cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37646129
Source: Reddit post— Private front-end.
Samsung Statement to Android Authority:
Samsung is committed to innovation and enhancing every day value for our home appliance customers. As part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen that value, we are conducting a pilot program to offer promotions and curated advertisements on certain Samsung Family Hub refrigerator models in the U.S. market.
As a part of this pilot program, Family Hub refrigerators in the U.S. will receive an over-the-network (OTN) software update with Terms of Service (T&C) and Privacy Notice (PN). Advertising will appear on certain Family Hub refrigerator Cover Screens. The Cover Screen appears when a Family Hub screen is idle. Ad design format may change depending on Family Hub personalization options for the Cover Screen, and advertising will not appear when Cover Screen displays Art Mode or picture albums.
Advertisements can be dismissed on the Cover Screens where ads are shown, meaning that specific ads will not appear again during the campaign period.
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The easiest thing in the world is not to connect your fridge to the internet.
Also don’t buy Samsung refrigerators they are truly truly horrific.
I’m an appliance repairman.
If you have gone out of your way and intentionally purchased a fridge with an internet connection and to screen frankly you deserve this. What did you expect? Screens have advertisements on them, why else would they put a screen on there.
There was a time when WiFi was actually useful in smart appliances, I have an LG washer/dryer about 7-8 years old, no touchscreens, but by WiFi you can get cycle done alerts, time checks, even remote start it. My matching fridge gives me energy conservation information, and allows me to choose a lower duty winter cycle
I like these features. IDK why the fuck I would want a fridge with a touchscreen. All the smart appliances I’ve seen in the last 5 years are just there to serve you ads and steal your data.
Yeah. We have a smart washer. It’s out in our detached garage/shop so even if the chime were on, no one in the house would ever hear it.
The only “smart” feature we use on it at all is remote notifications.
And we don’t use the GE app for that either. I have it linked through our Home Assistant, so no one in the family needs their crap on our phones. Yes, HA must link into their servers, but the only real data GE gets is how much we use it, and the “city” where our internet connection says we’re in… which is 300 miles away from our actual home, in a completely different state.
but the only real data GE gets is how much we use it
Nope. If they want my data, they can pay me for it. Fuck them.
Yeah, if I wanted to monitor and control my appliance online (which I don’t), just give me wifi connectivity and a REST API.
Given how many times Samsung’s been caught spying on customer mics, and throwing ads into everything with an internet connection, I don’t understand why anyone is still putting wifi credentials into a Samsung device.
I don’t understand why people even buy their products. Shouldn’t trust them farther than you can throw your fridge.
Agreed. They’re not even good products without the spying. Bad on top of bad.
Last time I had a Samsung product was their S7 phone, and even then it was so full of bloatware I just couldn’t take it anymore.
I hate the enshittification going on everywhere but I’d say the whole smart fridge thing was pretty shitty to begin with…
“Innovation” used to mean better prices and/or better products. Adding adverts to a product you already own isn’t innovation.
It is innovation.
Just for the company, not for you.
Anyone who fell into the trap of buying a fridge with a screen in it kind of deserves this.
I hear what you are saying. But our society is pretty fucked up if you “deserve” something bad because you bought a product without imaging how the manufacturer can make it worse in the future.
The owners should be able to return the product if something like this happens, no matter how long ago they bought it.
Yes, some people think that naiveté is worse than malice or cruelty for sone reason…
Malice thieves on our naiveness.
Indeed, but it is more just and effective to stop malice before naiveness
without imaging how the manufacturer can make it worse in the future.
We reached the point where companies do shitty things with all their digital services years ago. As long as it’s not open source, you’ll get shit “features”. And even if it is open source, it can be reverted on a whim (hello bambulab).
Help! My spy machine is spying on me!
Yeah but imagine how cool stuff could be if companies didn’t 100% of the time ruin their inventions
I don’t disagree but what’s also true is that some products are already as good as they can get and no longer need innovation. I know this is a bold claim but I’d argue that my dumb fridge without screen or internet connection keeps my food just as cool as the latest smart fridge.
some products are already as good as they can get and no longer need innovation
I just saw a poster for a sort-of cool fridge innovation: It has a door-in-the-door that you can open to get out commonly used things without having to open the main door and let all the cold air out. It’s called a “Conservadoor” refrigerator.
The kicker is that I saw this on Antiques Roadshow and it’s from the 1950s.
