. I deal with enough problems caused by software at work, to know better than to bring that hassle home.
Off-topic-ish: I've got a TCL Smart TV that, by default, runs Google TV (which, to my understanding, is a rebranded newer version of Android TV). The default launcher / interface, which contains ads and has only minimal customisation options, can only be changed by installing an alternative launcher disabling some permissions via adb.
Having followed the instructions to do it, it's much nicer having beautiful background images (rather than ads for crappy TV shows and movies) and a cleaner interface with at least one less click required to get to the apps I want (ie. a better UX).
TCL TVs are not a particularly premium product, so I'm not too annoyed about having to go this little bit of effort to make it nicer. However, a $3,500 fridge seems like a premium-ish price, and so to also have ads on that feels incredibly tacky to the point it cheapens the product and the brand overall.
I'll have to get back to you. I had to go through the process three or four times to get it to stick across reboots and not leave me with a useless TV just showing a black screen (I had a panic moment when that happened).
I should also mention: This may render some of the TV remote shortcut buttons useless. There's an app that's meant to help with this, but I've found it unreliable.
Not the GP, but I have a TCL 65C845. I've removed all the crap from it and installed a third-party launcher. I LOVE the result, both in terms of picture quality and usability. The UI is clean, snappy, functional and there's zero crap on the screen that I didn't deliberately put there.
Here are my notes:
Enable Android developer options.
Work through various settings (developer and normal).
Connect wired Ethernet (I use a USB dongle), enable RDNIS in USB port dev options. Disable WiFi.
Turn on Google TV. Log in.
Disable auto-updates, work through permissions etc.
Install ADB TV (PRO licence)
Disable the following apps in ADB TV:
AirPlayLaunchService
AirplayAPK (two different APKs)
BrowseHere
Electronic card 5.0
Gallery
GameBar
Google (com.google.android.katniss)
Logkit
MagiConnect
Media Player
Message Box
Overseaeva
Prime Video
Rakuten TV
Reminder
T-Solo
TCL Channel (two different APKs)
TCL Home
TCL Home Passive
TCSCore
T_IME
User Center
Works with Alexa
com.tcl.iptv.App
DO NOT DISABLE or you might have to start from scratch:
TV (com.tcl.tv)
TvInputService
Install FLauncher. Configure apps/panels/wallpaper.
Using ADB TV (under “install”):
Install a screen saver (Aerial Views), TV streaming apps, Plex, SmartTubeNext, f-droid, Mullvad etc.
That's pretty much it. A bit fiddly but a one-time thing (I did this two years ago and have been using the TV daily). I keep auto-updates turned off and basically nothing ever breaks and there are no random regressions.
I previously did the same on an older TCL TV. The panel was not as nice and the CPU was slower but the result was also quite good (it was what convinced me to get the 65C845 with its larger screen, better panel and faster CPU).
I used to run a similar FLauncher-based setup on a NVidia Shield Pro, but the new setup is so nice that I don't use the Shield for TV anymore.
Another experiment I did was replicating this exact setup on a Chromecast (I think GA01919). That also worked well, though having a second device was a bit inconvenient in terms of remote controls and such.
P.S. Where I live I have FTTH; TV is delivered as MPEG transport streams over multicast. I don't have OTA broadcast TV or a cable box and so couldn't vouch for the ergonomics there.
I have the Samsung Frame TV (great TV btw) and decided I didn't want to pay the $5 / month to have curated art in the room and when Superman the movie came out a few months ago it was only displaying Superman comics on the screen. Was super annoying bc was subtle but not subtle enough. I uploaded family pics instead so I don't have that anymore but it was still pretty annoying. I have samsung washers / dryers / dishwasher etc all connected to the internet and I love the notifications when a load is done but I don't know how useful the data is... I assume data brokers are like, "Oh Aj uses his washing machine 7 times a month let's hit him with Tide ads", but I assume everyone uses the machine that much. I'm fine having my machines tell Samsung use bc it's normal usage (i think?)
If you are thinking of data - you have to think of meta data. Instead of how often you do laundry think more:
* number of adults in the house hold (people who have access to the account)
* when you are home
* opening fridge/doing laundry/etc. I have no idea if their app has an excuse to ask for location- but app location tracking would be the most valuable data
* even if you don’t share location- these things are on your network and any regular and simple network scanning would show when certain devices are home and we they are not home and what schedules they follow
This isn’t even very imaginative, just the basics really. I would not be surprised if you could guess the household size solely based on the number of times a fridge is opened in a day. You could at least determine between a person without a family vs. family- that’s useful for ads. Are these the fridges that have cameras in them ‘so you can see what you have while at the grocery store’? Throw some image detection in there and you now know brand targeting and if they cook regularly or eat out. A goldmine of data really.
I use home assistant and a smart plug to get notifications when the socket has less than 1w load for 5 mins -> washing machine finished. Maybe one of the best automations I have. And all local.
I've bought Frame as well because our 10 years old Philips tv got a nasty dead pixels bar mid screen that made watching tv really annoying - prob moisture got inside. I was curious how Samsung's ecosystem looks like in comparison to Apple's and tbh, I didn't expect the main hub app asking for location access way before even looking up for the devices.
But that was a hard no for me. I just left all of that alone - we have a ISP set-top box that comes with FTTH tv and few services so I don't need to log in anywhere else.
Mother has a hearing aid and she wanted to try Bluetooth connection - devices paired without mobile app but she couldn't lower volume down on tv nor on her device, even with aid's own app.
It still wasn't as bad as expected. I read some of the experiences people had where they couldn't even get into the home screen of tv before agreeing for network connection or login to some cloud services.
Fiends got some 4k Samsung for their new house - it comes with some AI features because of course it does. They said that they couldn't easily find picture controls and every show was automatically adjusted on brightness, saturation etc., making anything pain to watch.
They also got washing machine/dryer combo from Samsung as well - weeks after someone posted on our discord server video from Polish store where bunch of guys "hacked" similar smart-enabled machine and launched... youtube with that dancing "6 grams" cow clip. What a time to be alive.
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?
"The ads experience, though, seems to have improved somewhat from the earlier pilot testing in that users can use their fridge’s settings menu to opt out of seeing ads. If users set their Cover Screen to show integrated Art or Album themes, then the display won’t show ads."
So at least for now tech savvy, aware users can opt out. But I don't like where this is going.
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.
Galaxy S2 was the best phone I ever had. I think it was pure Android, if not, you had some minor apps from Samsung that you could've delete. I think I left the Samsung train right about S5 (which was supposed water proof, but it wasn't). It was just down fall from there. Samsung account, locked phone full with shitty apps that you couldn't remove (without rooting)... I don't think I'll ever have anything from Samsung in the near future
I had the original Galaxy S, and that was very much not pure Android, and no other Galaxy I've had has been (so presume the S2 wasn't either). Prior to Android, they had their own OS, and wanted to continue the UI/UX rather than changing to Android.
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.
Yesterday I was seriously thinking about aftermarket control boards startup for some of my appliances (mostly the AC that has disgustingly low performance because of eco modes). Seems that there will be one for fridges too.
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.
Funny that they do that after the purchases have been made. Goes to show how much bundled services upset the user-manufacturer relationship, to the detriment of the user.
Using a service is an ongoing relationship, and relationships change over time, sometimes for the worse. This needs to be factored in as risk, every time someone makes a purchase that includes a service.
>>The box will change what it displays “every 10 seconds,” the publication said.
OT - This reminds me of the digital billboards on the highway that change before one has the chance to understand what it's advertising. I don't even have the chance to count the seconds before the ad changes much less see what it's advertising.
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?
Once they have paved the way and built the infrastructure, most fridges will come with some sort of display. Probably just a small status display. But these fridges will be much cheaper, subsidized by the Ad opportunities. It happened with most mainstream TVs making people expect cheap TVs to the point where they will dismiss a TV with "normal" price.
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.
How can smart be good? Can you give me a practical and real example of a benefit of a smart appliance? How can it be better than a regular appliance that does not get on your way?
Let me guess: now to operate a dishwasher I need to download and install a mobile app. And also regularly update the app and the firmware of the appliance, or maybe need a permanent internet connection to correctly operate. It' BS all the way down.
The only thing that companies are expecting from providing you a smart feature is to somehow monetize that on a regular basis and the easiest thing to do that is to either sell your data or locking you down to a fucking subscription.
Not mention the potential problems with devices being bricked due to failed software updates. And of course this whole thing of permanent connection: the manufacturer "sunsets" particular line because they decided it's time for their customers to get newer device. And you can't do anything because the device has a touch screen and proprietary software with no chances for opening it up due to patents and other "secrets".
Oh, well, forget all that bullshit please. I can see how that "smart" is utter nonsense no one possibly wants. If you need an app and Internet connection to operate a home appliance that's stupid, not smart. Crapware vendors really ruined it.
Instead, please imagine your dishwasher has a standardized management and observation API that's exposed on a LAN and can be consumed by your local IoT management software (e.g. Home Assistant). Nothing here should have any WAN connectivity, except for a tightly firewalled channel for out-of-home user communications.
I run dishwasher overnight (YMMV) and I have forgot to turn the dishwasher on more than once before going to bed. It would be nice if it would be able to either start on a ping from a home hub's cron if it's loaded, has detergent and locked. Or if it's not in a good state, when the home hub would sense I'm about to start my night routine it could notify me that I forgot to do something about the dishes.
Or consider a smart washing machine. Home hub can observe its state and home automation can actually remind you that you forgot to move the wet clothes to the dryer. Or, well, if we're considering advanced robotics, it could summon a service bot with appropriate manipulators to do it for me.
Or a smart kitchen stove. If the hub senses I'm going out and the stove or oven are running, it should bug the hell out of me before I'm out of the driveway.
That's what I mean when I say "smart". Unobtrusive, helpful home automation, doing what I actually want from it, not doing anything I don't explicitly want, designed to be reliable, private and fault-tolerant.
Smart home should be about dwellers convenience and automatically meeting their expectations (as defined by dwellers themselves), not a data siphoning mess with constant risk of security breaches, that becomes dysfunctional if someone else's computer (cloud) fails.
No offense taken. What's naive and and why do you think so?
I totally recognize almost nothing of the sort is currently offered on consumer market. You need to have skills and time, or hire someone with skills and time, to make a system like that. It's already possible today though. And I don't see any reason why the situation has to remain bad like this forever.
I agree with you. The "smart" in "smart appliance" to me always indicates some bullshit I definitely don't want.
What's especially frustrating to me is that my appliances that should have a delay on them don't; specifically, my dryer and dishwasher should be able to delay until later in the evening when my electricity rates go down. Instead, I have to get them ready and press the button with my thumb like my parents did with their appliances 40 years ago.
But hey! These things can chew up gigabytes of bandwidth[0], so there's that.
on a whim, I walked into a Lucid dealership and asked for a copy of their privacy policy as it relates to a purchased vehicle. the salesman told me “no” very firmly, so I left.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Different humidities and it makes a big difference. Also less stress on each component and they have very long warranty’s so if they break it’s on them.
Stopped buying Samsung phone because I couldn't disable some stupid assistant button with ai subscription on the last one. I'm really sad because Samsung was always a good brand to me
Not sure if that still even a thing but I remember reading here about plans of companies to include SIM module so "smart" devices could connect to the Internet without need for home network access. That would of course bypass solutions like Pi-hole
Obviously, this is not a change aimed at enticing customers but instead expanding revenue streams. And its obvious that all western governments hand-wringing over green and efficient energy usage falls apart as long manufacturers like Samsung, AWS, Sony are allowed to waste network bandwidth and chew up consumer and industry energy supply on superfluous pointless fluff like adverts where they are not needed or welcome.
It is proof again that Advertising is really about pushing messaging at people rather than selling anything.
Samsung already lost me with removing expandable storage in premium phones. Now they have reached levels of avoid that will push me to any alternative that respects the customer's usage needs.
A webcam on Aliexpress is around 5 euros. Throw in a microcontroller that's like 2 euros on aliexpress, a 10 euro screen and you still have a 30-ish euro budget for the actual door that's probably plastic (acrylic and something like PE ?). So yeah, probably more expensive.
But that doesn't means that doesn't exists ! We can see that all the time in supermarket, but I guess their needs are different.
Samsung SSDs I remember, do they still make good ones? I won’t buy the washer and dryer from them again, and probably not the dishwasher even though for the price it has been good.
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.
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.
Okay - so fridge is something that you buy, you put it on 3 degrees Celsius and you forget about it for the next 12 years. What exactly smartness gives?
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'd rather my fridge observe there are no apples, than to just assume N apples have been eaten. Especially relevant once you make if a family of 4, not an individual.
I don't think it's worth it myself, but here are some of the features of the Samsung Bespoke fridge that use wifi:
Notifications and Alerts:
If the door is left open, or the fridge temperature is leaving safe temps, or the water filter needs changing, it can send a push notification to your phone. (Useful if something fails; or if a kid/guest leaves the fridge open by mistake).
Remote control and monitoring:
You can use the camera to see the contents of the fridge. You can also adjust the temperature remotely. (Useful if you're at the grocery store and can't remember if you have milk?) It looks like they also have "AI" try to categorize these for you.
Built-in tablet:
The touchscreen is basically a builtin tablet. You can use it to display photos (pulled from your online albums), show the weather, or control "smart home" stuff like playing some music on your speakers. I imagine you could also try to put recipes or cooking videos on there. You can also easily order groceries from it or add to your shopping list (with your voice).
I'd rather have a separate device for most of this, but I can understand the appeal, especially if you're not privacy-conscious.
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?".
> Yeah, which is easy to reason about because you're probably used to reason about stuff, sometimes even a lot.
I reason about the same amount as anyone else.
> 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?".
1) There is no such thing as the "average" person.
2) There is nothing special about you, I or anyone else. The fact is that everyone makes lots of irrational decisions every single day without thinking about it.
