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.
> 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.
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.
Why not just attach a tablet to your fridge? Then you can easily upgrade and replace it over time. Maybe the fridge maker could integrate some internal sensors and let a generic tablet interface with them, if you want to? No need for some integrated "smart" (dumb) feature that bricks the fridge and fails at doing the basic job a fridge is supposed to do!
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.
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.
You break nothing, don't worry - I was taking about equipment failure or malfunction, not targeted attack. Like, your power brakes can fail but you can still brake. Power steering can fail but you can still steer. Hell, steering wheel can pop right off and the steering geometry should still try to relatively prefer the center (not always ideal, but like, better than going fully insane like a shopping cart wheel). My point is there's no single CPU executing the entire vehicle where any malfunction can spontaneously cause the entire vehicle to stop functioning so badly that it won't perform any of its duties. Sure an ECU could fail and not run the engine, but that won't make you lose the ability to brake or steer if it happens in the middle of a highway.
Right, I'm sure the fridge has the ability to set the temperature through the touchscreen or remotely but the inverter controlling the compressor should default to a medium setting when no commands (a specific temperature or an off command) are given by the computer. It would cost only a couple dollars to drop in a microcontroller between the computer and inverter to monitor for a periodic temperature command. No command after 1 hour? Set the inverter to cold and wait for further instruction.
I could see this being kinda annoying if you've told the fridge to be off (like in an unoccupied house) but it instead turns on because the computer has bricked itself but considering fridges usually have food in them for the majority of their lifespan, defaulting to cold is a fail-safe mode.
Fridges are one of the more critical home appliances. Sure, it's not going to be the end of the world if your beer fridge cuts out but hundreds of dollars of food is not something everyone can easily replace. EBT doesn't cover buying replacement food if it spoils. People also keep expensive prescriptions in fridges. You probably have at least two appliances for heating up food, a stove, oven, or microwave, such that you have some less convenient alternative available. But most people do not have an alternative fridge they can simply move all of their food to.
Yeah, this is what I'm talking about. The compressor should have its own system to regulate the temperature, not depend on some master control unit that also commands every other function of the fridge. Because if that master control unit gets so stuffed with functionality that a bug in one thing breaks everything else, you get hundreds of dollars of spoilage, yeah. For some families that's the difference between eating and not eating for days (or much longer).
I think what's happened here is the inverter does not have its own setting at all, it's controlled by a central computer, which in this case failed.
Maybe some fridges have cameras with object detection and can tell you what % your milk remains, but this one does not do any of that.
Features that are smart listed on the product page[1]:
Family Hub™ 21.5”: Family Hub™ keeps your family connected from anywhere; search recipes, share pictures, stream music, access YouTube and control your smart devices all from your the fridge* (*A WiFi connection and Samsung account required)
SmartThings Energy: SmartThings lets you monitor and manage your smart refrigerator's power usage; get energy saving tips and alerts to help lower your electric bill all from your phone.
Now Brief: The Now Brief provides a daily overview of information including the weather, your schedule and latest health data on your Family Hub ™screen, when it's not in use; customize your Now Brief dashboard using your favorite apps and widgets to get a quick glance of what's relevant to you.
Extremely uncompelling stuff. Now add in that it is probably beaming your usage habits for your ad profile, always listening for voice commands, and apparently will break into freezing mode, and I cannot imagine why anyone would even consider this. If they were giving them out for free or paying people to put in their house, their existence would make sense tp me. Now I've learned that n>1 people paid multiple thousands of dollars for this and I assume it is not the only model out there.
I'm not sure how any of that is actionable. I already know how to make my fridge more efficient - but if I knew how to get my kids to close the door instead of leaving it open while the pour their milk (on the other side of the kitchen) I'd do that.
I get mail from my utility that I use more electric than average. However that doesn't give me anything actionable to do about it. I don't need another nag about things I can't do anything about.
You’re only losing cold air, which has very little mass compared to what you’re actually storing in your fridge. The energy cost to re-chill the air in the unoccupied volume of your fridge can’t be that significant, I’d imagine.
It’s be an interesting experiment to put a temperature probe in something like a block of cheese, let it cool to the ambient fridge temperature, then open the fridge door for a few minutes and see if the temperature of the cheese even measurably changes over the next few hours or whatever amount of time.
I’m still on the fence about closing the door for a short task like pouring milk. My understanding from the physics of opening the door, you’re mostly already replacing all the air in the fridge with air from outside the fridge. So convection already did its job of robbing your fridge of cold. Closing the door to open it again a minute later just gives you a second convection inducing action for air that might have been trapped the first time.
I would love to see someone at the level of technology connections do a breakdown of the physics here, and where the likely crossover point point is for different kinds of fridges. My current (probably illformed) belief from the suction and imagined resulting air exchange of all the fridges I’ve lived with is that leaving the fridge open on the order of seconds is better than opening-closing-opening-closing in terms of cold loss.
"In theory but the benefit would be pretty negligible i think. Let's say for argument that most food is water and your fridge is 25% food and 75% air. The specific heat of air is 1 kJ/kgK, specific heat of water is 4.2 kJ/kgK. But also the density of air is 1.2kg/m3 and the density of water 1000kg/m3. Assume 1 m3 volume. So that would be 250kg food and 0.9 kg air. To change temp by 1C would take .9kJ for the air and 1050kJ for the food. So the air in a fridge holds a fraction of a percent of the total thermal mass of the contents. Whether or not that air changes temperature by a few degrees won't change things much at all. You would spend far more on balloons that you would save on energy."
The air exchanges in seconds, yes (as evidenced by the post-door-closing suction), but the air doesn't stop flowing through the fridge as soon as the air changes once, and the air enters warm and leaves cold, so (by conservation) heat is being robbed from internal surfaces. So you're still losing more heat by leaving the door open longer.
Here's a tip to save some electricity on the fridge: unplug all the smart stuff.
A fridge only uses a couple kWh a day and there's not much to optimize other than "keep the door closed" and "don't overfill it".
Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.
> Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.
Fundamentally due to product lifecycle expectations, I wouldn't even want that!
I hope a fridge will last 10+ years.
Unfortunately any SaaS/cloud-connected piece of hardware is going to have some combo of firmware/OS/security/app update deprecation well before 10 years is up. The last people I expect to maintain software that long is the maker of a fridge.
CalDAV has been a standard for nearly 20 years. This feature could be done in a way that doesn't require to to talk to their servers, you could just put in the URL for whatever calendar you already have.
Good thing it's still very easy to buy simple fridges that come with none of that crap. (Oh, cool, another huge Android tablet that's several versions behind latest and is a cracked door for red team agents to hack my house with and adtech to slurp up all of my refrigeration habits. I'LL BUY TWO!)
I can see why customers might want something like this though. We have a Skylight calendar in our house. It's just a big ass calendar. The software and service that Skylight provides makes it a VERY GOOD big ass calendar, but I can see some people thinking "i use my fridge all the time; why not just have a self-updating calendar there?". (Magnetic calendars on fridges are very popular.)
