Comment by weli
4 hours ago
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.
… and makers don’t have an incentive to even deliver such features, because people are already buying them?
At least I wouldn’t know what’s stopping them from building actually-useful features, tech-wise. Or was it just always a bad idea because fridge placement is random and items are often hard to find/detect?
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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.