Being frugal, thinking about what you need and similar ways of thinking is not common in the real world, it's a small selection of any population that acts and reasons like that. I'm not sure what to tell except go out more in the world and interact with people outside your bubble, if this isn't obviously clear to you already.
> Being frugal, thinking about what you need and similar ways of thinking is not common in the real world, it's a small selection of any population that acts and reasons like that.
It often is. Often out of necessity.
You are making the mistake a lot software developers and other professionals often make. Is that they think rationally and others do not. This is because in one area they are forced to think about things rationally because otherwise something simply doesn't work. This translates poorly often to outside of their field because they are often making incorrect assumptions.
I have seen little evidence that professional in software are any more or less rational, frugal than any other group of people and often they will spend their money on absolute garbage. This is so prevalent there are memes about it online.
Moreover I've seen many Software Developers and people that surround them in tech (e.g. BA, Testers, Project Managers) fall for some of the most obvious bullshit.
> I'm not sure what to tell except go out more in the world and interact with people outside your bubble, if this isn't obviously clear to you already.
So, I could say the exact same thing to you. TBH, I actually think this is projection. The way you are talking is like the way I used to talk when I was younger and had less real world experience. It should give you pause that another person has a radically different opinion, is arguing against their own group (I am a dev) and I can back that up with a decent rationale as to why I believe it.
Your argument throughout this boils down to "I think this is true, because I think other people are dumb". Which is pure hubris.
> The way you are talking is like the way I used to talk when I was younger and had less real world experience.
It's incredible interesting, if anything else, that I feel the same about you and could have written exactly the same thing as you seem to lack real-world experience, and probably are a bit younger than me, judging by what you wrote.
But instead, probably better to stop here and acknowledge we won't get to anything interesting after all, so thank you for your time, and maybe see you around :)
> if anything else, that I feel the same about you and could have written exactly the same thing as you seem to lack real-world experience, and probably are a bit younger than me, judging by what you wrote.
IME, those who start claiming the other person lacks real world experience as an argument (like you did), is normally making up for the fact that they don't.
> But instead, probably better to stop here and acknowledge we won't get to anything interesting after all, so thank you for your time, and maybe see you around :)
We can't get to anything interesting because you ignore what you don't want to engage with. There were a huge number of presumptions you make without even realising it in your statements.
I also want to know why you think that developers are more rational? You never gave a rationale other than what boils down to "I think other people are dumb, and developers are smart". That was your entire argument.
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.
I upgraded my Samsung phone to the latest One Ui version and i've been having a frustrating time with it. Turns out months later I discovered they have changed the behaviour to work best for Right Handed users. I found a setting that allowed me to flip that and now i'm able to use my phone again.
Every frog will be boiled. Remember this when you argue “oh but it will still be possible to sideload via adb” “oh but you can turn it off” “oh but you only need it on the first run” “at least they don’t…”
You won’t be able to. It will be mandatory. They will do it. If you give these companies an inch, they’ll take a mile.
The moment they don’t actively work entirely aligned with your interests, they work against you.
The idea of paying for a $2k fridge that has a $30* android board running a large screen is just absurd to me. Not only was this kind of enshittification almost a given, but we all know how well manufacturers update devices like this. Security issues aside, you just know that the software is going to slowly rot (Think: Widget to show tweets before Twitter closed the API down).
If you feel so inclined to have a touch screen on your fridge then you'd be better off getting some random tablet and sticking it to the fridge.
I _love_ my home automation/smart house devices but I wouldn't touch one of these with a 10ft pole.
Zero chance I'll purchasing any household device from Samsung. Not with all the crapware and spyware they pile onto their systems. Zero chance I'd purchase a household appliance with a large screen. WTF would I want that for. More garbage annoying crap and more to go wrong. The never ending chimes about everything on our Mellie clothes dryer was annoying enough... (and oh it wants to connect to the WiFi? Good luck with that. Terrible menu UI. I'll never buy one of those again either).
I like to think in future there migh be Harry Tuttle like appliance repair vigilantes that come out and remove all this crap from home appliances. :-)
I want to agree with you. But we said this about TVs and a bit later you couldn't buy a TV that wasn't giving you a "recommendations" feed or whatever.
Yes, it's just evil. I sure would not buy a Samsung TV laden with crap, I just will not do it. I run an old high-end commercial plasma display and otherwise watch video on dumb computer monitors or iPads. And yes I know, an iPad is far from a dumb device.
Honestly, stuff like this makes me want to leave my smart phone in the garage when I get home and have a single desktop linux box that is in a “computer room” hardwired and the house has no wifi or smart anything and every other screen goes into the trash.
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.
I've never purchased a refrigerator in my life - every place I've lived in my adult life has been a rental where I wasn't the one picking the appliances. What happens when I'm looking for a place to live, and I find somewhere that meets my requirements, except that the landlord has this Samsung smart fridge in the kitchen - maybe they thought this was a selling point, like the landlord I had who put the fact that they had a Google Nest thermostat proudly in the apartment ad (I deliberately never gave it my WiFi password)?
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 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.
A lot of outrage in HN comments, but it's kinda ironic, because if you had to point at the single biggest concentration of people who built out surveillance capitalism and other facets of our digital dystopian future...
Maybe the people complaining are the ones whose employers don't even sell out people with third-party trackers on their Web site. But I see more than 3 people complaining.
Everyone here seems to hate on the idea of seeing ads on an appliance you purchased. I hate ads too!
But, let's consider the counterfactual. What if Samsung offered you a new fridge for free, as long as you were ok with passive ads?
I hate ads, but I'm not sure I would pass up a free fridge...those things are expensive!
(this is not even that unrealistic. Let's say you have a household of 3 and a fridge lasts 10 years. Meta makes about $200 per year per user solely from showing ads; that's $6000 over 10 years. If Samsung got as good as Meta is (which they likely won't), 6k is more than enough to cover the cost of giving a fridge away for free)
> What if Samsung offered you a new fridge for free, as long as you were ok with passive ads?
I'd still buy a normal fridge from a different vendor. There's absolutely no reason why fridge needs a display screen nor any "smart" features. And no ad deal would convince me because next thing that would come after this would be the obvious "watch ads to unlock the fridge".
Household appliances are meant to work for years - sure, now lifespan is way shorter than used to be but these aren't phones we're replacing every 3 years or so. The fridge we once had lasted 25 up until cooling unit failed and there was no way to replace it or fix.
I hope you rolled some really low bait here because if you really think like that then... I sincerely feel sorry for you.
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..
* 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.)
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.
Maybe we need a new boots theory:
The rich person buys a $3500 pair of boots that comes with surveillance, useless AI, and bricks itself on the next firmware update.
The poor person buys a pair of boots, that are... boots.
"You are so poor that when AWS goes down, you still can get into your house" -- seen somewhere
Which phase of capitalism is this? Suffering costs extra, and you'll gladly pay for it!
"As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free.’" - 1984
It's hard to make the right boots analogy (try it yourself if you think you can), but to speak of fridges —
• The rich person's remodeller (or the developer of the house they buy) buys a commercial-kitchen prep fridge for the house's kitchen. This is a big, powerful, durable, repairable, no-frills, utilitarian fridge, that could be viewed as attractive or ugly depending on your opinion on brutalism. The rich person never sees this fridge. It's kept in the butler's pantry and only their private chef ever touches it.
• The rich person's interior designer then buys an elegant/classy half-sized in-wall glass-door fridge to live in the kitchen itself. This is intended for the rich person's household staff to keep constantly stocked with snacks and drinks for the rich person to grab. (Also, if the rich person thinks they want to cook one day, the staff will prep the exact ingredients needed in advance, keeping them in the butler's pantry until called for, but will then stage any "must stay cold" ingredients here.) This fridge is generally a piece of shit, made with huge markups by companies that make fancy-house furniture. But it sure is pretty! If (when) it fails, the staff can temporarily revert to just serving the role of that fridge, running to the butler's-pantry fridge or other cold-storage area (maybe a walk-in!) when the rich person wants something. (Also compare/contrast: in-wall wine cooler.)
• The rich person's household staff might respond to the rich person's request for more convenient access to snacks/drinks in certain areas of the house by buying + keeping stocked one or more minifridges. There'll certainly be one in the house's bar. (There's always a bar.) These are sturdy commercial-grade bricks, built by the same companies that build the ones that go into hotels; but these companies serve rich people just as often as they serve hotels, so they tend to have an up-market marque that makes the fridge look fancy while reusing the well-engineered core.
Parent was funny but almost a non-sequitor.
I appreciated the kernel of truth: industrial fridges will not come with adware in the foreseeable future. Buy industrial.
I mean, my point was that there are actually three different ways you can spend a lot of money on a fridge, and it's a lot like with PCs.
You can buy:
• a big ugly powerful repairable/durable industrial one (like a server);
• an average-sized, somewhat-fancy (because high-trim), repairable/durable commercial one (like a workstation);
• or an average-sized fancy "aesthetic" one, made by a design company rather than an appliance company, that isn't repairable or durable (like one of those bespoke "sleeper desk PCs.")
The same goes for most things you can spend a lot of money on. A sound system, a vacuum cleaner, a car, etc. In each of these cases, "premium" has these same three distinct meanings. None of which involve showing you ads. But all of which have their own trade-offs. And all of which are usually quite a bit more expensive (each for their own reasons) than the highest-trim product sold directly to the average consumer by what you'd think of as a "consumer brand."
I once bought a commercial dishwasher. It cost twice as much used as a domestic dishwasher would have cost new, and I had to add a 220 outlet and run some new plumbing; but the kitchen in that house had no space for a normal dishwasher, so I had to be creative. I put the big machine on my back porch, just outside the kitchen door: it was ugly, loud, and absurdly fast. Once it came up to temperature, it could wash a tray of dishes in three minutes flat. Great for cleaning up after dinner parties. It was certainly a kind of luxury, in a brute-force way.
What are the good brands of commercial/industrial we should be looking at?
I think it depends on the field or industry. I seem to remember seeing commercial TVs by Samsung when we were buying ours. Similar display specs, almost twice the price, no smarts, and 5 years warranty. They were designed for hotels I believe and came with a few features for that. Similarly hospitality aimed brands often are designed to withstand more abuse and cost a bit more. If you like whatever product you encounter or use in a commercial setting, just ask about it. There’s a decent chance you’ll be able to buy something similar.
Oh also, for vacuums at least, shop vacs are apparently the way to go. And for audio, DIY beats the pants off anything commercial (unless you don’t mind spending thousands of dollars more).
For fridges? True Manufacturing.
Buying industrial works in many circumstances:
- consumer kitchen mops break in 1-2 years. Get the commercial one for 2x and it lasts
- my bike is locked to an 25mm thick toughened steel industrial eye-bolt (set into concrete) which cost < $10. A consumer item intended for that purpose costs ~$70
You're talking about a _very_ rich person, there. Most merely rich people don't have household staff.
If you can't afford a household staff (even just a single person), you aren't actually rich. Very well off perhaps but not rich.
It's probably more like a rich person will spend $50 on a pair of boots that will last 10 years, while a poor person will spend $10 on a pair of boots that will last a year. The upper middle class person will spend the $40 on a pair of boots that comes with surveillance and useless AI, while a middle class person will spend $30 for the same, except it bricks itself on the next firmware update.
Boots and shoes are interesting because they're genuinely an area where premium materials and construction _could_ significantly improve how long they last. We're talking 1-2 years for "normal" boots and decades for $500+ boots (with re-soling) There's also a good middle ground here. I'm not saying everyone needs really expensive boots, but it nice that you can actually spend more money for higher quality rather than a horrible system on a chip that fails after a year and renders a whole product useless.
This is true of most products, actually.
where, outside of thrift stores, are you finding boots at these prices?
That’s actually roughly the price range to manufacture normal shoes. “The average production cost of a single pair of shoes ranges between $10 and $50. This includes materials, labor, and overhead.” https://hevashoeinc.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-manufacture...
What you actually pay is a large multiple of that covering the taxes, shipping, sales channel, marketing, etc.
The rich person goes to an exclusive London cobbler who spends 11 days carving out a model of his feet, one for left and one for right, out of expensive hardwood. Once complete, a team of masters and apprentices carefully craft him bespoke shoes out of premium leather (straight from Italy!). When finished, the shop calls his assistant and has them delivered. It only costs about $40,000.
You, the poor person, spend $150 on crappy Nike athletic footware, that isn't sized to fit, will fall apart in 6 months (3 if you're using them for actual athletics), but are unfashionable in 3 weeks (but you'll buy them for your middle school children anyway). And you'll think you're rich doing it. Never mind that the cost was $4.75 (up x2 what it was pre-Covid) in Bangladesh, plus $0.30 shipping across the Pacific. The sweatshop worker got a cut of $0.04 for the pair.
The analogy doesn't work though, because people nowdays are paradoxically even stupider than they were in Victorian times.
Not that dissimilar to Wirecutter's advice on appliances: either buy the cheapest of the cheap because it'll have the fewest parts that can break, or the most expensive since it'll be built with high quality components and hopefully be repairable.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/modern-appliances...
The cheapest appliance is definitely cheap, whereas you generally have to take on trust the quality of the most expensive. The rule of thumb I use is "you don't get what you don't pay for", which is not the same as "you get what you pay for".
My point was more along the lines of the fact that below a certain price point, you can't be sure whether you're paying $3500 for actual build quality and features or marketing. A $500 fridge could last forever, or it could last exactly as long as the (very short) warranty period. Also, cheap stuff may last forever in some ways, but it's been cost optimized in a million different ways that make it more annoying to use. In my case the compressor is fine, but the plastic interior has some inexplicable cracks in it and the feet broke off. But at least it will never advertise to me.
Isn't that reversed now? You can only afford the device that is subsidized by the analytics you will be generating for them while the rich person can afford to by the non-subsidized version.
No, these are US$3500 fridges.
$3500 is about 1/3 of the cost of a "rich person" fridge.
There's quite a spectrum of richness. I think my fridge cost US$100 used. This new 199-liter model costs US$280 new: https://www.mercadolibre.com.ar/heladera-philco-top-mount-ci...