But, no, Samsung and LG literally sell this concept as doomscrolling as a service. So dumb. They look super tacky also. EVERY ultra high end fridge is literally two solid doors or designed to disappear behind closet doors. Nobody's staring at their fridge while pulling out their eggs and bacon for breakfast lol
Why does it have to be a camera? Surely there are other sensors in this age of untethered innovation that could apply. Give me a "smart nose" that will explain whether the unusual smell is coming from the vegetable drawer, dairy section, or no man's land in the back of the top shelf. Give me a top-of-the-line thermometer that can warn me if leftovers are going into the fridge too hot.
These sound useful but hard. Putting a tablet on the front sounds easy but adds no value. Guess which one they picked? Apparently people will still buy.
It would be nice if that was all they were, but evidently a software update can render the fridge unable to run, so it is clearly much more. These things have transitioned from IT to OT.
What they don't tell you: when the fridge door is closed the light turns off.
(yes HN this is a joke)
More seriously, in a previous job I did inventory/POS systems for pubs which would track the obvious things like "you got ten casks of beer delivered this morning and have sold 50 pints, at what point do you need to order more beer". It would genuinely be useful to have inventory tracking for fridges. At one point this would rely on barcodes, but machine vision should be good enough for now. The problem is, as with many smart things, it needs to be reliable and frictionless enough that it's better than just the Mark 1 Eyeball.
Also it's very difficult to trust if it might end up integrated into a purchase system. Does "you always have milk in the fridge" sound good? Yes. Is it going to be like "HP Instant Ink", a massive and slightly wasteful ripoff? Well, quite possibly.
This wouldn't work in today's environment because any engineering capacity won't be directed towards making the thing useful when Samsung or whoever can sell the inside of your fridge in return for "recommended products".
My idea of a smart fridge: a fridge with Zigbee Temp/Humidity sensor connected to my Home Assistant automation system that alerts me if things get out of whack.
My idea of a dumb fridge: a fridge that updates firmware, bricks itself, and lets all my food spoil.
Why do you want that? Generations of humans have existed just fine with modern refrigeration without any of these extra, what you would call features and I would call simple bullshit.
They have started trying it when the problem was much more difficult than it is now. I think a fridge that does this itinerary well is not too far away.
Yes! I've been thinking about placing a tiny camera in the fridge for such a long time. This is especially important if you have a summer house or another apartment — you never know/remember what is in the fridge.
Taking photos of the fridge is a solution, but then phones were too stupid until recently to be able to find those. Even know it's a mixed bag.
We live in a world of dumb devices that could be so much smarter.
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.
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.
My $150 "smart toothbrush" (some Oral B iO model) has accelerometers to track its head position and the app lets you know if you're not covering certain areas well enough. Since using it properly (i.e. checking the app and adjusting my brushing) I don't have to go to the hygienist as often.
As I said it showed me I was neglecting certain areas over time and fixing that saved me more than the price of the toothbrush in under a year.
But feel free to continue to disagree with it as a gimmick. In my experience most people that do this are some of the lucky people that could brush their teeth once a week with a stick and still have no dental trouble, meanwhile a small percentage of people seem to have to take great care of their teeth, avoid a vast array of food/drink, and still end up paying out thousands each year to a dentist. Genetics plays a big part in it and you don't get to pick your genes.
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.
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.
any instances of this in the wild? it seems like fridges are pretty cheap anyway and ones with smart features are more expensive? i don't think this a tv-like scenario.
They now require login for old.reddit.com. You can remove the subdomain and access the modern JS laden slop without an account unless they deem it 'Adult Content'
I'd love to text my fridge from the grocery store and ask it how much cheese is left. It's a good idea. It's just that these days, we're just not making the kind of company who can be trusted to implement it. Gotta fix that first.
Smart appliances just seem like a ticking time bomb.
I want my appliances to last far longer than devices like my phone or computer.
There is absolutely no way these manufacturers will continue updating them even close to as long as I want to own them. So then you're stuck with an insecure and functionally useless, bad looking (in my opinion) appliance. That you paid extra to own and see ads on.
"I want my appliances to last far longer than devices like my phone or computer."
... and hopefully be simple.
My washer and dryer (made in late 90s) are dirt simple inside, with parts readily available. I recently had to replace the belt in the dryer, and a water valve in the washer. It was a diy job, with the help of a few youtube videos.
My neighbor guest's car got stuck in their driveway recently when an electronic parking brake malfunctioned. It really feels like all the gadgetry is a step backwards.
I've had a wifi-connected[0] Samsung fridge for 6 years. A few connected features that I like but aren't life-changing:
- Reminders to change the ice/water filter get sent to my phone. There's an indicator light, but the phone notification is nice, too. The app also records when the filter was changed—useful to confirm that I'm "tasting" that the filter needs changed early.
- When we had a teenager living with us, getting remote notifications that the refrigerator door was left open probably saved us a few fridge-fulls of food.
Other than that, it's just a fridge that works reasonably well. My one complaint has nothing to do with smart features: about once per year I have to spend 5 mins to defrost the ice maker with a hairdryer. Just infrequent enough for me not to investigate the source of the problem.
[0] I don't say "smart" here because nothing's really smart/automated and it doesn't have a screen, speaker, microphone or camera. RF28R7201SR/AA if you're curious.
Those are undoubtedly useful features, I just question why they should need the cloud:
> - Reminders to change the ice/water filter get sent to my phone.
How do you deal with all your other maintenance tasks around the house? with other appliances? with your car? Why not use a central system, like a task/reminder app?
> - When we had a teenager living with us, getting remote notifications that the refrigerator door was left open probably saved us a few fridge-fulls of food.
I would understand a child leaving the door open but a teenager doing it that often is kind of wild? Regardless, wouldn't a reminder beep that starts when the door has been open for 5 minutes be better? Must everything be on your phone? It's not even actionable if you're not in the house, where you'd hear a local beep.
> Why not use a central system, like a task/reminder app?
I do. I have OCD. Redundant systems and being able to confirm things are key for me.
> I would understand a child leaving the door open but a teenager doing it that often is kind of wild?
Teens can be absent minded. You might be shocked by how common it is for families with teens to replace a set of forks that just disappeared one by one.
> wouldn't a reminder beep that starts when the door has been open for 5 minutes be better? Must everything be on your phone? It's not even actionable if you're not in the house, where you'd hear a local beep.
It does beep when opened too long.
Remote notifications are the point. They are actionable: when I get the notification, I shoot off a text "close the fridge".
Our fridge is a smart fridge, though it doesn't have a screen on it or anything like that, and the smart fridge capabilities can be easily removed (it's a pluggable module).
I like knowing if I (or someone visiting our house while we're gone) left one of the doors open or when it needs maintenance done on it.
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)...
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.
