Samsung has made garbage appliances for my entire life. A family member went through about 3 different samsung fridges before they swore them off for good. The compressor would routinely break after only a year or 2 of service.

I will never own a Samsung or LG appliance. They are built almost explicitly to force you to get a new one in a couple of years.

Then couple that with both companies trying to use weaselly legal maneuvers like putting the EULA that agrees to arbitration on the outside of a box and saying "If you open this box you agree to the EULA".

There's an old joke floating around if anyone remembers where it's from:

A tech enthusiast has the latest and greatest smartphones, voice assistants, and everything else cool and flashy. A programmer has a single inkjet printer from the 90s, and they keep a shotgun by their bedside in case it makes a noise.

I'm skeptical of Samsung after having two LCD monitors dies at approximately the same usage hours. I think they were victims of the 2000s capacitor plague.

My house came with Samsung front load washer and drier. They're not wonderful but they're still running for the 6 years I've lived here. I had to replace the drier drum after the rollers deteriorated and gouged out holes in the drum. Then I had to replace the rollers again after a year because I bought cheap rollers :(

>I am now eyeing my dishwasher very suspiciously.

Appliances with mandatory wi-fi is a bad trend. The mid-tier dishwasher from Bosch locks the Eco(nomy) energy saver cycle and delayed start functionality behind a smartphone app. This requires connecting the dishwasher to wi-fi and use the smartphone to create a Bosch online account. That's what the whole Jeff Geerling complaint video was all about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M_hmwBBPnc

A lot of devices have optional "smart" functionality. I don't think that's nearly as bad as devices actively connected to the internet.

Ugh, I've avoided connecting my TV to Wifi to avoid all "smart" crap but it does support some "wireless" display from Windows that seems to be local based and I do get periodic requests to connect to other devices (My conundrum now becomes, is the TV safer with or without remote connection/updates).

What you should have done is install a webcam, connect it to some SuperMarket AI App Api (tm) and supply your credit card info. Now you never have to worry about food anymore. :)

Yeah, my hot water heater has an app. I'm not happy about this.

IoT need standardized inter-connection APIs enforced on every participent. If you can defect to another supplier- and ecosystem and he can revive your device after a e.g. a "downdate"- the lock in effect disappears and the competition reappars.

A bimetallic strip thermostat with a ‘cool/off/heat’ mode switch and ‘on/off/auto’ for fan control is all anyone actually needs with a fixed speed compressor and generic furnace with a fixed speed fan.

If you have a fancy modulating furnace and variable speed compressor or a variable speed heat pump, a thermostat that uses a PID would work better.

There was a brief period before IoT turned to IoS, when the first manufacturers seemed to make an effort in implementation.

Similar to when printer stops printing black when color is gone.

ioT is nice but only for people who know how to make softwares.

That, plus blocking all updates from the 'smart' devices; in the last few years, I dont remember anything getting better from updates, everything is actually getting way worse.

I have a Sonos soundbar. It used to be nice. Now it automatically goes to sleep after a few minutes of tv inactivity. I now hate the device and the company.

My old M1 mbp used to feel super fast. A number of MacOs updates later it feels sluggish. I don't see anything better about MacOs of today vs. 3 years ago, literally NOTHING.

My apple tv now routinely drops airplay -- it used to work flawlessly.

Etc. etc. All those companies push shit updates to keep their existing engineering teams busy.

Imagine a lot of insulin gone to waste.

The Q in Samsung stands for software quality.

And the S stands for security.

Reminded me of the August incident where the freezers at multiple U.S. Department of Defense commissionaires were remotely triggered to enter into "defrost" mode and cooked all their refrigerated food overnight.

This holds for most things, actually.

As someone who is bad at tracking what food I have in there and how long I have to eat it until it spoils, I can see the use for some automation here and that would be complex enough for convenient updates to make sense. Similarly, when I'm at the store I don't always know if I still have enough of $perishable or if I should get more.

I however have zero trust in our tech industry making this work without abusing me at every possibility so I will never buy such a product.

I can imagine one good use: plotting graphs of inner temperature, configured set point, motor on/off status, door open/closed status, and power consumption. But that use case does not require having control of the fridge compressor...

...oddly enough:

  - it notifies if your kids (or spouse) have left the door open.
  - you can use as a tool to check if the power company (or the road maintenance one!) has managed to reconnect the power back (or cut it, as in literally)

  - Other than that not so much.

I do not disagree with your sentiment. We have had refrigerators for 100+ years [citation needed] after all. Still there are likely cases where it is useful. Looking in on elderly family members might include picking up things from the grocery store and having a list of staples needed might be an example. There are plenty of ways to deal with this but one might be a connected refrigerator.

Marketing demands products that sound awesomely cool and new and shiny and feature-laden.

Why should anyone care about stuff that happens after Sales has gotten the customer's money?

My non-Samsung fridge lets me change the temperature settings from my phone.

That’s why the compressor answers to software. How else would I change the temperature remotely if it didn‘t?

I find that the anti-smart device brigade among tech enthusiasts is very detached from the reality of what consumers want. The general public does demand smart features and they want them to work well.

The sin here isn’t that the fridge is smart, the sin is that bad software was pushed out.

My particular refrigerator also has a purposefully limited set of features. You’ll notice that real luxury brands like Sub-Zero don’t pack their refrigerators with crazy feature lists and touch screens. Their smart apps are basic and focus on essentials like “door left open” or “change filter” notifications and remote temperature adjustment. They don’t have complicated features like craft cocktail ice and even basic stuff like water dispensing is an optional extra (since it’s assumed that luxury clients may have a separate dedicated reverse osmosis and sparkling water machine for that). They don’t push out frequent updates and they keep their smart functions as modular components since it’s assumed that the refrigerator will remain installed permanently for decades (e.g., you can add a newer control system with touch screen and WiFi to your older Sub-Zero fridge).

It would be nice if non-luxury brands followed some of these philosophies a little more.

Fridge sellers dont want their product to be seen as commodities, because they can't charge a high margin on those type of products.

Does a relay with a thermocouple get you the cycles required for no-frost features? I agree that there should be adequate safeguards at every turn but its not like computerized control of fridge temperature doesn't make sense.

Because the temperature is adjusted and they want to be able to display the current temperature as well as the target on said display? And once you’ve done that, your bean counters will pressure you to shave the BOM.

Not saying it’s smart, just laying out a plausible sequence of events on how they reached that decision

A thermocouple won't drive a relay.