So US$3500 is 12 times the cost of a poor-person fridge (excluding used fridges and "oh, I just go over to my mom's house") and ⅓ the cost of your rich-person fridge, which puts it much closer to the latter.
But I wouldn't be surprised if Wolfgang Puck or Gordon Ramsay has a custom walk-in fridge that cost a lot more than US$10k.
A truly rich person has never seen their fridge.
Certainly, the truly rich person has never seen the main fridge their staff uses to store the ingredients for their meals.
But said rich person has at least one more fridge: a relatively-small, usually very elegant (in-wall, glass-door) fridge, located in the [badly designed for cooking, but pretty] "kitchen" that adjoins the butler's pantry [= nearest, usually secondary, real kitchen].
They use this "kitchen" to whimsically prepare avocado toast when hosting "guests" (e.g. people from Architectural Digest); or when vlogging / hosting their reality TV show about all the cooking they love doing. (At any other time, e.g. when hosting actual guests, if they want to make use of this kitchen [rather than simply speaking in their lounge until dinner is served in their separated dining room], it won't be by cooking there themselves, but rather by sitting around the kitchen island or the [probably open] secondary dining arrangement nearby, watching their private chef cook there, while they or their assistants try desperately to cover for how gimped their workflow is by having to use the faux-kitchen.)
And of course, even if the rich person does some whimsical/performative hobby cooking, the staff will have prepped and mise-en-placed anything they'll need from the butler's pantry onto the (huge) kitchen island in advance. (Like a cooking show!) So even then, they won't be needing the "kitchen" fridge. With the extreme edge-case exception of needing something to stay cool until the very moment it's needed; or needing to repeatedly chill it (think "making croissant dough", though I doubt a rich person would ever try.)
Having been closely acquainted with a woman worth north of a billion dollars, and having met a number of people that are worth probably at least hundreds of millions, I can tell you the kitchen experience for the wealthy (maybe barring like top 10-100 billionaires) is really frankly kind of pedestrian. Are the kitchens nicer? Yeah sort of, I have fixed a bunch of stuff on a couple of certified real money mansions, and a lot of it is gimmicky stuff, some of it is good heavy expensive stuff, but honestly nothing that's doing some sort of extra magic a whole lot better than all of the plain old Whirlpool kit in my own home. Do they have help? Yeah for cleaning, and sometimes from what I've seen the one or two people helping around the house will help cook, but they're not dependent on it and it's more a "hey we're cooking for family, I need to delegate", as well as the sort of person I've met with that kind of money tends to skew much older anyways.
Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know, but the regular old very wealthy (the sort you don't know who they are, and I think they prefer it that way) live what you would probably consider mostly very pedestrian lives. More trips? Yes. Multiple homes in nice places? Yes. A couple of nice cars and a (reasonably sized) boat? Usually. Chartered flights? Absolutely. An army of staff and never doing even basic shit themselves? Nope and no on the doing basically nothing unless they're really geriatric (and then can you blame them anyways).
It sounds like you're describing idle-rich people. Which makes sense.
Yeah, if you're "rich" as in "retired", your life is usually pretty mundane. Most such people don't even live in any kind of mansion these days†, but rather just in very nice homes that are perfectly-sized and perfectly-cozy for them and what they like to do — with some verrrry long driveways, if they're in the right part of the country for that.
† (Mansions as a concept evolved from palaces; both exist mostly to provide enough rooms to host guests when some other rich person decides to pilgrimage themselves and everyone they know over to your place to stay for three months — in turn because that was really the only good way to visit someone with full amenities, back before air travel. Nobody needs to do that these days. Any modern mansion exists either as a status symbol, or because the owner likes hosting parties [or imagines they might one day host a party, but never actually does]. Mansions are especially useful, in the modern day, for people who throw fundraiser galas, like politicians.)
> Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know,
I don't think it's SV people doing this. (The SV entrepreneurial "grindset" is a form of protestant work-ethic mindset; most tech millionaires find it hard to allow themselves to have staff. They might have a lot of people on retainer — lawyers, personal trainers, private-practice doctors, etc — but they would find the idea of paying the full salary for the exclusive use of even a maid to be a bit strange, instead preferring to just "hire a service" for that. Right up until they have a security scare, that is... but I digress.)
Rather, the personal-staff (private chef, limo driver, landscaper, several maids, etc) setup is, these days, something for the busy rich — think "runs ten businesses because they don't know how to stop", or "has an infinite queue of people needing them to make a decision about something" [politician, chaebol owner], or "thrives on fame, and so can't stand to turn down packing their schedule with ever-bigger gigs" [celebrity actors]. You find it in LA and in DC, not in SF.
These groups "have people" because they literally wouldn't be able to fit self-care into their schedule without "people."
This reads like fiction rather than informed ethnography.
I think I've only been in one hectomillionaire's kitchen, though it can be hard to tell, and the only resemblance to your description is that he had a large household staff. But it wasn't his main house, and I don't know if you consider someone who isn't even a billionaire to be "truly rich".
I've been in billionares vacation houses (like several of them in an area, not one billionares multiple houses).
They're pretty conventional.
Honestly, it's mostly just my impression of how things work after watching a lot of https://www.youtube.com/@ArvinHaddadOfficial 's mansion design reviews.
I'm guessing that most rich people do not want the inside of their mansions to appear on a YouTube channel, especially one about mansions. Most of these mansions do not cost even US$100M and so probably do not belong to truly rich people.
> I'm guessing that most rich people do not want the inside of their mansions to appear on a YouTube channel, especially one about mansions.
1. He doesn't film these walk-throughs himself. Real-estate agents film walk-throughs of these places to try to get them sold (it's well worth it for the commission they'll make), post them publically, and then he reviews those videos.
2. The homes in the walk-throughs are always vacant; there are no actual rich people involved to worry about their privacy. (They do almost look lived-in, yes, but that's all stuff that comes with the house. Not even staged; a lot of it is "design flourishes" added by the developer to match the architectural style.)
> Most of these mansions do not cost even US$100M and so probably do not belong to truly rich people.
When this guy records a review, it's to point out the flaws in a property's architecture + developer-furnished interior design. (Because that's the professional service he offers to his clients: inspecting properties for design flaws that lower the place's perceived resale value. His videos are a demonstration of that service.)
Thus, due to needing something worth spending 10 minutes talking about, the mansions he bothers to cover are always the ones that are badly designed.
My understanding is that these mansions exist in markets, and are built at scales, such that they actually should cost a lot more than they do. But their bad design has caused them to sit on the market for a long time; and that means the seller often gets desperate and lowers the price. (This isn't speculation; he often covers the market offer-price + resale-price history of a property as well.)
That being said, they still have all the features a truly-rich-person mansion should have. That stuff repeats over and over; you recognize it like MVC in software. These places are just the architectural equivalent of spaghetti code, putting things in inconvenient arrangements (I recall a recent review of a property where you had to walk down three hallways and cross two great rooms to get from the dining room to the nearest bathroom), stacking things so that rooms you'll spend a lot of time in don't have a great view (another property built into a hill made two bedrooms sub-grade with window wells, rather than just putting the bedrooms on the other side under the living room, where they'd get a panoramic picturesque view), and so on.
A lot of truly rich people live in houses that haven't been on the market for generations, or centuries, or ever. The particular hectomillionaire's vacation home I spent a few months in wasn't one of those (he's self-made) but also didn't have the kinds of features you're talking about at all. No separate hidden "main fridge", no butler's pantry, no second kitchen, no kitchen island, no great rooms, no panoramic picturesque views. It did have a dining room and bedrooms, though. It had been built as a small hotel, so it had five bedrooms (on the upper floor), an atrium, and a small swimming pool. From the street it just looked like a regular house. You could walk from the bedroom overlooking the swimming pool down the hall, down the stairs, down the other hall and dining room, across the patio, up the other stairs, and into the last bedroom, in about two minutes.
My in-laws live near but outside of a community that has been vacation homes for the 0.5% for over a century. Those homes never go "on the market". The owners will quietly put the word out and a year later someone new is spending a month of their summer there.
It used to be industrial powerhouse families. Today, it is more likely to be a hedge fund manager.
The fridge example is an interesting problem. A middle class person would probably be much better off just buying a used or cheap fridge. ~$100 - $1000. It will last as long as the $3500 - $5000 fridge and will cost a fraction as much. (and due to not being premium-aka-huge will be much easier to cart inside and outside of your house when it does break down.)
In _principle_ the truly rich person would be better off with a really expensive fridge. Except the chances that it performs better or lasts longer are tiny. So for 4x-10x the price, you have no improvement. The only way to improve your outcome is to spend enough time doing research such that you can figure out if _any_ refrigerators aren't pieces of crap. A for-real rich person has more money than time, so this isn't worth it either. Yes, they might settle on the first fridge that's available and looks nice -- and this _could_ be a premium fridge -- but they really don't get any benefit from a premium fridge either. ie, there's nothing to really push them from a $2k fridge to a $5k fridge unless it's just something like capacity.
In other words, poor-to-middle class should NEVER buy a premium fridge -- but only because the market is terrible and "premium" _usually_ does not mean "more reliable." (if premium meant "much more reliable" then they should buy premium when they can afford it, as it would cost less over time due to longevity.) However, a rich person also accrues almost no benefit from a premium fridge, as the real cost to them is research time and not money.
So, who are these products for? Probably middle class people who want to _appear_ rich.
Sometimes buying a longer-lived fridge for more money is still a bad bargain. If the short-lived fridge lives 20 years and the longer-lived one lives 100 years, the longer-lived one is a bad bargain if it costs twice as much, at any discount rate over about 3.34%. If it costs 4×, it's a bad bargain at any discount rate over 0.59%. At a 3% discount rate, the 4× fridge is a bad bargain even if you have to replace the short-lived fridge every 10 years.
However, probably the major cost of fridge failures is not replacement but the destruction of the fridge contents. A friend of mine recently lost their freezerful of food. Apparently after a power outage the freezer forgot whether it should be a freezer or a regular fridge and defaulted to "neither". This is an example of a "premium" feature making the freezer worse.
There's a midwit bell curve meme lurking here...
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.
Not quite accurate as a blanket statement. Munro did a very detailed tear down series of a sub zero refrigerator that’s very interesting. Youtube link: https://youtu.be/KAYj6m9QtDU
I wish more content like this existed. It’s the only type of review that is worth paying attention to.
Long story short if you live in an energy market like california the energy savings of the sub zero will likely offsets its additions cost over the lifetime of the unit.
It's a little funny that, by far, the worst power and internet I've ever had [0], both by cost and by quality, has been in the Bay Area. The easiest way I'm aware of for me to cut my internet bill in half, cut my power bill 4x, have 30 fewer days per year containing electrical outages, and get back up to normal fiber speeds is to move to the Midwest.
[0] Excluding anywhere I lived for less than a couple months, like the middle of the Pacific or an exceptionally rough road trip through Wyoming.
When was that? Lots of people have solar here, we’ve had maybe 2 power outages for an hour or so in the last decade, and I pay $60 for 10Gbps fiber. Sure, electricity’s cheaper in the Midwest. We’re not exactly deprived of it in the Bay Area though.
Here and now, for the last nearly a decade. I pay $70/mo for, on a good day, 20Mbps down, 100Kbps up, 400ms ping, with a data cap. I have at least two major power outages each year and dozens of minor incidents (with the general quality -- phase stability, surges, etc being less than elsewhere I've lived even when it's working). Good utilities are localized in the Bay.
It's so crazy that even though California is in some ways the center of the technology universe we have had a dysfunctional electrical grid and market for decades. This has been an ongoing governance failure across multiple administrations and political parties. If we ever want to build stuff here and cut the cost of living then cheaper electrical power is a necessity.
I see three videos and I don't see any mention of how much electricity they use?
Looking up the fridges myself, a Sub-Zero BI-42UFD/O is rated at 693kWh yearly, and a Frigidaire FG4H2272UF is rated at 671. There's no difference.
Depends if it's luxury or commercial. Commercial products are generally able to be fixed, but there is a quite a price premium on them.
Commercial and consumer dishwashers are only the same in that they're both called "dishwashers" and use water. The former expect little to no food, have cycles measured in minutes, and run at temperatures that would eat more sensitive dishes alive.
You were close.
A commercial dishwasher will cut right through amounts of food that a normal residential dishwasher wouldn't touch (pre-wash is more for efficiency and to keep crap from piling up in the bottom tray of the dishwasher) and it will actually be ever so slightly less harsh on whatever goes in it (plastics are the problem mostly) because while it washes and rinses way hotter it doesn't have a stupid heating element that runs to dry things.
It will also use fucktons more water and more power and make more noise.
Haven't worked in a commercial kitchen, and I've been wrong before (in this chain, no less), but how would the water be hotter without a heating element? Consumer dishwashers are plumbed into the hot water, so it can't be a difference in a direct hook-up. Without it's own heating element, I wouldn't assume it has its own built-in and ready-on-demand hot water tank, either.
My last guess is more frequent cycles, meaning hotter water already at the spigot / dishwasher outlet, similar to the consumer recommendation to run the hot water for a minute prior to starting the dishwasher?
Plastics / tupperware were actually what I had in mind lol
The water is hotter in a commercial dishwasher. I forget the exact numbers but it's substantially more. What the commercial dishwasher doesn't have is an "oven style" heating element running around the perimeter of the bottom (or somewhere thereabouts) to dry the dishes. Most residential dishwashers have this. This is why some dishes say "top rack only". The water coming out the top isn't any different. It's that you're moving the dish farther from the hot element. So a dish that goes through a commercial dishwasher sees higher average temp but substantially lower peak temp.
At least the commercial ones I've been using on and off do not have a drying cycle at the end of the program; they just steam the heck out of whatever is inside, then once the cycle is through, you are expected to remove the tray with whatever you were washing and let it air dry on the bench.
This in contrast to the consumer unit at home which heats the interior of the dishwasher for 45 minutes or so after it has done its washing cycle to dry things while still inside the dishwasher.