Driving the compressor with software is not intrinsically a problem, but critical functions have to be isolated to a minimal safe kernel that will always run, like the kernel space/user space distinction. Smart features can read and send messages to the minimal kernel, but should not themselves be in the critical loop. Boggles the mind that this is not standard practice.
I like how escalators gracefully degrade to stairs, and electric toothbrushes to regular toothbrushes. That a smart fridge can't act as a dumb fridge is absolutely ridiculous.
Escalator manufacturers actually don't recommend having people use stationary escalators as stairs, as they're potentially in a problem state and may experience additional failure and become very unsafe.
If you have an option of regular stairs or stalled escalators, use the stairs.
Ngl, I’d like to see a broken escalator failing more than being stairs. I don’t know if manufacturers tell that as an abundance of caution or if they even say that, but a broken escalator becoming a danger seems highly unlikely to me
Don't get me wrong, these kinds of things are very rare, and are extremely unlikely even with a stalled one. I'm not trying to suggest every stalled escalator is a death trap waiting to happen. If there's really no other option I'd probably feel fine using them as stairs. There's a lot of safety planning that goes into escalators.
But the thing is, you don't know what it's state is, and it's clearly not in the "everything is OK" state. At least if it's running you can guess the operator is intending for you to use it.
To add to it… I can’t find the video of it right now, but a while back I saw people taking a stopped escalator, and the escalator failing into an open hole essentially. Since then I’ve started following said recommendations on not using stopped escalators.
some numb skull product engineer at Samsung thought remotely controlling the temperature of freezer/fridge was a "must have" or "quick win". Or maybe engineer was feature-maxxing to pump the yearly eval.
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
I’ve been in a Rivian during two infotainment crashes. It’s scary but the car still drives. Everything not screen related worked, and you can just pull over like any other car breakdown.
They take this type of bug very seriously but obviously any platform will have bugs. It’s the legacy automakers I worry about, since their software has always been outdated crap and this problem needs the best in test automation
Having worked in software at a legacy car company (Mercedes specifically), I wouldn't actually be too worried about most of them either (note: in this regard specifically, I could certainly criticize plenty of other things). There's a lot of institutional discipline keeping the stability and operation of the driving stuff separate from the screen stuff.
It's not just the screen. Microchips and sloppy firmware are everywhere.
My Jeep Cherokee had a freakout one day: the power steering stopped working mid-drive, on the highway. I was 50 minutes from my house, had to turn around and drive back home (an exhausting exercise given that modern cars are not built to function without power steering). I got to the dealer, parked in the lot, turned the car off, wait 30 seconds, turn it back on, everything worked fine.
That never happened again, but once is enough to put somebody in a dangerous-to-life situation.
It's not just the infotainment system we should be worrying about. Most modern cars are now distributed computer systems.
Yes! Pretty much everything the driver touches is no longer directly controlling anything. THe brakes are anti-lock (electronic control can disconnect them). The steering depends on assist motors. The throttle is just a suggestion.
Even my rear-view mirror is a camera, and currently it has failed (shows matrix style drippy blue lines instead of a picture.
A relative recently bought an electric Renault. When you open the door and sit in it you are greeted by an annoying voice assistant talking to you (can be disabled at least). It's also got sound effects for everything, but you cannot throttle its charging speed and the charging status shown in the app is often delayed by hours.
There was a YouTube video of (I think) a Kia that was towed into a shop because it would not start on the side of the road. The reason for no-start turned out to be a failed backup camera module. So, the car stranded the owner because it could not communicate to the backup camera.
I also remember an incident where a rental car refused to start the engine because the driver made the mistake of parking it in an area without reception and it wouldn't start without phoning home to a server.
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.
People don't laugh at conspiracy theorists over claims that technology will continue to get more annoying. People don't even laugh at conspiracy theorists who claim the rich engage in sex trafficking. People laugh at them over the specifics of pizzagate, qanon, etc.
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.
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.
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.
In logic, "if not A, then not B" is equivalent to "if B, then A." That's what the contrapositive is - it has the same truth value as the original statement.
Perhaps I am being overly-literal here, but my failure is not one of logic.
Kinda unrelated: Propositional logic is one of those things I wish we taught everyone in middle school. It's not that complicated, but it's such a powerful thing to have in your literary/rhetorical tool belt. I think a lot of young math nerds and writing/reading nerds alike would have appreciated seeing their worlds collide like this.
There is SO much of this in IoT / smart / 2010s-2020s tech.
Recent household BS: music playing out of my thermostat.
Wife tried playing music out of Sonos, but the clunky app was laggy and had also signed her out of Spotify. No problem, you can also just play direct from Spotify app into Sonos speakers. She opens Spotify, selects "Living Room" and next thing you know our THERMOSTAT was playing music.
Neither of us know this was possible, neither of us enabled it, apparently it's existed for years but for some reason Saturday was the day that "Living Room" thermostat beat out "Living Room" Sonos in the Spotify sort order.
There were product managers on both sides of that decision to prioritize enabling such a stupid feature.
I'd pay for it to not be possible. I'd disable it on either/both ends if they had a toggle, which of course they don't. MVP baby.
> There were product managers on both sides of that decision to prioritize enabling such a stupid feature.
Probably not. And that is why it happened - nobody thought about this at all until everything working as designed fails.
That is the thermostat probably is an off the shelf tablet with a speaker that they put other things on to make it a thermostat - this is the obvious thing to do and a lot cheaper than making your own completely custom hardware for this job. The software on the thermostat is likewise off the shelf (probably android) which has spotify in the base install and nobody took it out. Then you set the thermostat to be in the living room - again because that is the obvious thing to do. Finally your wife plays music and spotify sees two devices in the living room and picks one - which happens to be the wrong one but they have no way to know that.
The above is entirely likely and at no point (until know when I point it out) has anybody thought of it.
"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.
Samsung smart appliances in general seem to occupy a similar place in the market to vehicles like the Chevy Traverse or Nissan Altima, where people with technical knowledge in that area know them to be absolute horrific maintenance and repair liabilities and yet the consumer base places them second to God.
Obviously the review of a brand-new device or vehicle with 100 miles on it is going to have a disconnect from the realities of 60k miles of rocky ownership but I remain baffled when people buy a 7 year old used V6 Traverse, a vehicle extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure, and if I question their decision I get a "the reviews were good!". It seems like journalistic malpractice to not retroactively update reviews with a warning when critical widespread shortcomings are found later in a products life.
People's algorithm for purchases is usually "what's the best bang for the buck where the name rings a bell".
I'm guilty of it as well, if forced to choose blindly I'd pick Sony over WMFSENSY. But I'm beggining to wonder, with the recent casualness with which brands lower quality, whether they'll be a generational change and people will start ignoring brands entirely.
I'm starting to change my mind myself. My last Nike shoes weren't even the same size/shape (apparently they make left and right shoes in different countries now). At that point might as well go for the knockoffs.
> if forced to choose blindly I'd pick Sony over WMFSENSY.
Only at the same price. If there's a big discount, I'm going to prefer the random letter jumble from China because it's probably a standard design that a lot of factories are producing because it works well enough.
