Yet another Hacker News

Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges

74 points nonfamous 1 hour ago 61 comments

9cb14c1ec0 33 minutes ago | parent

Meanwhile, my non-smart fridge continues to run just fine. Why do we need smart fridges? That was always a bad idea.

Finnucane 27 minutes ago | parent

But your non-smart fridge doesn't support surveillance capitalism or a subscription model! How will investors keep making money on you if you think you can just decide for yourself when you need to shop for food?

weli 25 minutes ago | parent

I see reasons to have smart features in a fridge. Reminding you what food is going to be bad soon. Letting you know a list of recipes you can do with what food you have. Hell even being able to see and set timers without having to take my phone out. What I cannot fathom is the fact that the module running those smart features is not separated and modular enough so that basic functions like refrigerating are not dependent on an entire Android stack running.

natnatenathan 19 minutes ago | parent

I cannot relate to this. The past 15 years have made me so tired of connected devices (and subscriptions) that simple products feel like a relief. Side note, I bought a great, magnetic timer for my daughter that we keep on the fridge for just a few dollars.

jcoder 15 minutes ago | parent

> Reminding you what food is going to be bad soon. Letting you know a list of recipes you can do with what food you have

I feel like this is what people say a smart fridge _could_ be good for, but can they even do that? From what I understand the most sophisticated ones can tell you if some specific items are in your fridge, and otherwise they just do basic shit like display photos and tell the weather.

Legend2440 14 minutes ago | parent

Right now, no. The technology just isn't there yet.

herrherrmann 6 minutes ago | parent

… and makers don’t have an incentive to even deliver such features, because people are already buying them?

simonask 11 minutes ago | parent

All of those features just seem so gimmicky, and I could never imagine myself actually relying on them. If you are a functioning adult, these things are barely convenient, and the novelty wears off very quickly.

I will take a solidly engineered fridge with a good energy usage profile every single time over some overengineered wifi-connected piece of crap.

WarmWash 8 minutes ago | parent

People pay 10-20% extra for food to be delivered to their door just for the convenience of only having to open a single app rather than call the take out place directly.

Never underestimate the value of convenience to people.

VulgarExigency 9 minutes ago | parent

> Reminding you what food is going to be bad soon. Letting you know a list of recipes you can do with what food you have.

How? Are there cameras inside the fridge that check best before dates, and what food is in there? Having a fridge that is actively spying on what I eat seems even worse.

2OEH8eoCRo0 8 minutes ago | parent

It's one of the tragedies of modern tech. We could make a time saving smart fridge but we end up with ads and data collection with a veneer of usefulness.

Legend2440 15 minutes ago | parent

The trouble is that 'smart fridges' turn out to be just a regular fridge with an android tablet on the front. Which is useless.

I would love a fridge with a camera inside and a smart enough AI to tell me (1. what's in the fridge (2. how long it's been there and (3. what I've eaten from it. Some companies have tried making this kind of fridge, but AFAIK they don't work very well.

anentropic 14 minutes ago | parent

Why not just open the door and have a look in the fridge?

Legend2440 14 minutes ago | parent

...while I'm at the grocery store on my way home from work?

juvvel 11 minutes ago | parent

1. Look in fridge before work 2. Add any missing items to shopping list 3. Reference said list on the way home from work

matsemann 7 minutes ago | parent

I'm biased working for an online grocer, but isn't the problem really that you are in a store making the decision instead of in your kitchen at home? Half the goods I buy anyways aren't in a fridge, so a smart fridge only solves parts of the problem.

Systemerror7A69 11 minutes ago | parent

Not the person you asked but I can answer that from my perspective:

I am always on the lookout to automatate as much boring, everyday tasks. A Smart Fridge like that would allow you to generate shopping lists and reduce food waste by alerting you to possible soon-to-be-spoiled food.

A bit like what roombas are doing for cleaning. You still need to do it yourself a bit, but they help.

Not necessary, not even a gamechanger but another neat home automation. Would be nice, sad to hear they don't work well.

oh_my_goodness 8 minutes ago | parent

That does nothing to solve my real problem, which is too little surveillance.

silon42 9 minutes ago | parent

Maybe they were testing spoiled food detection /s

LoganDark 6 minutes ago | parent

The trouble here is that this smart fridge put safety-critical features behind a single internet-connected piece of shit. Appliance manufacturers really need to take inspiration from automotive manufacturers in terms of redundancy and localizing failures.

pbkompasz 15 minutes ago | parent

We don't need this anti-innovation mindset.

deciduously 9 minutes ago | parent

I genuinely cant tell if this is sarcastic. Im all for innovation where its productive, but some things already just work.

jjulius 8 minutes ago | parent

There's innovation [nods head] and innovation [shakes head].[0] We've seen what kind of "innovation" "smart" fridges have been.