Some dishwashers blow hot air to dry, some get the rinse water extra hot, some do neither.
If they're talking about the water being hotter, but not a "stupid heating element that runs to dry", then it sounds like they mean the hot air.
for commercial there are 2 options chemical and temp sanitization. From fda food code has to reach 171F to sanitize. most use a inline OnDemand heater with a couple taps so constant temp is close to 170 but will also pipe off steam to do a final sanitize. restaurants will also hand wash their plastics in a 3 sink setup water only needs to be 110F
Commercial products usually require knowledge (expertise?), and have their own limitations. Even repairability can be an issue in a different way.
I don't know for dishwashers, commercial printers are expected to be serviced by the maker or affiliated business and getting parts as a mere peasant can be pretty complex. Surely rich people can just throw money at a contractor, but that's not what we're talking about I think (otherwise having a new one delivered everytime would also just work)
I mean, repairing anything requires knowledge. The problem with most home devices is they are not repairable at all and you can't get parts.
While I'm a computer farmer for my day job, I can repair a vast amount of different devices as long as they don't take specialised equipment like vacuum pumps. And while I don't consider myself a rich person, between my wife and I we're in the higher income brackets in the US, I still service as much of my own stuff as possible. And in general commercial stuff is in the same price ranges as the higher end consumer stuff.
The good/bad part of modern consumer appliances is that they are largely giant computers with fewer mechanical parts to fail. They can be more reliable but when something breaks, it almost always requires replacing a main board that costs 25-50% of the replacement cost of the entire unit.
I've had two boards die on appliances this year. Fortunately, warranty coverage paid for the parts. So now I have a practically new refrigerator and furnace. At least until they fail again in 3-5 years.
The old fridge had much smaller usable volume inside. Modern insulation allows for thinner walls which increases capacity. Same for modern ovens.
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Miele did the best advertising ever, and I believe it even got a news story. A woman had been using their washer for 25years and Miele reached out and asked if she wanted a new one for free, for no other reason than to upgrade. Iirc she declined as the one she had worked perfectly. I have a vacuum from them, a cheap model, been working for 12 years so far. It’s probably the only appliance brand I would trust, even if I’m sure they have bad stories too.
I got another way of looking at it: it's not worth it having appliances that last 20 years, because in that time the tech itself can and does improve a lot.
Ready example is my aunt: a very good and expensive Miele washing machine, that was made to last as things were before. But now 10 years have elapsed and modern washers come with bigger drums, much lower noises, optimized water and electricity usages, and more effective washing patterns.
But she's stuck with her old and trusty one, because she feels that it's working "like new". And she's not wrong, it works well, so it became a sort of a "golden cuff" so to speak (not knowing any better metaphor). So good and expensive, that now getting rid of it for a new one feels like a waste of money for not much gain.
She’s not stuck with her appliance unless she has FOMO anxiety, she paid for her appliance once and if it’s still working then all is good. Marginal improvements don’t justify buying the same thing over and over.
Counterpoint: some appliances reach "good enough" status and the only "improvements" are cost-cutting that makes them more fragile or less reliable.
My friend has a microwave from the late 70s. The time/power are set by turning knobs - no fiddling with a bunch of buttons and modes - the turntable is metal so it can't break. The only thing I would consider missing is a popcorn mode, not a big deal.
Edit: Another great example is toasters. Toasters have not gotten better in my lifetime and older toasters are probably more reliable than what I could buy today.
Inverter microwaves are a noticable improvement over regular microwaves. True variable power instead of time slicing means I can precisely heat up almost any food evenly all the way through.
I often want to set my microwave within 5 seconds for small items, so no knobs for me please. And I like having a delayed start option. Modes never happen without me asking for them.
Direct drive models are a little quieter. Modern drums are slightly larger. Many people live where there is plenty of water, so increasing water efficiency isn't very valuable. It's not worth increased fabric wear or energy consumption!
There isn't much gain. That's the point! She's got a device that's nice to use, repairable, is well-designed, and isn't serving her ads. She's fine! Really. If she wants a new washer, Miele washing machines hold value and can be resold.
She probably doesn't think about it, which is the real gift. She's free to think about literally anything else! I have an extension to the Vimes boot theory, where you don't even notice your boots when they're working like they're supposed to. Most of us aren't enlightened enough to notice and appreciate that our feet are dry. This reduced cognitive overhead increases capacity for creativity and play, which further amplifies the life outcomes of people buying cardboard-soled boots vs leather boots.
I have a similar dilemma with my car. I drive a 25-year old Lexus with a bizarre electrical glitch. The ABS sometimes goes off as you come to a stop, for no reason at all. It only ever happens below ~10mph, and only when decelerating gradually. Never happens under heavy braking. It's not a safety hazard, and honestly you get used to it. Yet, anyone who test drives this car will run for the hills because it feels spooky.
It's still a terrific car. Comfortable, well made, fast enough for all practical situations. Unusally low mileage for its age. An engine that's sought after in the tuner community. But, it's unsellable. I'm stuck with it, whether I like it or not.
The good news is that I like it. The funny news is that I took a new job that will move me to the Bay, and whatever my new employer is paying to move my car out there is definitely more than my car is worth.
Check your wheel speed sensors.
I've had 2 dealers and an independent mechanic check them, and they all swear the wheel speed sensors appear to be reading just fine. One dealer has a crusty old Lexus-specific diagnostic tool that indicated it may be the ABS control module, which is a part that hasn't been made in over a decade.
why not fix it?
Maytag/Whirlpool washing machines in the past 10 years come with nylon hubs instead of the metal hubs they used to have. The splines wear out quickly and you’ll need to replace it. Most people will just buy another machine.
We have a high end bosch (the absolute best model of the best brand the year we bought it), and it’s been wonky for three of the five years it has lasted so far, and now rubber noiseproofing is falling out and the racks are rusting through / breaking.
Definitely keep the old dishwasher till it dies.
(The bosch is quiet and cleans well, fwiw. The magic heat free drying minerals are nice. It’s a shame they’ll be in a landfill in a few years.)
That one is sunk cost, I think golden handcuffs are for highly compensated employment.
Sunk Cost is usually something we encourage people to avoid, but in the case of the capital infrastructure of your home, we have to factor depreciation. The aunt is not likely going to re-sell the washer for market value (like a car). It would be recycled when the new more high tech model comes in. A total loss.
Theoretically it would hold its value and there would be a secondary market. Then she'd pay for the upgrade and not an entirely new machine. I wonder if that's the case for Miele.
Do you really believe that a newer washer actually somehow makes clothes appreciably more clean? Quieter, perhaps, and maybe a little less water, but so much so that you'd ever notice if a persons clothes came out of a multi-decade old machine that's in good shape versus a new one, I would wager you'd never notice, and frankly every generation of machine I've owned, even the expensive ones manages to get worse, harder to repair, and last less and less time. If you've got something that works and doesn't require a dozen elves at some factory in Shanghai or Berlin to do ancient satanic rituals just to replace a knob or repair a switch, I think you'd be crazy to get rid of it.
> it's not worth it having appliances that last 20 years
Think John Deere tractors as well as adware refrigerators.
I wonder if those expensive fridges are any more serviceable. I'm guessing someone with $10k to spend on a fridge doesn't care how easy it is to fix because they'll never do it.
I'm not sure about that. The issue that I'm having is that if I could spend $10,000 and not have fridge issues for 10, 15, 20 years I might be tempted.
The problem is that there might be problems with the equipment or problems caused by the installer.
A few years ago, we ended up replacing a Sub-Zero fridge (27 years old) with another one because the repair bills were mounting. Because of the way the previous owner did the kitchen, using any other kind of fridge other than the 2' deep, 7' high kind would have involved remodeling. It wasn't quite $10k but it was close.
At our new house, we had a repairman fix the ice maker in our current fridge. It's 17 years old and could have come off the floor at Best Buy or Home Depot (NOT a Sub-Zero, in other words) but he recommended keeping it until it failed because the quality of current appliances is not as good.
Our water heater is going to need to be replaced because it's 17 years old and showing signs that it's getting too old. I want a heat pump water heater because the gas water heater is the only gas-powered appliance we have. Trying to assess reviews of heat pump water heaters and of the local plumbing companies is not fun.
>I'm not sure about that. The issue that I'm having is that if I could spend $10,000 and not have fridge issues for 10, 15, 20 years I might be tempted.
What kind of fridge issues are you having? I just buy a $1000 Miele/Liebherr and it's fine for 10+ years. 0 repairs.
> you can still find fridges in that price range today with a similar value proposition
Does anyone have examples of consumer fridges like this?
Is Liebherr not a thing in the US? At least in Europe all the Miele fridges are basically Liebherr with different interior setup and the Miele logo slapped on them. No smart things, unless you buy the smart box that you can attach, but otherwise they are quite reliable and solid.
sub-zero or thermadore maybe?
Parents have a sub-zero that’s over 20 years old and in good condition, no idea if the new stuff is as well built.
Miele still has a good reputation, and you’ll pay for it. https://www.mieleusa.com/category/1022129/refrigerators-and-...
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> rebrands of Chinese conglomerates
Eh, I've got a very reasonably priced Haier fridge that I've had no issues with at all. Maybe I'm just lucky, and it definitely helps that there's no built in ice maker or water dispenser (those things seem to break first) but it's lived longer than the refrigerators that the rest of my family have.
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.
Ours died with a “cannot communicate with board A” error. The wiring harness (yes, an irreplaceable harness) between A and B looked fine. We replaced boards A and B, which were half the price of the machine and not returnable. Same error code. We threw it out and got a Speed Queen.
Our Samsung fridge’s manual says it’ll automatically and silently mesh network with any Samsung TVs in range, use AI and hidden cameras to recognize what’s in the fridge and when we use it, then have the TV inject targeted ads into programming based on its findings.
We’ll never purchase another Samsung product.
I’m glad to have avoided it - when I moved from sharing with room-mates into my own place and had to buy new appliances, there had just been a spate of Samsung appliances literally randomly catching fire in the news. Those models have all been recalled but it put me right off.
Otherwise I might have considered them but steered well clear, and am very happy with the decision a decade later. Went Bosch for the washer and Electrolux for the fridge, had zero issues.
How long did it take to break?
Also, I'm wondering if any other manufacturer would make the crank and the drum from the same material. Wouldn't it be like $100 extra to make a stainless steel spider?
I can't recall, but I think it was about 7 years. Some will say that's an acceptable lifetime, but I think I did the math once, and estimated it was only a little less than laundromat pricing (less opportunity cost).
> stainless steel spider
like in Wild Wild West?
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.
We purchased a low-end LG OLED TV in 2022. A few months ago it started inserting LG text ads with a little bullseye at the bottom of the screen while watching OTA programs or using streaming apps. It wasn't clear how to remove them without stopping the programming or accidentally triggering some other ad display, which I didn't want to do. So the text ads sat there for 15 or 20 seconds before fading away.
It's the last LG TV we will ever buy.
LG tvs have ads now. In fact, there are no TVs that are ad free at all anymore. At least keeping them unplugged from the internet usually prevents the ads… for now. True dystopia.
Not true. Sony Android TVs can have all the ads disabled. Google disables voice input as a result, but otherwise I am ad free.
My LG TV got an update which started pushing ads. I had to take it off the internet and use a Chromecast instead. But I fear it's not long before products straight up refuse to function without an internet connection, or they have their own way to access the internet you can't disable.
> Currently I think we have LG TVs > no ads even on the TVs.
Um, have you needed to change anything for your LG TVs to not display ads?
Asking because modern LG TVs seem to display ads too. :(
Saying that because I was recently looking for a TV, and considered LG, but many people seem to be having regrets now due to ads being shown.
LG TVs do have some settings related to ads, but my solution was to just not connect it to the internet in the first place.
This. Parents bought LG OLED TV. It is absolutely lovely, has super nice picture. (not an ad!:D) I insisted they never connect it to network. Probably it would be usable on network cut off from internet, but there is high probability of some mistake. I wasnt sure what happens if it got out for just a tiny bit so decision was clear. We've seen zero ads there (except the standard-ads-iterrupted-by-actual-programming).
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.
> The problem is that we are running out of alternatives.
But why is that? HN told me that ads were just reserved for people who refused to “pay for the product”. By inference we must conclude that for-pay products shall not have ads on sheer principle. Where’s that smug scolding at now?
B-b-because you’re using it wrong, obviously! Samsung conglomerate won’t survive without the ads, comrade! Small indie company.
Love how whenever “YouTube doesn’t block sponsor ads natively even on premium” they shut up. Ads are a disgrace and should be removed everywhere.
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)
How are people still buying into the whole "voting with your wallet" crap?
Most people don't care and so don't vote with their wallet.
Also, people don't realize that sometimes it doesn't even matter
Enough people don't care, don't notice, or in the worst case, even when they do, if the companies band together and don't give people a choice, eventually they will cave and thats what i predict will happen here
In the future i suspect most people's homes will have ads, except for nerds who will have rooted their devices. and hopefully their moms.
A lot of people have gotten so used to their entire lives being saturated in ads that they don't even notice them anymore.
there are enough people who do care to matter. Sometimes we settle for not great answers, but there are generally options for those who care.
Buy commercial units rather than consumer ones.
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
Thank you for sharing this holy crap. I have this exact monitor and that popup drives me absolutely insane.
I'm always happy to hear this from people. I get maybe an email a month specifically about this post haha
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 had a Samsung phone a few years ago. It had the usual un-removable crap that Android phones have, but it wasn’t bad otherwise.
Mid range samsung phone here, great performance but even with their keyboard disabled on a non-rooted phone it still copies your clipboard on every copy/paste. I will be buying something else next time.
“Copies” meaning sends clipboard contents to Samsung? That’s not cool.
Haven't disassembled it yet so i don't know but when i turned on clipboard notifications i started getting two messages. One for my password manager and a second for the disabled branded keyboard.
I bought a pixel 6a and installed graphene os. I don't like their phones.