The only reason I lean towards Sony all things being equal is because I know that Sony gets sued when things go wrong, and won't just drop the brand and close up shop like the random letter jumble.
Also I would prefer Sony if lead would be a problem somewhere in the thing I'm buying.
To be fair mentioning Nike is kind of a straw man here — unless being explicit with the model/style. They manufacturer to many different price points, more than an auto maker.
I'm not immune. I recently bought some New Balance shoes from Sheels, figuring I'd be getting reasonable quality footwear. Both sets had hole damn near worn through the soles and delamination in multiple locations after ~6 months of wearing them as an office worker who does no abnormal amount of walking or exercise in them. Come to find out their "non flagship" models are cheaply made garbage as opposed to the quintessential white leather model that costs, iirc, the upper $300 range and is made in America.
There's so many companies reputation-tarnishing themselves by doing this "we sell a lesser line thats actually terrible" thing. Why do you think I will now trust you with more money for an upgraded model? You've just made me skeptical of your brand entirely.
I've sworn off Bosch appliances after a 2 year fiasco of service calls with one of their dishwashers. The thing was still about $900 plus install. At what price point am I to believe it's not the worse-on-purpose line, as they cheapen the product every year. They seem to have models from $700 to $2000.
A bad $900 model sours me on gambling that the $1200, $1500 or $2000 model is the good one this year.
The Bosch 800 series dishwashers are god-tier, or at least they were as of 5 years ago, when I last bought one. I've had one in the last 3 houses, and went so far recently as to swap my new house's dishwasher (I think a Whirlpool something-or-other) with my old house's Bosch 800, because it was a cross-town move, and I could.
Seems like almost everything moderately priced has soles made of a extremely
lightweight, squishy soft plastic that neither has much traction nor any toughness — worse than cheap flip-flop material.
Shoe companies should be embarrassed to put their name on such crap, yet they try to pass it off as premium.
A more likely scenario is that display shoes of the same nominal size/model can be made in different factories, and when they are reboxed to be sold, they end up in a box from the wrong factory. Different factories make the same model but can have differences in processes so the shoes are noticeably different. Having left and right made in separate factories, much less countries, would be a total nightmare of inventory management.
One problem is that business forces keep turning brands into rugpulls.
After enough of this nonsense, brands are less of a reliable indicator.
Amazon pushed that to its inevitable endgame, where each product is a unique look-at-reviews situation. (and coincidentally the amazon advertising business is there while you run the product choosing guantlet)
Older brands have a motive to care for their reputation, because if people know *oldbrand* is bad. they will avoid *oldbrand* and it dies.
On the contrary, *insertanynonenglishnamebrand* (*newbrand*) doesn't need to have any care in the world. If the product is trash, they would replace the name next year, bonus points if they declare bankrupcy and don't pay their obligations.
> My last Nike shoes weren't even the same size/shape
This is something that frustrates me to no end. How are clothing item sizes not standardized yet?
For example, I recently went to buy new Jeans, so I went to the same store where I got my current Jeans, asked for a size 28, and tried it on. How is it possible that my size 28W Basic Straight Jeans from Fox fit me, while a pair that fits the exact same description is too small?
I later went to a different branch, and there I found another pair which fits the exact same description, and it did fit me!
I have encountered this type of thing inany places, like when buying shoes one of the employees at the store told me "We don't have this in size 42 in stock, but we do have 41 and our sizes are larger".
Imagine if you went to McMaster Carr and asked for an M3 screw, and being told "We are out of M3, but our M2.5 is larger so it should work for you"
Someone shopping for an M3 screw would not be interested it trying out a smaller one, but research has shown that people are interested in trying on a smaller size with clothes ;)
However, clothes are nearly impossible to simultaneously standardize and commoditize: people (and their feet) come in all shapes and sizes, so different brands in particular, but also different lines of those brands, will have different proportions.
As a tall guy, I hate that clothes keep growing in width with larger sizes, but rarely grow in length (pants/trousers included), but only because you can't get things without trying them on in multiple sizes.
If you do not understand why standardized sizes are not mandated or something similar, just look at any bespoke garment creation and all the variable measures being taken for a shirt, pants or jacket — just make realistic combination of all of them in different sizes, and you are looking at ~1000 "standard sizes" or more.
> extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure
The problem with this is it's a bit hard to put "well known" in a news article about a negative piece of news, because the manufacturers tend to threaten to sue you unless you have some kind of source or some kind of actual numbers. So this ends up just circulating as received wisdom within the car-knower community but not to the general public. Unless they get lucky with Reddit search results.
I noticed today that Autotrader.co.uk have recall warnings for certain cars, though.
This is fair. I should have been more explicit that my wonderment is how something that is gospel in the car guy/mechanic community has somehow completely avoided filtering into the greater consumer discussion with regards to catastrophic failure and reliability.
> I remain baffled when people buy a 7 year old used V6 Traverse, a vehicle extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure
I’m puzzled as well, buying a car that depreciates 60-70% in 7 years seems like a horrible idea, you could spend roughly the same on a Toyota Highlander or Honda Pilot and only face 30-40% depreciation after 7 years. This information is freely available if you google “[vehicle model] depreciation curve”.
Nissan (and Stellantis, Mitsubishi) decided to stop making better cars and focus almost exclusively on subprime lending, the rest of the story tells itself once you have that information.
> This information is freely available if you google “[vehicle model] depreciation curve”.
That's just one of those secrets that you need to know, though. It's like knowing to ignore the unemployment rate (in the vast majority of cases) and instead to look at the prime-age employment rate. People rarely think of something like that without being told.
Cars are also one of those things that can be an emotional purchase and people do weird things. I spent way more than I needed to in order to get the car I wanted and I wanted it because it's a cool vehicle that, when I squint, still fits my needs. It wasn't smart financially but I'm extremely happy I did it. My wife could not care less about a vehicle outside of it being ergonomic and not having a payment. We'll be looking at depreciation curves and the like during that exercise.
I bought a car that seemed cheap for what it was. Turns out is was unpopular because of the timing belt in oil. Can't say I've had any issue with it though (with basic maintenance) but it's only 8 years old.
> Can you possibly elaborate on the timing belt in oil? I’ve only known of dry timing belts or lubricated timing chains/gears
Ford's recently designed engines were designed with a timing belt internally that operated in an oil bath.
They are currently walking that decision back and attempting to make it look as if it wasn't planned obsolescence (dry cambelt engines or proper timing chains means that the engine would last almost longer than the person who bought it if they did the regular maintenance. A cambelt that cannot be changed because its internal means that there is a limit to how long the engine would last.)
Cheap and poor decision by a company not acting in good faith. Right up there with the globally popular Ford Ranger whose oil change needs to be completed in under 10 minutes because thats how long it takes the oil pump to drain residual oil and it has no self priming capability, so itll run dry and seize the engine despite the oil sump being full.