[0]https://youtu.be/OvUr00GPcIo?is=zSoGzA6fV49JTSpV

herrherrmann 7 minutes ago | parent

I think it’s at least equally important to be sceptical of bad ideas, in order to let good ideas win. From a consumer perspective, smart fridges are usually bad.

ModernMech 13 minutes ago | parent

You think smart fridges are bad, my wife bought this $300 "smart toothbrush" that I'm just like... facepalm. All it does is connect to an app and reminds you to brush your teeth or something. It's so dumb I'm just waiting for it to break.

someonebaggy 12 minutes ago | parent

Because the fridge company can make more money by displaying ads on your fridge, and consumers can save more money by buying the fridge with the ads and taping cardboard in front.

apercu 8 minutes ago | parent

Have any data that the savings are passed on to the consumer? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't see any modern, late-stage capitalism companies doing anything that actually benefits the consumer.

tacomagick 30 minutes ago | parent

Why is the fridge's cooling system is one with the smart features? They should be kept completely separate

ta988 18 minutes ago | parent

or at the very least go back to safe default when the computer part fails which is (should be) design 101. designing failsafe systems was one of the first thing we learned in engineering class (that was a while ago but still)...

wat10000 6 minutes ago | parent

The "smart" side has access to the temperature sensor for whatever reason. Then somebody notices that they could remove a component and save three cents per unit if they drive the compressor in software.

saadn92 27 minutes ago | parent

Maybe not everything needs to be smart.

deadbabe 22 minutes ago | parent

Few things are truly smart.

ta988 17 minutes ago | parent

Decidedly not the ones who approved the design of those fridges...

Scubabear68 27 minutes ago | parent

This is my fear on the car side, as smart features start leaking from isolated areas in automobiles into the larger CAN bus....

qmr 17 minutes ago | parent

Why do you own such a vehicle then?

You must not fear it that much.

_aavaa_ 15 minutes ago | parent

“Ahh, and yet to participate in society.”

This is a direction all manufacturers are going into, so there is little actual choice. And buying used is not a real solution; where do tomorrow’s used vehicles come from?

someonebaggy 11 minutes ago | parent

all cars made in the last 15 years do it

tobysmith568 9 minutes ago | parent

My car has two screens, one screen for things like showing the speed / the indicator lights and one screen for maps / music.

You can hard reset the latter one by holding down the home button for ten seconds, but while it turns back on the indicators don't function... even while driving

__sy__ 22 minutes ago | parent

i know it's maybe an unpopular thing to say to OEMs, but i do think some should adopt an open firmware stack to prevent post-discontinuation bricking and flex that somehow in their marketing. I'd buy that, especially for a larger appliance.

silon42 6 minutes ago | parent

There's a name for when they don't: e-waste.

Razengan 19 minutes ago | parent

Fridges with spyware.

Idiots who still laugh at "conspiracy theorists" deserve this shit upon them heh

sixothree 18 minutes ago | parent

I had a samsung fridge. Every year it would spoil all of the food inside of it. The temperature reading on the outside would say 35 (1.5 c) but the food inside would be warm and spoiled.

It only happened when it was particularly cold outside. I eventually figured out that there is an external temperature sensor that causes the fridge to stop cooling below a certain external temperature. And that space in the kitchen was particularly cold in the back. But I could never read it below 55, so I think the sensor was faulty.

But the reading on the front is what really annoyed me. I had to keep a thermometer inside the fridge so that I didn't accidentally eat food that felt cool enough but was bad.

This happened every year. I eventually gave it away for free, with a warning to the person.

ryukoposting 15 minutes ago | parent

What a profoundly idiotic way to design a smart fridge. Shame on Samsung for designing their product in such a way that this was even possible.

Granted, I think the very concept of a smart fridge is a bad idea no matter how you execute on it... but they still managed to take a bad idea and execute on it badly. Amazing.

sitkack 6 minutes ago | parent

Funny that so many people in this thread are arguing that a bad idea should also be engineered well. It was already a bad idea, so no it won't be. They are a package deal.

rkuska 14 minutes ago | parent

Gilfoyle's take on Smart Fridges: > This thing is addressing problems that don't exist. It's solutionism at its worst.

mystifyingpoi 5 minutes ago | parent

Well, they saved Pied Piper in the end. So maybe it was worth it :P

robrain 11 minutes ago | parent

Yesterday I learnt that Samsung has a Royal Warrant in the UK.

TIL that they really shouldn’t.

nekusar 4 minutes ago | parent

"Smart" is stupid. It's primarily just a way to tie subscription shit and advertisements, and lock in DRM (and laws protecting DRM) on what used to be perfectly fine hardware.

"Smart" that I can back is simple sensor acquisition over open protocols. I would appreciate being able to MONITOR my fridge/freezer/stove/oven/washer/dryer. Changing shit over those connections is not needed, nor wanted.