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.
When I bought my new fridge I told the sales guy I wanted the least features possible. "You don't want an in door ice maker" "How many of those have you seen that aren't broken" "not many. no through door window?" "I know there's milk in the fridge why do I need to see that there's milk in the fridge?" down and down the list. Eventually we settled on a very bare bones whilrpool french door. It's very simple. My previous fridge I could fix with a screwdriver and a piece of wire. These things push cold air from a compressor that lasts 50 years if it's not fucked with by electronics and some boxes that are all passive insulation. They were solved problems 30 years ago.
The speed queen washer that came with the house failed. The 30 year old lid switch literally fell apart. $10 on amazon next day. Took me 10 minutes and youtube to take the machine apart. It's meant to be serviced and I'm handy. I don't get engineers who won't try and fix their appliances. It's like a free weekend day entertainment for me.
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.
Only eight years for a dryer is definitely not pretty good in my mind. It's barely acceptable unless you have a huge family and are doing laundry daily. I had a low-end Capri (Sears house brand) that was 21 years old and still going strong when I moved away. It was serviced once, by me, to replace a fuse. If I'd paid twice as much and gotten only eight years out of one, I'd be furious.
Yeah-- I was thinking that 8 years isn't even broken-in. My old Sears dryer was 27 when I had to replace a pulley and a thermal fuse. It ran just like it was new after that. I left it with that house but, hopefully, it's still running today.
Sears (Kenmore) appliances from that era are manufactured by Whirlpool in the US.
The motor died on mine and they "didn't make it any more".
I tried to find something close and make custom gearing but it ended up being cheaper to get a new dryer.
> What is the advantage of an inductive stove?
That you can control temperature changes better than with a ceramic hob, on par with methane stoves.
> I think in Europe they work with 360 V
No, normal 230V (or 220V)
A few other advantages to induction:
1. Better air quality. You don't have combustion byproducts in the kitchen.
2. More efficient than both gas and conventional electric stoves.
3. Faster to heat than gas/conventional electric (due to the efficiency improvement)
4. Easier to clean (except for glass top stoves).
I've yet to own a full-on induction stove, but I do regularly use the 120V induction hot plates in my kitchen. In fact, I use them more than the gas stove that came with my house. I'm eagerly awaiting the day that I have a full induction stove.
I've had the full permanent install induction stoves and the portable ones. The in counter ones are massively better. They have much larger heated areas so you don't get heat only in the middle of larger pans. They also have a much higher top power so you can boil water incredibly fast.
But even the portable ones are preferable to gas imo.
There's also bascially nothing to break. It's a solid state device. Same general tech idea as the wireless iPhone chargers.
Actually, I was (partly) right. In Germany, they run with 400 V, I just googled it.
Never heard of this. I though 360 with 3 phases.
In most of Europe (which runs a shared grid), not just Germany, it's 230V between any two of the three wires and 400V on each line:
> For example, in countries with nominal 230 V power, the line voltage is 400 V and the phase voltage is 230 V. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-phase_electric_power
In the counter integrated induction simply gets connected with all three phases, which are available in-house anyways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...
Between phases, it is 400 V; between phase and neutral, 230 V. There are five "lines": three phases, one neutral and one ground.
3 phase is 380V
Three phase consumer induction stoves are approximately 0% of the consumer induction stove market.
My common model IKEA stove – rebranded Siemens or Electrolux – runs at ~400v (Northern Europe). I know because it broke and I almost poked at it, until I got spooked by the warning labels. It's on its own circuit. Not an expert but as far as I know, most houses in Western/Northern Europe have a three-prong stove/oven connection in the kitchen for a ~400v feed.
My understanding is that many of them can be wired as 1, 2 or 3 phase at least in Nordic countries, though admittedly the ones which allow 3 are somewhat rarer especially when looking at stove top-only models (not combined stove+oven).
As far as I can tell, there are a single digit number of municipalities on the planet where two phase power is available. Do you have more details on that I can read? There's not a ton of.info on Wikipedia and I'm interested to know more.
If you are asking about some stoves that can be installed that way, there is for example FÖRDELAKTIG from Ikea. The manual is at https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/manuals/foerdelaktig-induction-ho..., you can find the wiring options from page 13.
That is fascinating. I was unaware this existed.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I learned something new today!
Take a look at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... power grid. You have three lines of 230V between each pair, and you can connect appliances with either two or three of the lines, depending in their power needs.
That link isn't really a source for residential 3-phase power.
Almost every electrical network is 3 phase distribution, the matter under debate is if you bring every phase to each house, or if a phase reaches every third house.
Anecdotally I have never seen an electrical panel without three phases, but when I went looking it was like trying to find a source for the fact the sky is blue.
I'm pretty sure most of them just use a higher amp circuit. A 40 amp circuit at 230v is 9kW which is more than enough. I've also seen one particularly high end stove which used a battery to cover the extra power needed for the highest setting. Also means you could use it in a power outage.
No, they simply get connected with all three phases, which are available in-house anyway, with a standard 16A circuit breaker on each. That's what installed in our house and that's what I've seen in various holiday homes.
I can easily use all the power my largest induction burner gives me on a 240v outlet. I really want one of those battery boost units for my next big purchase.
Honestly just browning 4 chicken thighs at once is too much for 240v. (My gas range couldn't do any better!)
Good we have one. What a nice 0% we are.
Like I said, approximately.
They exist. But mostly they are not three phase.
It’s 400V in most of the world actually, but residential induction stoves are basically always single phase as far as I have ever seen.
I have a three-phase 'smeg'.
We have that particular model because it was literally the only induction cooktop on the market that would fit the existing hole in our stone worktop.
Quite a lot of them can be wired either one, two or three-phase when you look into their installation instructions, it's just that not that many houses have three-phase power and not many people are willing to pay to get that upgraded just for the hob.
nope. 3 phase is 400V
All inductive ranges pretty much use the same 2700 watt elements. In the US, you have to do a dedicated circuit (50 amp required but I had bigger wire pulled because of resistive heating and sag potential with some ovens triggering circuit breakers).
Inductive tends to be much more efficient than gas (which is what I have) and vastly more efficient than straight electric.
Speed Queen for washing machines. Bosch for dishwashers.
Bosch 800-series dishwashers are amazing. I’ve bought one at every house I’ve lived at, regardless of what’s installed. They’re quiet, they get everything clean no matter what, and they dry without a heating element, and without popping the front open.
Re: washing machines, I tentatively put forward LG. I bought one (and matching dryer) in the early 2010s, and it lasted 7 years before needing me to replace some balancing parts. It lasted years after that. Hoping for the same on this next move in a few days (yes, I move a lot).
My parents have a Bosch 800 series dishwasher and it is excellent... frickin pricey for a dishwasher though (about 3x more than the cheap GE one in my place)
You might want to reconsider Bosch (or be careful about which model you choose): https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-wont-connect-my-dis...
We’ve been pretty happy with the the Speed Queen set we bought a few years ago. No IoT crap.
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 parents are moving out of their house of ~50 years.
The garage fridge was in the house (as the kitchen one) when they moved in. The chest freezer in the basement moved with them in '77.
They have had at least three kitchen fridges in the time since the fridge got moved to the garage. I've lost track of the number of dishwashers. The current one was out of service for a few months, partially due to wifi/firmware issues. The super expensive oven clock doesn't work anymore, since it broke after the last time it was fixed for an $800 callout.
I can relate. Same for my parents. Washer and dryer still going strong after 30 years, same for the fridge which has been relegated to the basement since the paint has begun to chip. Microwave still works. And out of the three AC units they have, only one needed service. Maybe they are just exceptionally lucky compared to me. And these were not very expensive appliances for that time. I used to offer washers and dryers in rental properties for convenience, but their reliability has become so bad lately that it is not worth it.
They were likely the equivalent of $3k today. That's part of why these things don't last. Nobody wants to spend $3k on a fridge.
I bought a Samsung phone back in like 2014, and shortly after bought smartwatch to pair with it. A year later, Samsung released an update that removed the pairing functionality so my smartwatch could no longer pair. They did this in conjunction with releasing their own smartwatch and some proprietary pairing protocol.
I'm not a fan of vendor lock in, but their decision to retroactively remove functionality that I was depending on led me to never buy another Samsung product since.
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.
Yes, but good luck finding a way to integrate CEC with Home Assistant, or anything else for that matter. Even modern GPUs don't support it. You usually have to buy a USB dongle that MITMs the connection for a disgusting amount of money. It looks like Raspberry Pis support it, but then you have an SBC and its power source dangling off of your TV just to run a single lightweight daemon that may not even fit your use case. CEC is not designed for total control, and on many TVs it's even a bit flaky. I had to disable it on mine because misbehaving devices would randomly turn the TV off and on when I didn't want it.
ESPHome+HDMI breakout board. Just use a spare HDMI port to connect to your 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".
This nonsense keeps getting repeated over and over again for years now and I have yet to find a single documented case of it happening. You'd think that with all the attention, someone would've actually documented it by now.
Enough people connect their TV/smart devices willingly to the internet that there is no need for adversarial approaches like this (which are not trivial to set up - they'd need to maintain per-country partnerships with Wi-Fi hotspot providers, pay them and hope the ROI is worth it).
Hmm I thought I had read it on an article posted here at some point, I could be wrong.
I think it originated on Reddit and it's since been parroted here in the comments on basically every smart TV thread but I have yet to see actual evidence. It seems like a trivial theory to test - disconnect from your wifi or change its password, wait for ads to suddenly reappear on the TV (evidence it got a network connection from somewhere).
Similar FUD is being spread around HDMI's Ethernet channel; a way to carry network data over an HDMI cable. I have basically never seen it in the wild on any consumer device, but even if it were, it would still require the other device to cooperate and act as a switch/router to share its connection to the TV. Yet despite that every time smart TVs and privacy comes up someone mentions this.
Scroll up a bit, we at least have a first-person claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45741064
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 :).
With KDE Connect you can use your phone as a touchpad+keyboard. One less thing to get lost in the couch cushions ;)
I’m forgetful but it’s quite hard to lose an entire keyboard with integrated touch pad down the cushions.
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."
Do not create the Torment Nexus.
(<https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus>)
Until they start installing 5G modems in the things anyway. Or put a time bomb in the OS so the TV starts shutting down if it hasn't been connected to the internet after a week.
For a short while, I worked at one of Samsung subsidiaries on their TV firmware, mostly fixing Linux kernel bugs introduced by the product teams cannibalizing upstream features to serve their needs (including intentionally disabling reasonable kernel security measures that happened to be in their way). I've seen things, both technical and organizational, that led me to pledge never to give my money to that company, or have their devices connected to networks I care about. I don't trust any of it, if not due to evil intent, but just incompetence.
i would have thought "better the devil you know" here. The other manufacturers are probably doing similar shenanigans
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.
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 was out when they decided to change their authentication, with only two weeks notice, and (from what I read) incorrect documentation, causing it all to not work with HomeAssistant for a month [1].
[1] https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/133623#issueco...
> not directly connected to the Internet.
Hopefully you don't have a neighbor like me. I keep an open wifi channel. So far the only customer has been the neighbors samsung tv phoning home. I felt bad about that and blocked it. But wow are they aggressive trying to get that telemetry out.
If you're buying chips (other than Flash) made with cutting-edge semiconductor processes, your options are only Samsung and TSMC. How long will it take Samsung's foundries to start adding malicious hardware implants to their customers' designs?
Samsung makes great components and terrible appliances. Buy a monitor with a Samsung panel or a Samsung SSD and you'll be a happy camper. Buy a Samsung fridge or washing machine and your life will be hell.
> They make nice stuff.
Do they? I've never owned a Samsung phone, in large part because I was always turned off by reports that they liked to skin Android in annoying/lame ways. I have a Samsung fridge/freezer (old and not-smart), but the in-door ice maker has a design flaw that causes condensation to drip, freeze, and clog it, so we've given up on it and just make our own ice with regular old-school trays in the freezer.
I'm not going to say they make crap, but their stuff is... okay, I guess.
Samsung once sold a fantastic phone. It had a wonderful camera, a great 432 PPI OLED screen, a battery that could be swapped in seconds with no tools, a headphone jack, an SD card slot, NFC, optional wireless charging, USB 3.0, HDMI output over MHL, an IR emitter for shenanigans, heart rate and blood oxygen saturation sensors, and at 8.1mm thick it was also waterproof.
It was hackable, rootable, and it ran aftermarket ROMs like a dream.
It was the Galaxy S5, and it was released just over a decade ago.
Things have been headed downhill ever since.
I've had a few Samsung products over the years. The only one I haven't regretted is their SSDs, both internal and external. Those seem to be good. Everything else has been awful.
I'm also one of those who never buys Samsung. So when it came to a new NVMe, the main options were Samsung and WD, and I kept the track record by going with WD.
They make nice stuff? I’ve stopped buying samsung 10 years ago and even before then not a single device was decent (and I bought phones, screens, home appliances, a TV)
i have good memories of my Note 3. samsung was pretty cool back then. i bought some galaxy s 5 years ago for a lot of money, then it got splashed with water and died. stupid waste of money. i've had my current oppo for 3+ years and he's a trooper, and it was about half the price of a similar-spec samsung. samsung is overpriced shit.
>This guarantees I'll never buy a Samsung appliance.
I saw someone else’s Samsung TV with ads on the input select menu…
That was enough to pre-ban myself from any future Samsung appliance.
Even when they aren't loaded with ads, Samsung products are built to fail almost immediately. My Samsung vacuum has been a total piece of shit that's falling apart. I will never buy another Samsung product again.
Other than probably flash storage, there's never been a Samsung product that's ever been better than just throwing at least the equivalent amount of money in a fire pit and incinerating it. They've never sold an appliance appropriate even as a boat anchor, and I'm amazed at this point that people even consider buying their junk.
I would never buy a roku tv with its built in ads. Unfortunately my partner did that for me. Most people simply don't care about this kind of stuff. If it has the gleam of newness, hell the ads are kind of flashy I don't mind em at all!