> That motor was durable, tested and approved, But... Europe said: You must adjust this and that for the new legislation, and the change made a little bit of gasoline to mix in the oil and reach the belt. Problem: Gasoline eats rubber over time, and the timing belt is made of rubber.
The surface-level problem, sure. The root cause is that the "engineers" (and I lose that term loosely) decided that running a rubber belt in an oil bath internal to the engine was a good idea.
It obviously isn't a good idea, even if you could guaranteed that petrol will never mix with the oil. In the best case scenario, when the belt starts degrading (because all belts degrade), you're throwing pieces of rubber into the oil pump.
Even in the best-case scenario, the effect of that design was to reduce the cap on engine life.
Just make sure that belt gets changed on time if not a bit before. Its unpopular because if that belt breaks before replacement the motor will self destruct and you can't put off the not insignificant cost of it.
Now interference engines detonating when the timing belt breaks isn't new, but putting a belt in a bath of dirty and burnt oil that makes it a mess and expensive to replace and basically impossible to inspect is pretty silly. A chain would not have had such problems and become an efficiency and running issue from a stretched chain instead of sudden and catastrophic failure of a broken belt.
It also has the problem of rubber belt pieced clogging up the oil system.
Its fine for people that get all the regular maintence and oil changes strictly on time. But not everyone does it so diligently. And if you buy it as a random used car you have no way of really knowing how good that belt is without a list of every oil and belt change and how hard they drove it.
My 2017 Altima has been great. Comfortable to drive, bluetooth connection that doesn't drive me crazy, space for passengers and cargo, manageable maintenance, I even use it to tow a small trailer with lawn equipment, no issues! I'm up to 190,000 mi with only minor repairs that I could do myself. I got my money's worth out of this one.
That said... I do avoid smart appliances, especially LG and Samsung. The additional features do not seem to add enough value to overcome the potential problems.
Must be the more recent models. My main complaint with my 2012 Altima is the sunroof drainage hoses leaking in the winter. I've had zero mechanical or electronics problems with it.
Those CVTs were fucking terrible for years. They were so bad that loads of them ended up on buy-here-pay-here lots after the transmission blew and the Altima is now widely known as the highway missile of choice for drivers with a credit score in the 400s and no insurance. You lucked out.
> yea, it's awesome, super smooth acceleration from stop to highway speed
TBH, I have heard that a small number of those JATCO transmissions didn't shit themselves soon after the warranty expired; congratulations :-)
I've got the exact transmission in a Renault SUV (2.5 NA petrol engine), and at 160000km the belt started jittering. Not noticeable to the passengers or driver, and no codes thrown up on the dashboard, but the OBD2 tool I use shows that the belt was, in fact, starting to fail.
If they get the fluid changed on time and drive like a granny I don't think they are that bad. But a lot of people overlook/skip the cvt fluid change and others drive them hard because "Wow CVT can pull pretty hard!"
I know atleast one dealership that never even mentioned a cvt fluid change despite the schedule for it being only 1000 miles away, but it was the last service before being paid off and if you don't come back and replace it on yoir own dime thats a potential new sale in 2 years.
The CVT is a steel belt though so that fluid should be replaced sooner rather than later because metal particles build up in oil. And at some point its not far from throwing a handful of sand inside of it and it will eat itself alive.
Interesting. I've never heard that about Altimas but I used to own one and it was hands down the worst vehicle I've ever owned. It had more issues in two years, including leaving me stranded multiple times in the middle of the night, than I've had in a decade with any other vehicles.
Some of that might just be bleed over from their non-smart devices. My dumb Samsung washer, monitor, etc have been great. And yes, part of my decision involves the ratings/reviews. They are point-in-time and wont catch an issue 5 years from now, but they will help you avoid models that have immediate issues.
I’ve taken to sharing this clip [1] with anybody expressing the kind consumer behavior you outline… once they’re done laughing I simply say “now replace wa’er with [insert item of debate]” if they’re still arguing with me I share this clip [2]…
Maybe cruel, but I haven't found a better way to get someone to realize the error of their ways… because logic has obviously failed them.
That doesn't seem very "clear" to me. The article you linked mentioned those were made to go into defrost mode (and it didn't mention any brand). Meanwhile the affected Samsung devices are located in Korea and Samsung admitted it was due to their firmware update.
Also I don't see how it's unfair to expect refrigerators that cost a grand to do their one job without firmware.
My guess is that the main culprit might be marketing. We underestimate how advertisement shown to us online can shape our reality.
Last I checked Samsung had the most engagement on Facebook just behind Netflix. This means that they are spending tons of money to put their products in front of their customers via social media marketing. Go out and ask any normies for the top 3 brands for electronics, especially that of home appliances, Samsung will definitely be up there somehow, because most people think that big brand = good. How do they know it's big? Well, you see them everywhere!
So I imagine that, "the reviews were good!" is just the surface. The truth is that they ignored all the writings on the wall. In the reality created by the constant exposure, the manufacturer is a big brand, thus they make good cars. Unless someone runs a counter advertisement to tell them about the critical problem the same amount of time or more than when they're shown the car whooshing through multiple scences sytlishly.
I've only ever bought one thing from Samsung, a small TV about 10 years ago which, it turns out, has a _variable audio lag_ bug; the audio lag changes seemingly at random, so impossible to compensate for. I can't imagine how that even _happens_. As a result of that experience, I'll never buy anything from Samsung again.
I would guess it had new 'features'. Certainly nothing that improved things for the consumer since 'keep food cool' isn't something you need to periodically revise (or have an internet connection for). Probably some combination of "new ToS so we can collect more data about customer" and "collect more things about customer we can sell on the third parties".
Sure but the infotainment/smart BS should be firewall off from the "keep the food cold" life safety part of the appliance.
Even Tesla which plays fast & loose with some things.. the car does not come to a halt if the infotainment/GPS/etc tablet reboots. It's VERY disconcerting as you have no speedometer, the car is eerily silent, etc.. but the car still drives.
Telsa answers to the NTSB. There are rules. A fridge? As long as it doesn't catch fire when you plug it in, it's 'let the market decide' sloppy, cheap, lazy products.
"2020s-era tech" is a bit late. An unnecessary and destructive home-appliance update is a big part of the comedy film Popstar, shot over a decade ago already.
Never owned a Samsung appliance, but I had a Samsung smart TV for about year. Worse piece of technology I have ever owned and threw it in the trash and got a Roku.
The lesson here is that technology doesn’t always move in a positive direction. “Primitive” technology (e.g. simpler ICs, electro-mechanical machines, purely mechanical machines) can often be far better than the “modern” solutions.
This extends all the way up to software. Be wary when someone pushes a modern replacement of a reliable and effective tool you already have.
Besides Samsung incompetence, I think smart fridges were probably solving the right problem (some sense of efficiency / time saving in grocery management) the wrong way (sensors/cameras/connected fridge).
It turns out that grocery stores with real time inventory on websites & pickup/delivery are a much better solution.
