This is definitely on the horizon and future generations won’t even be aware of a time when you didn’t pay a subscription for every aspect of life. (TikTok screencap)
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Smart fridges don’t even improve storing food.
I won’t buy a smart fridge until they can play Tetris with the food inside.
We’ve seen how this goes: Eventually if you need a new fridge, you won’t have a choice.
It’s just like smart TVs.
Smart tvs aren’t as bad of a concept as smart fridges. A smart TV is better at being a TV than it otherwise would be, purely because it is smart. A fridge doesn’t have that. There is no way that a fridge can be better at being a fridge by being smart.
It’s all about marketing. “This smart fridge uses quantum AI technology to do neural scans of the contents of your fridge, allowing it to adjust the temperature and humidity perfectly for your food, making it crisp and moist!”
That fridge competes with a dumb fridge from a budget brand that costs 200 to 300 bucks. You can even get self-defrosting ones at that price point.
Unlike TVs, which need to display content, fridges can work just fine when they’re just a heat pump, a thermostat, a light bulb, and an insulated box (and optionally also a fan and a heating element). The biggest technical difference between a cheap fridge today and one from the 50s is in materials and using an LED bulb.
I mean, smart fridge COULD be scanning its contents and adjusting the cooling intensity based on that. My dumb fridge always freezes vegetables because even when set to lowest setting the cooling is too much.
But corpos would rathed stuff ads everywhere instead of making actually usefull upgrades.
If the lowest setting freezes your food, turn it up.
Yes, and use the contents it has scanned to sell to advertisers.
Lettuce is the only food that can be simultaneously crisp and moist
Nope. A TV’s sole job is to shit photons into my eyes. I have different appliances to tell it which photons those should be.
They could be in theory. But they are designed to bring a lot of terrible interface choices into the mix, so a basic screen where you just pick the input source and delegate the “smart” parts to something you control can end up being more comfortable.
A true smart fridge would be great.
An actual smart fridge would do things like scan everything you put in it, so you’d know that you had leftover lasagne from 4 days ago that was about to go bad. It would know its full contents, and where they were (like that you had some kimchi on the 4th shelf in the back), and when they were going to expire. And it would do it without you having to change how you used the fridge, like stopping to carefully scan everything you put in or took out. AFAIK some smart fridges do some of that, but not all.
The one smart feature I could see useful on a fridge would be for it to send me some sort of notification if the door is left open. Perhaps it could also send a notification if the temperature inside gets too warm (or too cold) - which assuming the door is shut would probably mean the fridge is broken.
With that said, I’m perfectly happy with a dumb box that gets cold inside and has a simple electro-mechanical switch to turn the light on when the door is opened.
Indeedy.
Unless there begins to exist a new business based around lobotomizing smart devices.
Unfortunately, even fixing a smart fridge without the manufacturer’s consent is a crime punishable with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and possibly prison time.
And everyone needs a new fridge every 3-5 years now because they’re all pieces of shit.
Get a cold basement, or get some rare vintage fridge, or stop using anything that needs refrigeration is my plan.
Don’t you do that every time you fill it?
Actually (put on fedora) a “smart” fridge is not necessarily bad.
No what absolutely sucks is lock-in and enshittification.
If you were to imagine a FLOSS OSHW fridge that used e.g. OpenFoodFacts and data from your purchases, e.g. OCRing your grocery list receipt or online purchases and genuinely helped with stock, recipes, diet, etc why not.
The WHOLE point is control, it’s not the technology.
Exactly, we don’t need to ditch computers and smartphones and go “back to nature” like some people say. We need control.
Counterpoint - we do not need appliances capable of running operating systems with userlands. A pre-programmed microcontroler should be more than enough for most appliances
An ESP32 based microcontroller can also send the temperature over ZigBee, smart devices and microcontrollers are not mutually exclusive
I hate that any new tech nowadays is caveated by this perversion of right to ownership.
It’s gotten to the point that I either actively seek older tech, or just go for even more expensive niche tech by small private tech players like Framework. But then my worry becomes, are these small private tech companies actually principled or are they just waiting on their exit strategy to be bought out?
Theoretically, I suppose that you could reflash your fridge. It’s unlikely that it’s running a dedicated embedded system nowadays. It has to be either android or Linux (or maybe Windows if they’re idiots, which is always a possibility).
you could reflash your fridge
Well yes, but honestly that’s swimming upstream. I always discourage reverse engineering or hacking unless you do it for learning and entertainment purposes. If you love the challenge it’s amazing. If you want to use the tool they you are giving away money to corporations you do not trust and you put a lot of weight on your shoulders to maintain all that over time.
Drink verification can to access refrigerator.
Then you are stuck, cause the verification can is inside.
Yes! Why hasn’t anyone posted the copypasta for this?
This reminds me. I need to call my uncle and ask him about that Fridge at his country place that’s been running since 1994. He’s selling his place and I want that fridge!
It’s been running since 1994? He should probably think about catching it!
My fridge is about that old too. It’s entirely possible that fridge will still be chugging along in 2050. Whereas a brand new Samsung fridge has about a zero chance of lasting until 2050.