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
There is no such thing as consumer GE products. They haven't existed for several decades. The name has been licensed to various brands in China, but the only thing actual GE made in it's last several decades (It suffered existence failure in 2024 after a series of spinoffs) is aircraft engines.
Anything sold as "GE" is just re-badged somebody else's crap, mostly Haier.
The dishwasher that came with my condo was GE, and when it stopped draining completely, I found the instruction manual, and it was mostly ads for other GE products. Ironically, I replaced it with a Samsung dishwasher with a clearer instruction manual and easy repair investigations.
Of course I am no longer inclined to purchase Samsung products based on this new info. I honestly think that if a company pushes an update that makes its product worse, they should be obligated to refund you 100% of the original purchase price.
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.
The one I have does not have a linear compressor. I replaced my fridge last year
GE's appliances business was sold to Haier of China in 2016
Some of the old US-based GE appliance factories and engineering offices are still operating though, but iirc fridges were the first to go straight overseas.
I think washing machines and dryers, maybe dishwashers, are still designed and manufactured in the US.
I’m boycotting all Samsung products permanently.
Their TVs and phones have terrible PWM and are bad for your eyes anyway.
I won't buy Sony TVs any more because of their software, because it started displaying ads on the home-screen.
It's Google TV, and I don't mind ads for content on the home screen. I use a bunch of streaming services, I might want to watch whatever's up there, that's not entirely incongruous. Then about a year after purchase we started getting ads for L'Oreal shampoo and other products. Nope.
Sony acted confused when I sent a support ticket, and eventually said "Oh, that's because it's Google TV, nothing we can do about it". I replied saying perhaps they had given too much control over their tv experience to a third party. I was able to activate "App Only Mode" to make them go away, but you lose a bunch of the features and have to disable it to get to the play store if you want to install anything else.
Pisses me off. I paid a couple of thousand dollars (AUD) for that tv, I shouldn't have advertising shoved in my face.
> 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.
> I'd expect that HDR would make it go from -50 to 150
That's not how HDR works. It expands the high range exclusively. So more like 0 to 1000 instead of 0 to 100.
Your approximation isn't really better than theirs.
It's true that you can't go below black, but SDR has extremely bad precision below 1 nit. HDR can accurately represent scenes at least 100x darker than SDR, in addition to bright spots at least 100x brighter. https://2.img-dpreview.com/files/p/TS940x940~forums/66687985...
You're right about how HDR should work. I'm reporting how my Samsung TV does work. It's terrible, and clearly a bug. There are many, many forum posts about "samsung hdr dark", often with random advice about adjusting the gamma, etc., that sounds like it should work but only helps a little bit.
You know, the ad they display on the home annoys me and I've never thought much about it. The prevalence of ads is so much that I think I already expected it there.
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).
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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.
I've used the built-in apps at a friend's house, and they were awful compared to the Apple TV versions. Everything was sluggish, like it was running on something without enough RAM and swapping out to an SD card. If I hadn't used anything else but that, or maybe the Dish Network DVR we had years ago, I'd probably think it's just fine. However, I have used something else, and it made the TV's own apps feel unbearable.
Imagine you're using a brand new maxed-out MacBook Pro, and someone hands you a 2013 HP laptop. The HP is... fine. It displays web pages, lets you load a word processor, and otherwise looks and acts like a laptop. If you hadn't ever used another computer, you probably wouldn't think anything of it.
BTW, I bet a Fire TV or various other options would be fine, too. I just don't have the personal experience to vouch for those. I'm not using this anecdote to shill Apple TV specifically, just to say that there are much better options than the built-in apps.
> 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.
>I let it connect to the internet but not any of my other LAN devices so it cant' snoop too much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition
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.
> "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.
win’s a win
Sounds like something an LLM would say.
Sounds like something Bender would say.
Everything does. That's the fucking problem.
What great insight! I can see how that would be frustrating - I know it bothers me too.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g
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 lieu of a donation I'll continue to not pay for ad-laden garbage.
Keep the bounty, but target the cause and not the effect. Who made the decision? Send a drone army once a month to spray paint their house with PSAs about consumer rights.
I recall Louis saying that some (or all?) solutions to these bounties cannot be revealed to the public due to being liable under DMCA circumvention measures. IANAL.
They can be revealed volunarily by the author, but FULU can't require or condone it. Because of the DMCA section 1201, trafficking in circumvention tools to violate digital locks is a felony punishable by 3-5 years in federal prison.
Yeah maybe this would be an exception since patching firmware to disable ads probably doesn't constitute circumventing digital locks, unless in the process of doing so they do.
Seems like they should release the fix on a Hong Kong server.
Doesn't it just affect US citizens?
The US has successfully bullied many countries around the world to adopt their same insane IP laws, at the cost of cancelling trade agreements with those countries if they don't comply. So no, it affects many countries.
In fact the first DeCSS trial was in Norway. Which started the whole internet wide civil disobedience campaign of mirroring it, putting it in haikus and t-shirts, etc.
Canada and Mexico too thanks to CUSMA.
In light of the ongoing trade war, I think Canada should just tear up this agreement.
I’d vote for that.
IANAA.
I would assume AdGuard or Pi-hole can do the job? No need for potentially unsafe firmware patches
> Include instructions for carrying out the functional method which are accessible and easily usable by a non-technical individual
Good luck for anyone to claim this bounty if that's one of the requirements. Does the fridge have any exposed ports at all that the average person could access without removing anything from the fridge?
It's also not clear in the bounty, if I add funds to the campaign and it gets fully funded, does that mean that software/hack will be released publicly? Or only to "backers"? It's not clear what the donation goes to, besides for the person who makes the hack to claim.
It helps to read into the personality and psychology of Louis Rossmann a bit, who is running this. He does component-level repairs of MacBooks, and entirely understands that custom firmware will likely require JTAG to flash the MCU.
FULU / Rossmann isn't handling the public release ... at all. They're worried that doing so would violate US law or at least cost a lot in court fees. They'd be super stoked if whoever made it released to to the public and absolutely not just to "backers".
What's the use if a non-technical individual can't apply the fix?
What's my donation gonna go to if the requirements are impossible to fulfill?
That website has never once paid out a bounty? hmm...
It looks to be a very new program.
While the fulu.org domain has been around for a long time, archive.org's oldest snapshot of bounties.fulu.org is from late last week.
This press release from Oct. 23rd agrees with archive.org's snapshot history: <https://fulu-foundation.ghost.io/repair-bounty-program/>.
Given the complexity of the tasks on offer, I'm unsurprised that zero of them have been completed in three days. Give those boffins some time, yeah?
I think the bounty aspect of it is incredibly new, the operator only released an announcement video a week or less ago.
accurate HN username
Can't stand behaviour like this.
I pay for Spotify and the app now shows paid suggestions (cough ads), to paying users. When you tap the ellipsis and choose "Not interested", it doesn't respond with "OK, we'll stop" but something like 'We'll show less of this'.
No, don't show less, I want you to not show it at all.
I switched away from Spotify a couple of years ago because of this, after having been a paying customer for around 10 years.
But I fear all such services will eventually succumb to this, given just how much more lucrative ads can be compared to subscriptions.
I did the same, and switched to Apple Music. Soon after that, Apple Music started injecting their F1 movie soundtrack into suggested music for me. There really is no escape from this. They haven't done it since, so at least it's not as bad as what Spotify does. If I come across a good offline music player for iOS I will probably cancel my Apple Music subscription.
Is suggested music not already an ad? Why not just listen to your library?
That's not an ad and sounds like a you problem. I've never had the F1 soundtrack being played on radio/random and I do listen to a lot of soundtracks.
Last time I checked the sky tv financials, subscription revenue outweighed advertising revenue about 10:1, is for every £30 subscription they took £3 in adverts.
I guess that's part of the sentiment for the current resurgence of physical media, specifically vinyl and CDs. It's refreshing to be able to just enjoy media without mega corporations tracking your listening habits or serving you ads.
Might seem funny for some more senior readers, but as somebody who almost exclusively only listened to music through MP3s and streaming, I found the included artwork and other goodies in vinyl / CDs to be incredible. Who would have known that my favorite albums often had not just album covers, but lyrics sheets and entire booklets filled with interesting trivia and additional artwork?
NFL RedZone, the ad-free premium tv channel now shows ads for sports betting
I imagine a modern hacker needs to basically shun all fo mainstream media to get away from such behavior. No Google, no Meta, no Microsoft, etc. apparently no Smart devices either.
my XM app with a paid subscription now has in-app popups advertising concerts. it sucks.
I will say that they’re typically concerts related to the channel I am on, but there is no world in which I want to attend live music, and of course there’s no way to tell them that. so I have to tolerate getting interrupted periodically despite already paying them.
I was also infuriated by this, so much so that I switched to TIDAL. Migrating was easy— I used their recommended webapp ti migrate all my playlists. Have been using TIDAL happily ever since. Never any popups or ads.
I unsubscribed from Spotify for this very reason.
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
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.
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...
This isn't just Samsung! Nearly all of them use ACR [1].
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-t...
Tizen was launched in 2012, not sure that would count as early 2000s! But I had colleagues who were also working with the Tizen team, and that's when I learned it'll never fly. Samsung just didn't have the software engineering mindset required for it.
The short version of the story is that I was working with one of the Samsung mobile engineering teams for Vodafone 360 (look it up). The other team was the Galaxy team.
Interesting, what about the Tizen team or ecosystem turned you away?
I used to have the watch, and was interested enough in the OS to work toward making personal apps for it.
What alternative phone manufacturer would you recommend as well, if you don't mind.
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?
Second hand Pixels which then get GrapheneOS installed on them (GrapheneOS doesn't support Google Wallet payments via NFC, which can be a deal-breaker for a lot of people).
iPhone. Android is so crap laden.
i've been using android since the iphone 4s (i had one of those and thought it was very cool). i wanted freedom. but these days i'm thinking of changing up, back to iphone, and getting a mac laptop to replace this old thinkpad ashtray. i won't ash on the mac, at least not to start with. i'm tired of the crap. ubuntu is crap. why am i using a janky kde connect? i'd like to try xcode and other apple stuff. seriously, i think apple is going to start getting more marketshare in both phones and computers. i think people are tired of google and microsoft, and linux desktop distros. ps. i'm too old to care about pc gaming. i have a playstation for that.
> 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.
I bought a Samsung notebook in ~2008. No crapware! Nice and small, it survived long beyond the guaranty date.
My cellphone decided to die last month. It was near retirement, but still working until it didn't. I bought a Samsung phone. First it asked twice if I wanted to share all my life with Google (using some dark patterns) and then it asked twice if I wanted to share all my life with Samsung (using more dark patterns). (After that, I installed WhatsApp, so I'm not sure I bothered.)
Next the phone offered to install the app from my carrier, TikTok and a ¿third? app-store. I didn't want them so in the screen with the offer I disabled the first and the other two were disabled by default. Anyway, I got TikTok and the other app for some reason! (I uninstalled them inmediately.)
I still get random notifications, like complaining that I'm using the phone too much. Or a notification that they upgraded something, restarted the phone and all apps notifications were disabled until I unlock it. (Lucky, I didn't miss any important urgent message.)
I quit buying Samsung when my phone rebooted into a forced update while I was using it with a customer and then fucking bricked itself.
Not to mention a new notification to accept the new Samsung terms and conditions every two weeks.
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.
> Smart devices tend to be cheap because the manufacturer is double-dipping by selling telemetry and advertising.
I wouldn't call a "$1,899 to $3,499" fridge cheap.
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:
Please drink a verification can.
(<https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2714117-mountain-dew-twitch-...>)
Millions of people sit through minutes of the worst ads I've ever seen to watch mr beast exploit homeless people. We're boned.
How does anyone watch youtube these days? I wouldn't mind seeing an ad or even 2, but it feels like youtube is singling me out for special treatment. I'm not going to watch anything if i'm scared a 30 second ad will interrupt the video.
I subscribe. I earn a decent amount working in tech, I’m more than happy to pay for content.
Use Firefox or Zen browser with uBlock Origin. I never see ads on Youtube anymore.
Sprinkle some SponsorBlock on top and you're golden.
i use the rss feed of the channels i am subscribed to and download the videos i want to watch with yt-dlp. i may browse the homepage every so often but i just copy the links and download them.
Pay for it, no YT ads in many, many years for me
It might be coincidence, but I've noticed the ads get slightly less obnoxious if I religiously abandon the video and close the browser tab any time the ad is more than 10 seconds long and unskippable. I'm sure they're monitoring closely to see what people will and won't tolerate.
We noticed you have Coca-Cola in your refrigerator... please enjoy this Pepsi ad and this QR code for 25% off your next purchase.
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.
Even the unnecessary microcontrollers in modern devices irk me. A fridge does not need a microcontroller. (My issue is primarily repairability - discrete components can be sourced and replaced, microcontrollers with the correct programming usually cannot.)
Or import one yourself
Neither. In a world where everyone is trying to be more eco conscious, it seems like a joke that manufacturers are slapping screens on the most menial of things.
It's probably work like IMDb does on your phone. All ads are piped through the same domain as useful data.
“Looks like you have an ad-blocker. Disable it to reactivate cooling.”
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?
Until it streams audio
Out comes the screwdriver...
This is why I have so few 'smart' devices in my life. It is obvious that all of these devices are predatory. They start off 'helpful' and 'useful' and then turn malicious when you can't easily replace them. Lock-in bait and switch should be illegal.
Or they are neutered by a software update, or stop working when the company shuts down the servers that make them work.
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.
It sounds defective. Return it.
Of course they would do this. They did this with their top of the line 4k tvs when they first came out. Everything was great, their OS and such worked wonderfully then they started to inject ads for gamefly into notifications and it went downhill from there. Ads in a 200 dollar tv I understand. Ads on a 5 thousand dollar tv? Absolutely unacceptable.