I have my weekly order I add my usuals to, and then add items to the cart all week as I noticed I am out/low while making dinner.
Need #1: we need a fridge.
Need #2: we need it to be smart
Need #3: we need it connected to internet
Need #4: we need it to be controlled by the seller.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 35.6 ms ] threadHow? 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.
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.
Remember this classic? https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
I could see this being kinda annoying if you've told the fridge to be off (like in an unoccupied house) but it instead turns on because the computer has bricked itself but considering fridges usually have food in them for the majority of their lifespan, defaulting to cold is a fail-safe mode.
Fridges are one of the more critical home appliances. Sure, it's not going to be the end of the world if your beer fridge cuts out but hundreds of dollars of food is not something everyone can easily replace. EBT doesn't cover buying replacement food if it spoils. People also keep expensive prescriptions in fridges. You probably have at least two appliances for heating up food, a stove, oven, or microwave, such that you have some less convenient alternative available. But most people do not have an alternative fridge they can simply move all of their food to.
I think what's happened here is the inverter does not have its own setting at all, it's controlled by a central computer, which in this case failed.
Features that are smart listed on the product page[1]:
Family Hub™ 21.5”: Family Hub™ keeps your family connected from anywhere; search recipes, share pictures, stream music, access YouTube and control your smart devices all from your the fridge* (*A WiFi connection and Samsung account required)
SmartThings Energy: SmartThings lets you monitor and manage your smart refrigerator's power usage; get energy saving tips and alerts to help lower your electric bill all from your phone.
Now Brief: The Now Brief provides a daily overview of information including the weather, your schedule and latest health data on your Family Hub ™screen, when it's not in use; customize your Now Brief dashboard using your favorite apps and widgets to get a quick glance of what's relevant to you.
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Samsung-30-cu-ft-Smart-French-Door-...
Extremely uncompelling stuff. Now add in that it is probably beaming your usage habits for your ad profile, always listening for voice commands, and apparently will break into freezing mode, and I cannot imagine why anyone would even consider this. If they were giving them out for free or paying people to put in their house, their existence would make sense tp me. Now I've learned that n>1 people paid multiple thousands of dollars for this and I assume it is not the only model out there.
I get mail from my utility that I use more electric than average. However that doesn't give me anything actionable to do about it. I don't need another nag about things I can't do anything about.
It’s be an interesting experiment to put a temperature probe in something like a block of cheese, let it cool to the ambient fridge temperature, then open the fridge door for a few minutes and see if the temperature of the cheese even measurably changes over the next few hours or whatever amount of time.
I would love to see someone at the level of technology connections do a breakdown of the physics here, and where the likely crossover point point is for different kinds of fridges. My current (probably illformed) belief from the suction and imagined resulting air exchange of all the fridges I’ve lived with is that leaving the fridge open on the order of seconds is better than opening-closing-opening-closing in terms of cold loss.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/1618mku/would...
Here's a tip to save some electricity on the fridge: unplug all the smart stuff.
A fridge only uses a couple kWh a day and there's not much to optimize other than "keep the door closed" and "don't overfill it".
Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.
Fundamentally due to product lifecycle expectations, I wouldn't even want that!
I hope a fridge will last 10+ years.
Unfortunately any SaaS/cloud-connected piece of hardware is going to have some combo of firmware/OS/security/app update deprecation well before 10 years is up. The last people I expect to maintain software that long is the maker of a fridge.
I can see why customers might want something like this though. We have a Skylight calendar in our house. It's just a big ass calendar. The software and service that Skylight provides makes it a VERY GOOD big ass calendar, but I can see some people thinking "i use my fridge all the time; why not just have a self-updating calendar there?". (Magnetic calendars on fridges are very popular.)
But, no, Samsung and LG literally sell this concept as doomscrolling as a service. So dumb. They look super tacky also. EVERY ultra high end fridge is literally two solid doors or designed to disappear behind closet doors. Nobody's staring at their fridge while pulling out their eggs and bacon for breakfast lol
What they don't tell you: when the fridge door is closed the light turns off.
(yes HN this is a joke)
More seriously, in a previous job I did inventory/POS systems for pubs which would track the obvious things like "you got ten casks of beer delivered this morning and have sold 50 pints, at what point do you need to order more beer". It would genuinely be useful to have inventory tracking for fridges. At one point this would rely on barcodes, but machine vision should be good enough for now. The problem is, as with many smart things, it needs to be reliable and frictionless enough that it's better than just the Mark 1 Eyeball.
Also it's very difficult to trust if it might end up integrated into a purchase system. Does "you always have milk in the fridge" sound good? Yes. Is it going to be like "HP Instant Ink", a massive and slightly wasteful ripoff? Well, quite possibly.
My idea of a dumb fridge: a fridge that updates firmware, bricks itself, and lets all my food spoil.
Taking photos of the fridge is a solution, but then phones were too stupid until recently to be able to find those. Even know it's a mixed bag.
We live in a world of dumb devices that could be so much smarter.
[0]https://youtu.be/OvUr00GPcIo?is=zSoGzA6fV49JTSpV
My $150 "smart toothbrush" (some Oral B iO model) has accelerometers to track its head position and the app lets you know if you're not covering certain areas well enough. Since using it properly (i.e. checking the app and adjusting my brushing) I don't have to go to the hygienist as often.
https://www.oralb.co.uk/en-gb/product-collections/oral-b-app for an example.
As I said it showed me I was neglecting certain areas over time and fixing that saved me more than the price of the toothbrush in under a year.
But feel free to continue to disagree with it as a gimmick. In my experience most people that do this are some of the lucky people that could brush their teeth once a week with a stick and still have no dental trouble, meanwhile a small percentage of people seem to have to take great care of their teeth, avoid a vast array of food/drink, and still end up paying out thousands each year to a dentist. Genetics plays a big part in it and you don't get to pick your genes.
https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/1ow6cpu/appa...
https://old.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1pi2ax1/woman_...
The ads were real though: https://ibb.co/5hbG7ymS
Cant manage to get an archive link for the second one.
Does anyone know of an xcancel like service but for Reddit? OP links just lead to a login page.
I want my appliances to last far longer than devices like my phone or computer.
There is absolutely no way these manufacturers will continue updating them even close to as long as I want to own them. So then you're stuck with an insecure and functionally useless, bad looking (in my opinion) appliance. That you paid extra to own and see ads on.
... and hopefully be simple. My washer and dryer (made in late 90s) are dirt simple inside, with parts readily available. I recently had to replace the belt in the dryer, and a water valve in the washer. It was a diy job, with the help of a few youtube videos.
My neighbor guest's car got stuck in their driveway recently when an electronic parking brake malfunctioned. It really feels like all the gadgetry is a step backwards.
- Reminders to change the ice/water filter get sent to my phone. There's an indicator light, but the phone notification is nice, too. The app also records when the filter was changed—useful to confirm that I'm "tasting" that the filter needs changed early.
