Comment by liendolucas
1 month ago
You do not buy a smart appliance. Period. A fridge, oven, toaster, washing machine, bed do not need to be smart.
Smart is the consumer that is able to spot all this BS ideas that are putting in front of us and avoids it as much as it can.
Disagree. Smart can be good, if you're actually in full control (whenever you contract the implementation to a company or own it).
The real problem is, there's not much on the market that respects the consumers in this regard. Ask for an SLA on a smart fridge functionality and you'll be met with a confusion and possibly a revelation there's nothing of a kind.
It's all ignored because most consumers don't ask questions about reliability, functionality, security and control - they don't think of those. And it's not a matter of technical or specialized knowledge, I'm sure even a caveman can understand "will this work tomorrow the exact same way it works today?" or "what happens to my fridge if you go out of business?" - it's a matter of awareness. People simply don't know yet how those new things can fail them.
Eventually people will learn about the issues, and start asking maker companies those questions. But it's all too new today.
How can smart be good? Can you give me a practical and real example of a benefit of a smart appliance? How can it be better than a regular appliance that does not get on your way?
Let me guess: now to operate a dishwasher I need to download and install a mobile app. And also regularly update the app and the firmware of the appliance, or maybe need a permanent internet connection to correctly operate. It' BS all the way down.
The only thing that companies are expecting from providing you a smart feature is to somehow monetize that on a regular basis and the easiest thing to do that is to either sell your data or locking you down to a fucking subscription.
Not mention the potential problems with devices being bricked due to failed software updates. And of course this whole thing of permanent connection: the manufacturer "sunsets" particular line because they decided it's time for their customers to get newer device. And you can't do anything because the device has a touch screen and proprietary software with no chances for opening it up due to patents and other "secrets".
Oh, well, forget all that bullshit please. I can see how that "smart" is utter nonsense no one possibly wants. If you need an app and Internet connection to operate a home appliance that's stupid, not smart. Crapware vendors really ruined it.
Instead, please imagine your dishwasher has a standardized management and observation API that's exposed on a LAN and can be consumed by your local IoT management software (e.g. Home Assistant). Nothing here should have any WAN connectivity, except for a tightly firewalled channel for out-of-home user communications.
I run dishwasher overnight (YMMV) and I have forgot to turn the dishwasher on more than once before going to bed. It would be nice if it would be able to either start on a ping from a home hub's cron if it's loaded, has detergent and locked. Or if it's not in a good state, when the home hub would sense I'm about to start my night routine it could notify me that I forgot to do something about the dishes.
Or consider a smart washing machine. Home hub can observe its state and home automation can actually remind you that you forgot to move the wet clothes to the dryer. Or, well, if we're considering advanced robotics, it could summon a service bot with appropriate manipulators to do it for me.
Or a smart kitchen stove. If the hub senses I'm going out and the stove or oven are running, it should bug the hell out of me before I'm out of the driveway.
That's what I mean when I say "smart". Unobtrusive, helpful home automation, doing what I actually want from it, not doing anything I don't explicitly want, designed to be reliable, private and fault-tolerant.
Smart home should be about dwellers convenience and automatically meeting their expectations (as defined by dwellers themselves), not a data siphoning mess with constant risk of security breaches, that becomes dysfunctional if someone else's computer (cloud) fails.
2 replies →
I agree with you. The "smart" in "smart appliance" to me always indicates some bullshit I definitely don't want.
What's especially frustrating to me is that my appliances that should have a delay on them don't; specifically, my dryer and dishwasher should be able to delay until later in the evening when my electricity rates go down. Instead, I have to get them ready and press the button with my thumb like my parents did with their appliances 40 years ago.
But hey! These things can chew up gigabytes of bandwidth[0], so there's that.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/smarthome/comments/mn3p6c/lg_dryer_...
on a whim, I walked into a Lucid dealership and asked for a copy of their privacy policy as it relates to a purchased vehicle. the salesman told me “no” very firmly, so I left.
I bought a vented Samsung washer/dryer combo recently. I have to say I like it a lot, probably because its a combo and I no longer have to transfer clothes from washer to dryer. The fact that is Samsung definitely makes me feel nervous however (how long will it last?). Unfortunately, they were the only one to make a vented combo so far (I should have waited for more options, but I'm still OK with it).
We have a frame TV also and it worked nice for the very narrow use case we had.
I don't buy smart devices, unless they work fine without the smart stuff and it's a good buy. I have a "smart" TV because it's a great TV, but it only has HDMI cables plugged into it and no internet connection.