I know it's not your intention, but it does illustrate another divide between rich and poor. I guess some would say they'd rather a cheap TV with ads over no TV, but I imagine TV companies could still make an affordable TV without ads if mandated to remove ads. They just choose the ad route for more profit.
Paying more doesn’t guarentee cutting out the adverts.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
it is legal to kill for money as long as it is indirect enough
Why do you think there is infinite economic growth in ads???
Ads is just part of strategy.
Ads + subscription ($18 for heated seats in BMW, anyone?) + optional accessories and you can squeeze 20% more revenue.
That's fine, but you can't squeeze infinite growth!
Why do you address us as if we collectively went down to the town center and three dozen times in a row and decided on the same thing by consensus? For most of us this was shoved down our throats by sheer force of violence. And why always this oh shucks apologia about the “business model” that they are supposedly forced to adapt? No, this fridge already costs a lot of money. The ads don’t have to be recouping losses. They could just be for more profit.
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.
And a general lack of competition. You only buy fridges from a few brands after all.
When you get downvoted for making the obvious statement that you have to maximize profits as a capitalist entity, well, you know you’re in a venture capital forum.
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).
> Why is this the best business model we can collectively execute on?
Attention is the ultimate resource.
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.
Who said anything about the best? It’s the strategy that makes most revenue in the shortest amount of time.
The execs will receive their bonuses in two years and then move to the next company to grift again, and again, until they retire.
It’s so sad. Smart devices were meant to make life easier. Now all they do is to be another platform for ads.
AI is going the same way.
In the end it’s always going to be ads. Is just sad.
Adverts are a cancer. They infect and destroy everything.
HN loves them as the majority work or want to work for advertising firms.
integrated 21.5- or 32-inch (depending on the model) screen
I don't want a fridge with a screen or any connections except power. All it needs to do is keep my food cold. I've had others very surprised to see my house containing mostly mid-century dumb appliances. I deal with enough problems caused by software at work, to know better than to bring that hassle home.
Off-topic-ish: I've got a TCL Smart TV that, by default, runs Google TV (which, to my understanding, is a rebranded newer version of Android TV). The default launcher / interface, which contains ads and has only minimal customisation options, can only be changed by installing an alternative launcher disabling some permissions via adb.
Having followed the instructions to do it, it's much nicer having beautiful background images (rather than ads for crappy TV shows and movies) and a cleaner interface with at least one less click required to get to the apps I want (ie. a better UX).
TCL TVs are not a particularly premium product, so I'm not too annoyed about having to go this little bit of effort to make it nicer. However, a $3,500 fridge seems like a premium-ish price, and so to also have ads on that feels incredibly tacky to the point it cheapens the product and the brand overall.
Don't enable smart TV mode. Dumb TV mode is still android, so you can install apps, but there are no ads.
Could you share a guide for how you did this? I've got a TCL TV, and it's constantly frustrating how it shows laggy ads.
I'll have to get back to you. I had to go through the process three or four times to get it to stick across reboots and not leave me with a useless TV just showing a black screen (I had a panic moment when that happened).
You can ask Perplexity, but this doesn't give the adb commands to disable the default launcher (which you need to do so that it doesn't override what the user has chosen upon reboot): https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-do-i-install-project-iv...
I should also mention: This may render some of the TV remote shortcut buttons useless. There's an app that's meant to help with this, but I've found it unreliable.
I'll find my notes tonight...
Not the GP, but I have a TCL 65C845. I've removed all the crap from it and installed a third-party launcher. I LOVE the result, both in terms of picture quality and usability. The UI is clean, snappy, functional and there's zero crap on the screen that I didn't deliberately put there.
Here are my notes:
Install FLauncher. Configure apps/panels/wallpaper. Using ADB TV (under “install”): Install a screen saver (Aerial Views), TV streaming apps, Plex, SmartTubeNext, f-droid, Mullvad etc.That's pretty much it. A bit fiddly but a one-time thing (I did this two years ago and have been using the TV daily). I keep auto-updates turned off and basically nothing ever breaks and there are no random regressions.
I previously did the same on an older TCL TV. The panel was not as nice and the CPU was slower but the result was also quite good (it was what convinced me to get the 65C845 with its larger screen, better panel and faster CPU).
I used to run a similar FLauncher-based setup on a NVidia Shield Pro, but the new setup is so nice that I don't use the Shield for TV anymore.
Another experiment I did was replicating this exact setup on a Chromecast (I think GA01919). That also worked well, though having a second device was a bit inconvenient in terms of remote controls and such.
P.S. Where I live I have FTTH; TV is delivered as MPEG transport streams over multicast. I don't have OTA broadcast TV or a cable box and so couldn't vouch for the ergonomics there.
Disable Internet access. An Internet-connected smart TV is one update away from a bricked device.
Sometimes I wonder if developers are exempt from responsibility much like a soldier for following orders
To be fair if you're gonna advertise to someone, people who buy $3500 fridges are ideal
Its only a matter of time until your toilet starts telling you where to get high fibre cereal at 20% off.
Truly, life imitates art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
LOL. But I'm sure I've seen worse things on 'Dragon's Den' (UK equivalent to 'Shark Tank').
Wasn't there a post last week about this company wanting to install cameras in your toilet?
I have the Samsung Frame TV (great TV btw) and decided I didn't want to pay the $5 / month to have curated art in the room and when Superman the movie came out a few months ago it was only displaying Superman comics on the screen. Was super annoying bc was subtle but not subtle enough. I uploaded family pics instead so I don't have that anymore but it was still pretty annoying. I have samsung washers / dryers / dishwasher etc all connected to the internet and I love the notifications when a load is done but I don't know how useful the data is... I assume data brokers are like, "Oh Aj uses his washing machine 7 times a month let's hit him with Tide ads", but I assume everyone uses the machine that much. I'm fine having my machines tell Samsung use bc it's normal usage (i think?)
If you are thinking of data - you have to think of meta data. Instead of how often you do laundry think more:
* number of adults in the house hold (people who have access to the account)
* when you are home
* opening fridge/doing laundry/etc. I have no idea if their app has an excuse to ask for location- but app location tracking would be the most valuable data
* even if you don’t share location- these things are on your network and any regular and simple network scanning would show when certain devices are home and we they are not home and what schedules they follow
This isn’t even very imaginative, just the basics really. I would not be surprised if you could guess the household size solely based on the number of times a fridge is opened in a day. You could at least determine between a person without a family vs. family- that’s useful for ads. Are these the fridges that have cameras in them ‘so you can see what you have while at the grocery store’? Throw some image detection in there and you now know brand targeting and if they cook regularly or eat out. A goldmine of data really.
I use home assistant and a smart plug to get notifications when the socket has less than 1w load for 5 mins -> washing machine finished. Maybe one of the best automations I have. And all local.
I've bought Frame as well because our 10 years old Philips tv got a nasty dead pixels bar mid screen that made watching tv really annoying - prob moisture got inside. I was curious how Samsung's ecosystem looks like in comparison to Apple's and tbh, I didn't expect the main hub app asking for location access way before even looking up for the devices.
But that was a hard no for me. I just left all of that alone - we have a ISP set-top box that comes with FTTH tv and few services so I don't need to log in anywhere else.
Mother has a hearing aid and she wanted to try Bluetooth connection - devices paired without mobile app but she couldn't lower volume down on tv nor on her device, even with aid's own app.
It still wasn't as bad as expected. I read some of the experiences people had where they couldn't even get into the home screen of tv before agreeing for network connection or login to some cloud services.
Fiends got some 4k Samsung for their new house - it comes with some AI features because of course it does. They said that they couldn't easily find picture controls and every show was automatically adjusted on brightness, saturation etc., making anything pain to watch.
They also got washing machine/dryer combo from Samsung as well - weeks after someone posted on our discord server video from Polish store where bunch of guys "hacked" similar smart-enabled machine and launched... youtube with that dancing "6 grams" cow clip. What a time to be alive.
Finally, manufacturer's can be liberated from the opressive existence of a world without advertising revenue
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?
which one?
Don't recall, sorry. I'm at work, so I can't check right now.
Horribly bad, and also bad precedent, but:
"The ads experience, though, seems to have improved somewhat from the earlier pilot testing in that users can use their fridge’s settings menu to opt out of seeing ads. If users set their Cover Screen to show integrated Art or Album themes, then the display won’t show ads."
So at least for now tech savvy, aware users can opt out. But I don't like where this is going.
Maybe we can tape cardboard over the screens?
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.
Galaxy S2 was the best phone I ever had. I think it was pure Android, if not, you had some minor apps from Samsung that you could've delete. I think I left the Samsung train right about S5 (which was supposed water proof, but it wasn't). It was just down fall from there. Samsung account, locked phone full with shitty apps that you couldn't remove (without rooting)... I don't think I'll ever have anything from Samsung in the near future
I had the original Galaxy S, and that was very much not pure Android, and no other Galaxy I've had has been (so presume the S2 wasn't either). Prior to Android, they had their own OS, and wanted to continue the UI/UX rather than changing to Android.
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.
Yesterday I was seriously thinking about aftermarket control boards startup for some of my appliances (mostly the AC that has disgustingly low performance because of eco modes). Seems that there will be one for fridges too.
> 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?"
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.
Ads for things it overheard you talking about recently.
Funny that they do that after the purchases have been made. Goes to show how much bundled services upset the user-manufacturer relationship, to the detriment of the user.
Using a service is an ongoing relationship, and relationships change over time, sometimes for the worse. This needs to be factored in as risk, every time someone makes a purchase that includes a service.
>>The box will change what it displays “every 10 seconds,” the publication said.
OT - This reminds me of the digital billboards on the highway that change before one has the chance to understand what it's advertising. I don't even have the chance to count the seconds before the ad changes much less see what it's advertising.
Soon there will be a subscription model to use certain features in the fridge! Spherical ice and fast cooling will cost $9.99 per month!
With the $15.00 per month Pro Chef subscription you can enable the freezer compartment.
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
I'd understand if the ads were subsidizing the purchase price significantly, but this still seems to be in line with their highest pricing.
Once they have paved the way and built the infrastructure, most fridges will come with some sort of display. Probably just a small status display. But these fridges will be much cheaper, subsidized by the Ad opportunities. It happened with most mainstream TVs making people expect cheap TVs to the point where they will dismiss a TV with "normal" price.
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.
How can smart be good? Can you give me a practical and real example of a benefit of a smart appliance? How can it be better than a regular appliance that does not get on your way?
Let me guess: now to operate a dishwasher I need to download and install a mobile app. And also regularly update the app and the firmware of the appliance, or maybe need a permanent internet connection to correctly operate. It' BS all the way down.
The only thing that companies are expecting from providing you a smart feature is to somehow monetize that on a regular basis and the easiest thing to do that is to either sell your data or locking you down to a fucking subscription.
Not mention the potential problems with devices being bricked due to failed software updates. And of course this whole thing of permanent connection: the manufacturer "sunsets" particular line because they decided it's time for their customers to get newer device. And you can't do anything because the device has a touch screen and proprietary software with no chances for opening it up due to patents and other "secrets".
Oh, well, forget all that bullshit please. I can see how that "smart" is utter nonsense no one possibly wants. If you need an app and Internet connection to operate a home appliance that's stupid, not smart. Crapware vendors really ruined it.
Instead, please imagine your dishwasher has a standardized management and observation API that's exposed on a LAN and can be consumed by your local IoT management software (e.g. Home Assistant). Nothing here should have any WAN connectivity, except for a tightly firewalled channel for out-of-home user communications.
I run dishwasher overnight (YMMV) and I have forgot to turn the dishwasher on more than once before going to bed. It would be nice if it would be able to either start on a ping from a home hub's cron if it's loaded, has detergent and locked. Or if it's not in a good state, when the home hub would sense I'm about to start my night routine it could notify me that I forgot to do something about the dishes.
Or consider a smart washing machine. Home hub can observe its state and home automation can actually remind you that you forgot to move the wet clothes to the dryer. Or, well, if we're considering advanced robotics, it could summon a service bot with appropriate manipulators to do it for me.
Or a smart kitchen stove. If the hub senses I'm going out and the stove or oven are running, it should bug the hell out of me before I'm out of the driveway.
That's what I mean when I say "smart". Unobtrusive, helpful home automation, doing what I actually want from it, not doing anything I don't explicitly want, designed to be reliable, private and fault-tolerant.
Smart home should be about dwellers convenience and automatically meeting their expectations (as defined by dwellers themselves), not a data siphoning mess with constant risk of security breaches, that becomes dysfunctional if someone else's computer (cloud) fails.
Forgive me, but this seems wildly naive.
No offense taken. What's naive and and why do you think so?
I totally recognize almost nothing of the sort is currently offered on consumer market. You need to have skills and time, or hire someone with skills and time, to make a system like that. It's already possible today though. And I don't see any reason why the situation has to remain bad like this forever.
I agree with you. The "smart" in "smart appliance" to me always indicates some bullshit I definitely don't want.
What's especially frustrating to me is that my appliances that should have a delay on them don't; specifically, my dryer and dishwasher should be able to delay until later in the evening when my electricity rates go down. Instead, I have to get them ready and press the button with my thumb like my parents did with their appliances 40 years ago.
But hey! These things can chew up gigabytes of bandwidth[0], so there's that.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/smarthome/comments/mn3p6c/lg_dryer_...
on a whim, I walked into a Lucid dealership and asked for a copy of their privacy policy as it relates to a purchased vehicle. the salesman told me “no” very firmly, so I left.
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.
> 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.
I’ve seen enough of these stories to know that I will never buy any Samsung product. They are a repeat offender.
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.
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?
It allows the refrigerator to run two different zones in terms of humidity. Evidently, it really does keep fruits and vegetables lasting longer.
Different humidities and it makes a big difference. Also less stress on each component and they have very long warranty’s so if they break it’s on them.
There is a better way... and stop calling me Shirley.
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Stopped buying Samsung phone because I couldn't disable some stupid assistant button with ai subscription on the last one. I'm really sad because Samsung was always a good brand to me
Wonder if you could stop this with Pihole?