- When we had a teenager living with us, getting remote notifications that the refrigerator door was left open probably saved us a few fridge-fulls of food.
Other than that, it's just a fridge that works reasonably well. My one complaint has nothing to do with smart features: about once per year I have to spend 5 mins to defrost the ice maker with a hairdryer. Just infrequent enough for me not to investigate the source of the problem.
[0] I don't say "smart" here because nothing's really smart/automated and it doesn't have a screen, speaker, microphone or camera. RF28R7201SR/AA if you're curious.
The filters I buy come with little date stickers to put on it.
> - Reminders to change the ice/water filter get sent to my phone.
How do you deal with all your other maintenance tasks around the house? with other appliances? with your car? Why not use a central system, like a task/reminder app?
> - When we had a teenager living with us, getting remote notifications that the refrigerator door was left open probably saved us a few fridge-fulls of food.
I would understand a child leaving the door open but a teenager doing it that often is kind of wild? Regardless, wouldn't a reminder beep that starts when the door has been open for 5 minutes be better? Must everything be on your phone? It's not even actionable if you're not in the house, where you'd hear a local beep.
I do. I have OCD. Redundant systems and being able to confirm things are key for me.
> I would understand a child leaving the door open but a teenager doing it that often is kind of wild?
Teens can be absent minded. You might be shocked by how common it is for families with teens to replace a set of forks that just disappeared one by one.
> wouldn't a reminder beep that starts when the door has been open for 5 minutes be better? Must everything be on your phone? It's not even actionable if you're not in the house, where you'd hear a local beep.
It does beep when opened too long.
Remote notifications are the point. They are actionable: when I get the notification, I shoot off a text "close the fridge".
I like knowing if I (or someone visiting our house while we're gone) left one of the doors open or when it needs maintenance done on it.
If you have an option of regular stairs or stalled escalators, use the stairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krXj69fJjgA
If the brakes aren't operating properly the stairs could start moving uncontrollably.
But the thing is, you don't know what it's state is, and it's clearly not in the "everything is OK" state. At least if it's running you can guess the operator is intending for you to use it.
https://youtu.be/vrIw2i4WtA4?is=AWJK7ywVgImbVcTD
You must not fear it that much.
There's no obligation to purchase such cars.
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
They take this type of bug very seriously but obviously any platform will have bugs. It’s the legacy automakers I worry about, since their software has always been outdated crap and this problem needs the best in test automation
My Jeep Cherokee had a freakout one day: the power steering stopped working mid-drive, on the highway. I was 50 minutes from my house, had to turn around and drive back home (an exhausting exercise given that modern cars are not built to function without power steering). I got to the dealer, parked in the lot, turned the car off, wait 30 seconds, turn it back on, everything worked fine.
That never happened again, but once is enough to put somebody in a dangerous-to-life situation.
It's not just the infotainment system we should be worrying about. Most modern cars are now distributed computer systems.
Even my rear-view mirror is a camera, and currently it has failed (shows matrix style drippy blue lines instead of a picture.
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.
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.
For example, nuclear weapons are certainly well-engineered, but I think it's reasonable to disagree on if they were a good idea or not.
No, if you are already making bad decisions, you are going to make more. I never argued that good engineering means the idea was good.
Perhaps I am being overly-literal here, but my failure is not one of logic.
Kinda unrelated: Propositional logic is one of those things I wish we taught everyone in middle school. It's not that complicated, but it's such a powerful thing to have in your literary/rhetorical tool belt. I think a lot of young math nerds and writing/reading nerds alike would have appreciated seeing their worlds collide like this.
Recent household BS: music playing out of my thermostat.
Wife tried playing music out of Sonos, but the clunky app was laggy and had also signed her out of Spotify. No problem, you can also just play direct from Spotify app into Sonos speakers. She opens Spotify, selects "Living Room" and next thing you know our THERMOSTAT was playing music.
Neither of us know this was possible, neither of us enabled it, apparently it's existed for years but for some reason Saturday was the day that "Living Room" thermostat beat out "Living Room" Sonos in the Spotify sort order.
There were product managers on both sides of that decision to prioritize enabling such a stupid feature.
I'd pay for it to not be possible. I'd disable it on either/both ends if they had a toggle, which of course they don't. MVP baby.
Probably not. And that is why it happened - nobody thought about this at all until everything working as designed fails.
That is the thermostat probably is an off the shelf tablet with a speaker that they put other things on to make it a thermostat - this is the obvious thing to do and a lot cheaper than making your own completely custom hardware for this job. The software on the thermostat is likewise off the shelf (probably android) which has spotify in the base install and nobody took it out. Then you set the thermostat to be in the living room - again because that is the obvious thing to do. Finally your wife plays music and spotify sees two devices in the living room and picks one - which happens to be the wrong one but they have no way to know that.
The above is entirely likely and at no point (until know when I point it out) has anybody thought of it.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gPRyq0Vu0Tk
TIL that they really shouldn’t.
"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.
Obviously the review of a brand-new device or vehicle with 100 miles on it is going to have a disconnect from the realities of 60k miles of rocky ownership but I remain baffled when people buy a 7 year old used V6 Traverse, a vehicle extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure, and if I question their decision I get a "the reviews were good!". It seems like journalistic malpractice to not retroactively update reviews with a warning when critical widespread shortcomings are found later in a products life.
I'm guilty of it as well, if forced to choose blindly I'd pick Sony over WMFSENSY. But I'm beggining to wonder, with the recent casualness with which brands lower quality, whether they'll be a generational change and people will start ignoring brands entirely.
I'm starting to change my mind myself. My last Nike shoes weren't even the same size/shape (apparently they make left and right shoes in different countries now). At that point might as well go for the knockoffs.
Only at the same price. If there's a big discount, I'm going to prefer the random letter jumble from China because it's probably a standard design that a lot of factories are producing because it works well enough.
The only reason I lean towards Sony all things being equal is because I know that Sony gets sued when things go wrong, and won't just drop the brand and close up shop like the random letter jumble.
Also I would prefer Sony if lead would be a problem somewhere in the thing I'm buying.
I've sworn off Bosch appliances after a 2 year fiasco of service calls with one of their dishwashers. The thing was still about $900 plus install. At what price point am I to believe it's not the worse-on-purpose line, as they cheapen the product every year. They seem to have models from $700 to $2000.
A bad $900 model sours me on gambling that the $1200, $1500 or $2000 model is the good one this year.
It's called liquidation for a reason. You don't have the asset afterwards.
Seems like almost everything moderately priced has soles made of a extremely lightweight, squishy soft plastic that neither has much traction nor any toughness — worse than cheap flip-flop material.
Shoe companies should be embarrassed to put their name on such crap, yet they try to pass it off as premium.
One problem is that business forces keep turning brands into rugpulls.
After enough of this nonsense, brands are less of a reliable indicator.
