Comment by 9cb14c1ec0
2 hours ago
Meanwhile, my non-smart fridge continues to run just fine. Why do we need smart fridges? That was always a bad idea.
2 hours ago
Meanwhile, my non-smart fridge continues to run just fine. Why do we need smart fridges? That was always a bad idea.
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.
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.
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'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.
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> fridge with a camera inside
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.
Well the camera only needs to work while the door is open. Stuff isn't going to magically appear/disappear while the door is closed.
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Why not just open the door and have a look in the fridge?
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.
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I always just want to know how much of X or Y is on hand when I’m physically out and at the grocer. You can just buy another but that usually leads to folks storing 5 bottles of ketchup or whatever
That does nothing to solve my real problem, which is too little surveillance.
Why not do the more labor intensive, higher energy use, higher friction, less convenient version of anything? Why automate anything?
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...while I'm at the grocery store on my way home from work?
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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.
You can get a Zigbee temp/humidity sensor and throw it inside the fridge.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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 failure.
I hate to break it to you, but those guy's aren't far behind on the path of enshittification.
Remember this classic? https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
Why? Just open the door and look in it.
Maybe they were testing spoiled food detection /s
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.
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
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.
Right now, no. The technology just isn't there yet.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Just solder a jtag connector to them and let AI dump the firmware, decompile, reverse engineer and flash a non-updating, sanitized version.
That does sound like a fun project! Not on an appliance that I rely on working 24/7 though. Maybe an idea to apply to a broken unused one.
"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.
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.
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.
It's apparently common enough for funny things like this to happen.
https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/1ow6cpu/appa...
https://old.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1pi2ax1/woman_...
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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.
They aren’t. The smart features are more expensive to make and the added features justify a higher price. Most people don’t care either way and will buy it when they see a discount and feel like they got a good deal.
My parents are of the generation where they put a TV in every room and just keep it on 24/7 news all day long. They don’t understand a world without ads and certainly don’t go out of their way to avoid them
Even if it worked right, you know they will eventually force a paid subscription just to keep the fridge running.
We don't need this anti-innovation mindset.
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.
I genuinely cant tell if this is sarcastic. Im all for innovation where its productive, but some things already just work.
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
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?
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.