I had to go to contortions with a tv from Samsung, but did manage to force all port 53 traffic to go via Pihole.
I believe this method may have been broken by Samsung/Google et al somehow though?
Not sure if that still even a thing but I remember reading here about plans of companies to include SIM module so "smart" devices could connect to the Internet without need for home network access. That would of course bypass solutions like Pi-hole
The world’s largest advertising company pushed DoH to get around pi holes.
There IS a market for non-internet-connected devices:
- fridges - toasters - TVs - home appliances - what-have-you
Whoever makes those, take my $€£¥
For everything else, there are crappier alternatives from all the consumer electronics OEMs
SO glad that I avoided buying that nice looking Samsung fridge.
Obviously, this is not a change aimed at enticing customers but instead expanding revenue streams. And its obvious that all western governments hand-wringing over green and efficient energy usage falls apart as long manufacturers like Samsung, AWS, Sony are allowed to waste network bandwidth and chew up consumer and industry energy supply on superfluous pointless fluff like adverts where they are not needed or welcome. It is proof again that Advertising is really about pushing messaging at people rather than selling anything. Samsung already lost me with removing expandable storage in premium phones. Now they have reached levels of avoid that will push me to any alternative that respects the customer's usage needs.
Why on earth does a fridge have a screen in the first place?
To change settings, others also have a camera inside the fridge so you can see on screen the contents without opening it.
Why don't they make part of the door with that magical see-through material my windows are made of ?
Glass is not a good thermal insulator, and is more expensive than plastic.
My windows are insulated. Is it more expensive than a screen/camera/electronics ?
I see that a insulated (triple layer) window around 100 euros [ https://www.leroymerlin.fr/produits/bauplaza-fenetre-en-pvc-... ]. Let's assume this retailer makes a 2x margin, so real cost is 50 euro.
A webcam on Aliexpress is around 5 euros. Throw in a microcontroller that's like 2 euros on aliexpress, a 10 euro screen and you still have a 30-ish euro budget for the actual door that's probably plastic (acrylic and something like PE ?). So yeah, probably more expensive.
But that doesn't means that doesn't exists ! We can see that all the time in supermarket, but I guess their needs are different.
How did we manage to figure out a less convenient interface than a door and dial?
What do you mean? It was always inconvenient for the manufacturer. How do you show ads on a dial anyway?
Samsung SSDs I remember, do they still make good ones? I won’t buy the washer and dryer from them again, and probably not the dishwasher even though for the price it has been good.
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.
You know, ads printed on toilet paper would be entertaining.
I worry about the thought process of the average consumer. Who exactly is buying these? How have smart fridges not been a colossal failure?
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.
Okay - so fridge is something that you buy, you put it on 3 degrees Celsius and you forget about it for the next 12 years. What exactly smartness gives?
Never bought a Samsung phone, TV or Fridge. Smart is now translating into "Ad-injection" in various appliances and I hope this backfires!
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)
Sounds like a terrible idea - I don't want my fridge to decide when and how to spend money.
Ordering refills does not need to involve any decisions. And you telling it which things to refill definitely isn't it making decisions.
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'd rather my fridge observe there are no apples, than to just assume N apples have been eaten. Especially relevant once you make if a family of 4, not an individual.
I don't think it's worth it myself, but here are some of the features of the Samsung Bespoke fridge that use wifi:
Notifications and Alerts: If the door is left open, or the fridge temperature is leaving safe temps, or the water filter needs changing, it can send a push notification to your phone. (Useful if something fails; or if a kid/guest leaves the fridge open by mistake).
Remote control and monitoring: You can use the camera to see the contents of the fridge. You can also adjust the temperature remotely. (Useful if you're at the grocery store and can't remember if you have milk?) It looks like they also have "AI" try to categorize these for you.
Built-in tablet: The touchscreen is basically a builtin tablet. You can use it to display photos (pulled from your online albums), show the weather, or control "smart home" stuff like playing some music on your speakers. I imagine you could also try to put recipes or cooking videos on there. You can also easily order groceries from it or add to your shopping list (with your voice).
I'd rather have a separate device for most of this, but I can understand the appeal, especially if you're not privacy-conscious.
> 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?".
> Yeah, which is easy to reason about because you're probably used to reason about stuff, sometimes even a lot.
I reason about the same amount as anyone else.
> 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?".
1) There is no such thing as the "average" person.
2) There is nothing special about you, I or anyone else. The fact is that everyone makes lots of irrational decisions every single day without thinking about it.
> I reason about the same amount as anyone else.
Being frugal, thinking about what you need and similar ways of thinking is not common in the real world, it's a small selection of any population that acts and reasons like that. I'm not sure what to tell except go out more in the world and interact with people outside your bubble, if this isn't obviously clear to you already.
> Being frugal, thinking about what you need and similar ways of thinking is not common in the real world, it's a small selection of any population that acts and reasons like that.
It often is. Often out of necessity.
You are making the mistake a lot software developers and other professionals often make. Is that they think rationally and others do not. This is because in one area they are forced to think about things rationally because otherwise something simply doesn't work. This translates poorly often to outside of their field because they are often making incorrect assumptions.
I have seen little evidence that professional in software are any more or less rational, frugal than any other group of people and often they will spend their money on absolute garbage. This is so prevalent there are memes about it online.
Moreover I've seen many Software Developers and people that surround them in tech (e.g. BA, Testers, Project Managers) fall for some of the most obvious bullshit.
> I'm not sure what to tell except go out more in the world and interact with people outside your bubble, if this isn't obviously clear to you already.
So, I could say the exact same thing to you. TBH, I actually think this is projection. The way you are talking is like the way I used to talk when I was younger and had less real world experience. It should give you pause that another person has a radically different opinion, is arguing against their own group (I am a dev) and I can back that up with a decent rationale as to why I believe it.
Your argument throughout this boils down to "I think this is true, because I think other people are dumb". Which is pure hubris.
> The way you are talking is like the way I used to talk when I was younger and had less real world experience.
It's incredible interesting, if anything else, that I feel the same about you and could have written exactly the same thing as you seem to lack real-world experience, and probably are a bit younger than me, judging by what you wrote.
But instead, probably better to stop here and acknowledge we won't get to anything interesting after all, so thank you for your time, and maybe see you around :)
> It's incredible interesting,
You don't think that.
> if anything else, that I feel the same about you and could have written exactly the same thing as you seem to lack real-world experience, and probably are a bit younger than me, judging by what you wrote.
IME, those who start claiming the other person lacks real world experience as an argument (like you did), is normally making up for the fact that they don't.
> But instead, probably better to stop here and acknowledge we won't get to anything interesting after all, so thank you for your time, and maybe see you around :)
We can't get to anything interesting because you ignore what you don't want to engage with. There were a huge number of presumptions you make without even realising it in your statements.
I also want to know why you think that developers are more rational? You never gave a rationale other than what boils down to "I think other people are dumb, and developers are smart". That was your entire argument.
How would a fridge know you are low on eggs?
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3pYZwol6Dc
Silicon Valley parodied smart fridges nearly a decade ago.
Their unbelievably poorly-designed icemakers are already a reason I'll never buy another Samsung fridge. Now this? Yikes.
One needs to be rally dumb to buy a smart fridge
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".
I actually checked the date to see if we were April first. Turns out it's pretty far away!
Are there any other fridge brands up to such nonsense? About to buy one.
Guessing anything without screen is reasonably safe
They’ve been doing this for years. The Galaxy S III (yes three) shipped with an indelible Pizza Hut bookmark.
Who will buy this? This is insane.
"You're going to have to PI-hole your refrigerator" wasn't on my 2025 bingo card.
Previous outrages:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45291107
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45262808
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292666
Who needs a smart fridge anyway? It cools, and annoys as hell when you leave it open.
Does a website exist that lists products only by companies who respect their customers?
about:blank
I disconnected the wifi from my fridge. Opened the back and unplugged it from the board
Samsung products are shipping with what feels dangerously close to malware these days
I upgraded my Samsung phone to the latest One Ui version and i've been having a frustrating time with it. Turns out months later I discovered they have changed the behaviour to work best for Right Handed users. I found a setting that allowed me to flip that and now i'm able to use my phone again.
I got smart appliances not a single one is connected to the internet and never will.
Can’t wait until I get those Lightspeed briefs adverts transmitted into my sleep.
Smart fridge. Get a life.
The backlash from this doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet so here we go!
Every frog will be boiled. Remember this when you argue “oh but it will still be possible to sideload via adb” “oh but you can turn it off” “oh but you only need it on the first run” “at least they don’t…”
You won’t be able to. It will be mandatory. They will do it. If you give these companies an inch, they’ll take a mile.
The moment they don’t actively work entirely aligned with your interests, they work against you.
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.
Way to punish your customers for paying you more.
I know it's a trope, but this is the absolute textbook definition of enshittification.
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. "
The idea of paying for a $2k fridge that has a $30* android board running a large screen is just absurd to me. Not only was this kind of enshittification almost a given, but we all know how well manufacturers update devices like this. Security issues aside, you just know that the software is going to slowly rot (Think: Widget to show tweets before Twitter closed the API down).
If you feel so inclined to have a touch screen on your fridge then you'd be better off getting some random tablet and sticking it to the fridge.
I _love_ my home automation/smart house devices but I wouldn't touch one of these with a 10ft pole.
* That might be a bit high
Your smart appliances are my opportunity
Where is Gilfoyle when we need him so much?
Richard Stallman was onto something.
Zero chance I'll purchasing any household device from Samsung. Not with all the crapware and spyware they pile onto their systems. Zero chance I'd purchase a household appliance with a large screen. WTF would I want that for. More garbage annoying crap and more to go wrong. The never ending chimes about everything on our Mellie clothes dryer was annoying enough... (and oh it wants to connect to the WiFi? Good luck with that. Terrible menu UI. I'll never buy one of those again either).
I like to think in future there migh be Harry Tuttle like appliance repair vigilantes that come out and remove all this crap from home appliances. :-)
> The never ending chimes
Have you ever heard Samsung washing machine doing Franz Schubert's The Trout at the end of cycle? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TpRsLdKVAg
I had an old Samsung washing machine and it was annoying with chimes, maybe it was not Schubert or I never realized it.
I want to agree with you. But we said this about TVs and a bit later you couldn't buy a TV that wasn't giving you a "recommendations" feed or whatever.
Yes, it's just evil. I sure would not buy a Samsung TV laden with crap, I just will not do it. I run an old high-end commercial plasma display and otherwise watch video on dumb computer monitors or iPads. And yes I know, an iPad is far from a dumb device.
Honestly, stuff like this makes me want to leave my smart phone in the garage when I get home and have a single desktop linux box that is in a “computer room” hardwired and the house has no wifi or smart anything and every other screen goes into the trash.
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.
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.
I've never purchased a refrigerator in my life - every place I've lived in my adult life has been a rental where I wasn't the one picking the appliances. What happens when I'm looking for a place to live, and I find somewhere that meets my requirements, except that the landlord has this Samsung smart fridge in the kitchen - maybe they thought this was a selling point, like the landlord I had who put the fact that they had a Google Nest thermostat proudly in the apartment ad (I deliberately never gave it my WiFi password)?
boycotted for life. All products.
next step is they're gonna make ad-free version with an additional monthly fee
Bound to happen eventually...
They also offer Jian Yang's "AI" fridge from the Silicon Valley comedy show:
https://www.samsung.com/us/home-appliances/refrigerators/bes...
Samsung is one of these companies that are so consistently scummy that I outright refuse to buy any of their products. They are forever blacklisted.
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.
Neat, another brand I don't have to consider when purchasing appliances in the future. Saves me time at a glance!
As a human, I'm FUCKING TIRED OF ADS.
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.
Next up is the update that makes the refrigerator refuse to cool your food without an annual subscription. Oh, and the ads don't go away.
Iirc, Chris Whittle proposed this idea of refrigerator advertising in the 1980s. Seemed dystopian then. Ugh.
Enshitfication at its best.
Nope nope nope
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A lot of outrage in HN comments, but it's kinda ironic, because if you had to point at the single biggest concentration of people who built out surveillance capitalism and other facets of our digital dystopian future...
Maybe the people complaining are the ones whose employers don't even sell out people with third-party trackers on their Web site. But I see more than 3 people complaining.
Everyone here seems to hate on the idea of seeing ads on an appliance you purchased. I hate ads too!
But, let's consider the counterfactual. What if Samsung offered you a new fridge for free, as long as you were ok with passive ads?
I hate ads, but I'm not sure I would pass up a free fridge...those things are expensive!
(this is not even that unrealistic. Let's say you have a household of 3 and a fridge lasts 10 years. Meta makes about $200 per year per user solely from showing ads; that's $6000 over 10 years. If Samsung got as good as Meta is (which they likely won't), 6k is more than enough to cover the cost of giving a fridge away for free)
Are they going to lock the fridge for 30 seconds each time you want to open it so that they make sure you finish watching the ad?
Did they do it?
Did we get free TVs, free cars and free phones?
> What if Samsung offered you a new fridge for free, as long as you were ok with passive ads?
I'd still buy a normal fridge from a different vendor. There's absolutely no reason why fridge needs a display screen nor any "smart" features. And no ad deal would convince me because next thing that would come after this would be the obvious "watch ads to unlock the fridge".
Household appliances are meant to work for years - sure, now lifespan is way shorter than used to be but these aren't phones we're replacing every 3 years or so. The fridge we once had lasted 25 up until cooling unit failed and there was no way to replace it or fix.
I hope you rolled some really low bait here because if you really think like that then... I sincerely feel sorry for you.
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..
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.
That button will soon become "Show fewer ads" if it doesn't just get removed at all.
Just like how Youtube won't let you switch off Shorts, but will let you click "Show fewer" which lasts for a few weeks.
Samsung marketplace on the phone used to have this- now it's just 'don't show this again today' button.
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.
The simplest way is to not connect a refrigerator to the internet.
For now.
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.)