Amazon pushed that to its inevitable endgame, where each product is a unique look-at-reviews situation. (and coincidentally the amazon advertising business is there while you run the product choosing guantlet)
On the contrary, *insertanynonenglishnamebrand* (*newbrand*) doesn't need to have any care in the world. If the product is trash, they would replace the name next year, bonus points if they declare bankrupcy and don't pay their obligations.
This is something that frustrates me to no end. How are clothing item sizes not standardized yet?
For example, I recently went to buy new Jeans, so I went to the same store where I got my current Jeans, asked for a size 28, and tried it on. How is it possible that my size 28W Basic Straight Jeans from Fox fit me, while a pair that fits the exact same description is too small?
I later went to a different branch, and there I found another pair which fits the exact same description, and it did fit me!
I have encountered this type of thing inany places, like when buying shoes one of the employees at the store told me "We don't have this in size 42 in stock, but we do have 41 and our sizes are larger".
Imagine if you went to McMaster Carr and asked for an M3 screw, and being told "We are out of M3, but our M2.5 is larger so it should work for you"
However, clothes are nearly impossible to simultaneously standardize and commoditize: people (and their feet) come in all shapes and sizes, so different brands in particular, but also different lines of those brands, will have different proportions.
As a tall guy, I hate that clothes keep growing in width with larger sizes, but rarely grow in length (pants/trousers included), but only because you can't get things without trying them on in multiple sizes.
If you do not understand why standardized sizes are not mandated or something similar, just look at any bespoke garment creation and all the variable measures being taken for a shirt, pants or jacket — just make realistic combination of all of them in different sizes, and you are looking at ~1000 "standard sizes" or more.
Humans have this same problem, which I suspect is the root cause.
The problem with this is it's a bit hard to put "well known" in a news article about a negative piece of news, because the manufacturers tend to threaten to sue you unless you have some kind of source or some kind of actual numbers. So this ends up just circulating as received wisdom within the car-knower community but not to the general public. Unless they get lucky with Reddit search results.
I noticed today that Autotrader.co.uk have recall warnings for certain cars, though.
I’m puzzled as well, buying a car that depreciates 60-70% in 7 years seems like a horrible idea, you could spend roughly the same on a Toyota Highlander or Honda Pilot and only face 30-40% depreciation after 7 years. This information is freely available if you google “[vehicle model] depreciation curve”.
Nissan (and Stellantis, Mitsubishi) decided to stop making better cars and focus almost exclusively on subprime lending, the rest of the story tells itself once you have that information.
That's just one of those secrets that you need to know, though. It's like knowing to ignore the unemployment rate (in the vast majority of cases) and instead to look at the prime-age employment rate. People rarely think of something like that without being told.
Ford's recently designed engines were designed with a timing belt internally that operated in an oil bath.
They are currently walking that decision back and attempting to make it look as if it wasn't planned obsolescence (dry cambelt engines or proper timing chains means that the engine would last almost longer than the person who bought it if they did the regular maintenance. A cambelt that cannot be changed because its internal means that there is a limit to how long the engine would last.)
The surface-level problem, sure. The root cause is that the "engineers" (and I lose that term loosely) decided that running a rubber belt in an oil bath internal to the engine was a good idea.
It obviously isn't a good idea, even if you could guaranteed that petrol will never mix with the oil. In the best case scenario, when the belt starts degrading (because all belts degrade), you're throwing pieces of rubber into the oil pump.
Even in the best-case scenario, the effect of that design was to reduce the cap on engine life.
Now interference engines detonating when the timing belt breaks isn't new, but putting a belt in a bath of dirty and burnt oil that makes it a mess and expensive to replace and basically impossible to inspect is pretty silly. A chain would not have had such problems and become an efficiency and running issue from a stretched chain instead of sudden and catastrophic failure of a broken belt.
It also has the problem of rubber belt pieced clogging up the oil system.
Its fine for people that get all the regular maintence and oil changes strictly on time. But not everyone does it so diligently. And if you buy it as a random used car you have no way of really knowing how good that belt is without a list of every oil and belt change and how hard they drove it.
OK, that's a fair statement, but!
My 2017 Altima has been great. Comfortable to drive, bluetooth connection that doesn't drive me crazy, space for passengers and cargo, manageable maintenance, I even use it to tow a small trailer with lawn equipment, no issues! I'm up to 190,000 mi with only minor repairs that I could do myself. I got my money's worth out of this one.
That said... I do avoid smart appliances, especially LG and Samsung. The additional features do not seem to add enough value to overcome the potential problems.
You don't have the CVT, do you?
TBH, I have heard that a small number of those JATCO transmissions didn't shit themselves soon after the warranty expired; congratulations :-)
I've got the exact transmission in a Renault SUV (2.5 NA petrol engine), and at 160000km the belt started jittering. Not noticeable to the passengers or driver, and no codes thrown up on the dashboard, but the OBD2 tool I use shows that the belt was, in fact, starting to fail.
I know atleast one dealership that never even mentioned a cvt fluid change despite the schedule for it being only 1000 miles away, but it was the last service before being paid off and if you don't come back and replace it on yoir own dime thats a potential new sale in 2 years.
The CVT is a steel belt though so that fluid should be replaced sooner rather than later because metal particles build up in oil. And at some point its not far from throwing a handful of sand inside of it and it will eat itself alive.
Maybe cruel, but I haven't found a better way to get someone to realize the error of their ways… because logic has obviously failed them.
[1] https://youtu.be/GceNsojnMf0 [2] https://youtu.be/-fC2oke5MFg
Also I don't see how it's unfair to expect refrigerators that cost a grand to do their one job without firmware.
Last I checked Samsung had the most engagement on Facebook just behind Netflix. This means that they are spending tons of money to put their products in front of their customers via social media marketing. Go out and ask any normies for the top 3 brands for electronics, especially that of home appliances, Samsung will definitely be up there somehow, because most people think that big brand = good. How do they know it's big? Well, you see them everywhere!
So I imagine that, "the reviews were good!" is just the surface. The truth is that they ignored all the writings on the wall. In the reality created by the constant exposure, the manufacturer is a big brand, thus they make good cars. Unless someone runs a counter advertisement to tell them about the critical problem the same amount of time or more than when they're shown the car whooshing through multiple scences sytlishly.
Just total engineering incompetence of forced updates with new features for no reason that degrade core workflows and introduce needless instability.
Even Tesla which plays fast & loose with some things.. the car does not come to a halt if the infotainment/GPS/etc tablet reboots. It's VERY disconcerting as you have no speedometer, the car is eerily silent, etc.. but the car still drives.
Just sloppy, cheap, lazy engineering.
But it is true that the rules don’t anticipate a fridge that cannot refrigerate food if the advertisements aren’t playing properly.
This extends all the way up to software. Be wary when someone pushes a modern replacement of a reliable and effective tool you already have.
It turns out that grocery stores with real time inventory on websites & pickup/delivery are a much better solution.
I have my weekly order I add my usuals to, and then add items to the cart all week as I noticed I am out/low while making dinner.
The future truly is incredible
Excessive needs bring you excessive pain.