I don’t know why, but I remember seeing that somewhere, too. Fantastic idea. Ergonomic AND energy efficient. Though, I feel like adding in a mini door somewhat lowers the insulative abilities of the main door, so I’m not sure of the trade-off.
Ergonomic AND energy efficient
FWIW I don’t think it’s really all that energy-efficient. Air, being much less dense than solids, contains comparatively much less heat energy. The “cold” of a refrigerator is mostly stored in the things inside it, not in the air inside it, so letting all the cold air out to be replaced by warmer air does not have a huge effect on the overall temperature of the fridge. I think you’re right that having a door which interferes with the insulating envelope is going to be worse than just opening the main door once in a while.
We need technology connections to make this experiment a reality
I’m a big fan of “make it actually better or leave it the fuck alone”
I literally can’t imagine a box that makes things cold being made cooler by having a screen on it
“I can’t see the value in this thing for myself, therefore it’s stupid.”
Some people use a whiteboard or notepad magnetically stuck to their fridge to keep track of things: shopping lists, to-dos, notes to other members of the household. Some people stick photos to their fridge. This has been a thing since John Fridgemagnet stuck the first magnetic plastic letter to his icebox in 1968.
Putting a screen in the fridge serves a similar purpose, with the added benefit of integration with modern online calendars, remote access to the whiteboard/notepad (in case you forgot the shopping list at home), it displays a rotating slideshow of photos, and adds things like weather and news reports that you can quickly check while you’re grabbing the orange juice.
It’s not a stupid idea for the people who would use that functionality, but the product itself becomes stupid when the company starts forcing ads into the system or intentionally hobbles the software that was available af time of purchase (yes, Samsung did that too).
I’d never buy another Samsung fridge, but only because the ice maker still doesn’t work after three warranty replacements/upgrades to a “fixed” design. My family uses the screen feature all the time.
Aside: I really enjoyed your pun. 9.5/10
Yeah, but we do wildly inefficient stuff all the time
deleted by creator
Right‽ Why the fuck would you buy a fridge with any more than a compressor and a fan?
This would already be illegal if we didn’t live in corporate dictatorships.
Best I can offer in the US is a spiraling rapid descent into fascism.
“All of the alternatives are corporate dictatorship”
Guess I’ll die
Why the fuck would you buy a smart fridge.
When the idea of them first came in to play the thought were items put in would have rfid tags or another identifier and your fridge could help you keep inventory and track when things might be going bad, suggest recipes and whatnot.
We shoulda known it’d be ads tho
Even so, most expiration dates are a scam. Why would smart expiration dates be any better
More like asking yourself “do I have milk” in the supermarket and being able to check that in a phone app.
They planned on having it automatically order more milk for you, but I guess Amazon wasn’t offering enough kickback for that. So we get ads instead.
I’m calling it here that other companies will start advertising dumb fridges on these smart fridges.
It should display what is inside the fridge, without the energy loss of a window.
It should have a bar code scanner and a complete food inventory system.
It should be the “kitchen’s tablet” able to show recipes, watch cooking instruction videos, have a high quality curated knowledge compedium in a convenient and easy to access way.
It should be able to stream outside cameras and answer door bells.
It should be able to take video calls from Mom on XMPP.
It should have high precision control and diagnostic systems.
It should run ENTIRELY on open source software, not damn blob drivers, the display panel should connect internally with an HDMI cable.
Run Proxmox and all my menagerie of LXC containers, don’t cheap out LG!! I want 64 GB RAM and 2tb ssd and a slot to add an HDD.
It should auto-doomscroll for me while I peel potatoes.
It should be able to run a smart voice assistance running Mistral 8x70B medium, locally and OFFLINE but networked and answer my agentic commands with a posh british accent.ok, good enough, send it
I would buy and work and invest for whatever company you create.
Imagine if didn’t make things that sucked.
Where I live we had little cheapass gas station cake company called Vachon
Say what you will, they were a staple and “our beloved trash cakes”
Some company came in, bought it, and made them suck hard.
Replaced animal fat and sugar with seed oil and HFCS.
Nearly all the better cakes are getting cancelled and the company is probably on the verge of bankruptcy.
I haven’t bought those shitty cakes in years.Imagine if we had a trend of doing not-that.
You got a bit trigger happy for the last few points, but seriously, why isn’t the first 3 standards now. It can’t be that expensive to put that in a fridge, and with an open platform manufacturer could even get away by providing the barest software offering and let us do the job for them.