I was in my local Lowes hardware and one of the Samsung fridges on display kept actively trying to connect to my Samsung phone. I must have gotten 5 or 6 notifications from the fridge letting me know I could connect.
On a related note, I was looking at RTINGS recently at their recommended TVs. One really important item for me is that I’m not subjected to ads.
It turns out that every single smart TV they tested has ads, and there’s no way to opt out of those ads.
https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv
It’s not possible to “vote with your dollars” to choose a TV that doesn’t have ads, because 100% of the TVs have ads now.
I know you can get a commercial flat panel intended for restaurants and stuff that doesn’t have any of those features, but those are hard to find, expensive, and don’t have basic features like multiple inputs.
If you think you can get around this by refusing to connect your TV to the Internet, some of them start to interfere with your use of them until you do connect them. Which ones? I wish RTINGS told me.
And, making it all worse, you know that every one of these things is going to have an EULA that allows them to enshittify it even more at some future date. And, you can’t get around that either, because either they’re designed to stop working if they don’t a recent update, or there’s a bomb planted in an update that only activates months later, so rolling back (if that’s even possible) won’t help you.
I know US law is never going to help consumers with this, but I do hope eventually Europe addresses this. People in Europe do still sometimes seem to have some rights when it comes to big companies.
I don’t know if this is helpful, but I recently bought a 55” Hisense and I just plug my old-school Roku USB stick into it. The UI is super basic and ad-free. It’s not 4k or anything, but for streaming shows and playing PS5 it works like a charm.
Here’s what RTINGS says about one of the Hisense TVs:
Ads Yes
Opt-out No
Suggested Content in Home Yes
Opt-out of Suggested Content No
Unfortunately, like most TVs on the market, the smart interface contains ads, and you can’t disable them.
And someone on another site has a video showing an ad playing as soon as their Hisense TV is turned on. The person posting says it doesn’t happen every time. And, maybe it’s disabled if you have it set to turn on using “input 2” or whatever your USB stick is connected to. But, an unskippable ad on start-up means I’m not going to risk buying a Hisense TV.
…That’s a Bosch refrigerator with a tablet stuck to it, presumably with a magnet. (Yes, we ruin everything for you on the Internet.)
Still. Samsung would absolutely try to pull this if they thought they could get away with it.
Well yeah I mean the image is a joke…
Sure, but for some godawful reason Samsung genuinely does make a series of refrigerators with a stupid touch screen in the door, it’s just that this isn’t one of them.
Another random fun fact about those, since we’re kibitzing and we’ll never get a chance to touch on this topic ever again, these silly fridges run Samsung’s Tizen operating system which at one point was supposed to be a successor to MeeGo, i.e. in and of itself the successor to the Maemo OS which ran on the venerable Nokia N900. But this categorically failed to set the world of mobile phones on fire, and nowadays is relegated to being used to making Samsung fridges and televisions annoying. Just one of those things, I guess.
Meanwhile some Europeans inherited a 1962 Liebherr Fridge that still works in 2050
Most of the older stuff is really energy inefficient. That said they have looser tolerances so they break less and keep on chugging.
The new stuff has tighter tolerances and is made to reduce cost. These powers combined make them shit.
The worst part is that in a lot of cases paying more won’t actually get you out of the trash. They just strap smart garbage to the cheap shit. You have to pay 5 to 10 times the amount for an actual decent appliance (ie one that’s just good at doing what it is supposed to do) and even then it’s a gamble.
Yeah we had to replace our piece of shit Samsung fridge this year and after doing days of research it turns out pretty much all fridges are pieces of shit these days.
And the few that aren’t, start at $13k.
IDGAF about energy efficency when entire datacenters are dedicated to making uncanny valley porn from stolen data.
Just don’t get the screen wet, if the screen is broken, the fridge won’t work for “safety” reasons.
They stopped looking at a screen for a second to open the fridge, quick install a screen on the front! Prediction: Screens will appear inside the fridge as well.
Is there a kind of open source dumb appliance movement out there? It sure seems like we need one.
They wouldn’t be free as in beer, but it would be awesome to have widely available instructions to take existing mass produced parts and assemble a functional and serviceable appliance.
Or maybe just a control module and some sensors that you can use to retrofit smart appliances.
I’m sure the big companies would keep them from gaining mass adoption though, thanks to cheap appliances with ads and junk parts. They probably already have.
I had an idea to create FOSH (Free open source hardware) license and wiki that contains schematics and plans for making your own hardware, be it a fridge or printer, or handheld label machine but i dont know if it will be worth anyones time. I dont have electrical engineering degree so i couldnt do more than test the products and maintain the website.
Came here to post that. More context: Short story by Cory Doctorow about apartments having mandatory proprietary toasters that only toast bread baked by the company , which then goes out of business, which makes the authorization handshake fail, which makes all the toasters useless, and then plot and stuff happens. It’s a good read.
Yes. Haha. Funny joke.
…at least until it’s no longer just a joke.
Why are we waiting 25 years for technology we have today? We shoud as a tip screen while we’re at it.
Ooh yes a tip screen pops up every time before allowing you access to the fridge then when you select the tip (because there’s no ‘no thanks’ option) it then asks you if you’d like to round up to the nearest $5 for charity.
Brawndo’s got what plants crave!
