My washer/dryer has a microphone so it can hear the tones from LG support over the phone that tell it to play back its diagnostic code.
Kidding aside, the trust we put in the myriad of internet-connected devices with microphones in our spaces is mind-boggling. Even lightstrips and lightbulbs have microphones to sync with music, and often show up as open Bluetooth devices for setup each time the wall switch is turned on.
I thought that too, but experience had proven me otherwise. At a software firm, I have many colleagues who don't mind this at all. In fact, it's the opposite: I'm the one who is too paranoid about things like connecting a washing machine to the internet, or installing an app for everything.
I am playing with home automation, and one of the reasons i’m only using zigbee devices is that they have no outside network access. I have two wifi thermostats that I bought before, and one of these days I’m going to have to set up a firewall of some kind to block them from outside access.
I just want normal buttons and dials back. Not time-based capacitance buttons that take 5.02 seconds to activate, not 5.0 seconds; nor free-spinning encoder wheels that mandate you give it a jiggle before the washer does anything, even if it's already on the setting you want.
I want kachunk-a-chunk back first. Then we can decide if it needs smarts.
Most low end appliances have buttons and dials as the interface to the "will last long enough to not be available when it breaks" computer that the fancy touchscreen stuff uses.
If you're talking about the motorised control wheel things that old washing machines used to have, they went away largely because they are failure prone, and their failure modes can be bad (for instance in some machines if they fail while the machine is filling, well, it will just go on filling forever). The microcontrollers in modern machines can fail, to, but generally are easier to make fail safe.
As has been said already those can fail nuclear disaster style so I have no interest in having those back. Give me an ethernet port and a wifi interface (ideally supporting at least wifi 6 but ideally wifi 7 so it's not polluting the airwaves causing interference. It should also be able to be disabled if I want to use ethernet only) that has a locked down web interface exposed on one port with some standardized interface (is rest still what all the cool kids are using?) that exposes all the machine functions and lets me configure access credentials. The apps are spyware garbage that I'm sure are fine for some people but with local polling I can integrate this stuff into my home assistant setup and do all I would ever want with it and block the machine's external access. All these commodity manufacturers of household goods are trying to lock us into their software walled gardens to rip us off more/sell our information to advertisers and governments and that needs to be aggressively stopped imo.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 55.6 ms ] threadBut it it appears to be outgoing traffic ...
My washer/dryer has a microphone so it can hear the tones from LG support over the phone that tell it to play back its diagnostic code.
Kidding aside, the trust we put in the myriad of internet-connected devices with microphones in our spaces is mind-boggling. Even lightstrips and lightbulbs have microphones to sync with music, and often show up as open Bluetooth devices for setup each time the wall switch is turned on.
Nope. Connecting your washing machine to the internet isn't the act of a tech-savvy person.
I want kachunk-a-chunk back first. Then we can decide if it needs smarts.
There are washing machines without any screens, just old buttons. Also they are cheaper, I can see now in the store for just €270.
But looks like many people wants screens, apps and happily pay extra for washing machine with extra features.
Watching Sanctuary Moon? Fair enough, washing clothes is pretty boring.