I just bought a fridge after my 15 year old one shit out. Let me tell you, trying to find a decently sized, dumb fridge with an ice and water dispenser is like finding the holy grail.
Samsung has evidently partnered with some timelords to get over 30 cu ft of fridge space in a 70"tall frame - including their door sized tablet.
Bosch has the next biggest but locks stuff behind an smart app. Hell, even LG has smart features to help you with your ice maker that will probably either be DOA or will break in a year.
I finally found a Whirlpool that isn’t smart and has a decent sized fridge, but it was a struggle.
How else are you going to look at Facebook while you drink milk out of the carton if you forgot your phone in the living room?
call me old-fashioned, but you don’t need a fridge with a fucking screen in it.
More than this we don’t need smart TVs I wanna dump high quality image tv
You can sometimes disable a lot of the smart TV bullshit if you put it in gaming mode. For some models it disables a lot of the smart features to improve performance.
…wut? The refrigerator has a gaming mode??
I would like to invite you to re-read my comment, and the one I responded to.
This is one of the many reasons I didn’t buy a fridge with a screen on it.
It seemed pretty obvious they were going to try and advertise something on it.
When I first saw them in stores, they were shown as having games on them. Why would anyone in this day and age, when we all have cell phones, need their fridge to have games on it? It makes no sense to add something like that.
Next model will come with a latch that won’t unlock the fridge door until you’ve watched a 30 second ad or are subscribed to SnackPass+ for 29.99$ a month.
Drink verification can to continue.
I need my fridge to maintain a cold temperature on the inside. That’s it. That’s 100% of what I need from a fridge. The last one I bought was $300 and there’s no place to put an ad. I have no idea why y’all were hooking your appliances up to the internet in the first place, but I’m sorry you’re having a bad time.
You could add a printed ad with adhesive tape to the front door of your fridge to have a similar experience like all those “smart” things…
In the past, the typical example for a “smart device” was a refrigerator, that would automatically buy milk online once it’s empty, but I’m not sure if that really works (or makes any sense). But at least you can now see ads together with weather and news on your refrigerator door.
I’d still take a dumb fridge and magnets at any time of the day.
Magnets is science…too liberal.
yet those magnets don’t show the time of day, do they?
no, for that you get a dumb analogue clock
They can, get a set with numbers ane arrows, move the arrow each time you pass.
if people are buying 1800$ fridges, its on them if they get ads from samsung.
lol who downvotes this? You have to be a colossal moron to buy an appliance without doing 5 minutes of research about any given model.
The ads are new. Research wouldn’t have revealed them.
Buying a fridge with a screen on it is part of the moron circle.
on the sub, where it was discusssing the same thing, it was referring to the 1800$ samsung fridges.
👏 You 👏 Don’t 👏 Need 👏 A 👏 TV 👏 On 👏 Your 👏 Fridge 👏
In the 1980s, home computers were sold like this:
“Look at these awesome games, kids! And as for your parents, uh… well, you could use the computers to… uh… I dunno… keep track of the contents of the fridge? Yeah, let’s go with that.”
Nobody ever did that. Not then, not now.
Don’t buy a smart fridge, it’s a scam
The computer manufactuers knew what they were doing. Although, 8-bit computers were cool typewriter replacements/spreadsheer machines if an adult wanted to use them.
and if you do: just get it separately
I see a bright future for “low tech” tech companies soon.
"Here’s our new fridge.
- What does it does?
- It cools your food.
- And?
- That’s it."
The low-tech appliances in my cheap apartment work pretty great. Just modern enough not to waste a ton of water, but still have knobs and rattle the floors.
As it should be
I’ve wanted to have the capital to start a company like that for a while now, but with one more selling point: repairability and promises of backwards compatibility of some degree. So the fridge not only cools your food, but you can replace the compressor yourself at home, and of a future model uses a different one, it will have the same screw placement and size for coils so you can fix/upgrade it. The washer/dryer not only wash/dry clothes, but the barrel and motor are easily replaceable, etc. Basically the framework laptop of appliances.
I doubt they bother with backwards compatibility, but Miele has longer parts availability than pretty much anyone else. They’re also not publicly traded.
Wonderful! I’ll take two.
Similar to the only white packaging and black text marketing from the xkcd https://xkcd.com/993/
I used to never want a fridge with any sort of icemaker or water dispenser. The place I moved into came with a fridge that has an icemaker in the freezer and a water dispenser in the fridge. The appliance is approaching 18 years old. There are some modern luxuries that just work so long as they aren’t over complicated.
