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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Draper’s law: Any screen a company can control will eventually display ads.
thats too absurd
I wonder how your comment will age in 1, 10, 100 years.
if its not a non profit it would be closer to true
It’s not because it includes company control.
Just don’t get the screen wet, if the screen is broken, the fridge won’t work for “safety” reasons.
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!
daaaaad!
Sorry kiddo but you know I had to do it
Sadly, fridges are the one appliance that uses the most energy, it runs 24/7, so running an older model will cost you a lot in the long term. I have a 20 year old fridge that hasn’t had a problem ever, save a broken glass shelf and a door basket, and I’m replacing it with a dumb one with the best energy rating. It’s the same with cars, although it’s getting harder to find “dumb” cars.
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.
Not zero, about the same as the survivorship bias of old appliances.
And the electricity cost will be about 10 times lower.
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.
A smart TV is better at being a TV than it otherwise would be
I think that depends on what you want from your TV. If you just want it to have a video input to stream stuff from somewhere else, smart TVs are typically worse because they take more time to boot up.
There’s also a longevity mismatch. The streaming device goes obsolete much faster than the display. At worst, you’ve got a bunch of buttons snd icons for dead services or “your device is no longer supported” tutning your home theatre into a dead mall.
It’s sort of like when they used to make low-end TVs with VCRs and DVD players built in. Nobody was doing that on top of the line sets because you wanted to keep it for 10 years, and the DVD player would give out much sooner.
I think one brand tried to make a modular component to allow for smart upgrades, but without industry standards, it was a predestined dead end. Thry should have just out a slot in the cabinet sized to fit a Roku/Fire stick and let customers swap them every few years.
Smart TV is just a dumb TV with an OS. Just factory reset it, refuse to give it WiFi, and it’ll basically function like a dumb TV. The longer boot time only happens after it loses power, otherwise it’s in a sleep mode.
More time to boot up than a fridge which is booted up all the time?
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.
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
What about onions?
You keep moist onions in your refrigerator?
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.
Or…
Beep if the door is open.
Regulate the temperature automatically.
No AI.
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.
I disagree. The one of the few smart thing i don’t want in my house is a smart tv, because it’s really just a subpar computer being build into a TV, and higher spec cost too much. I don’t want to change a TV every 3 to 5 years because the computer part degraded and make using the TV impossible. I can use my PC for that.
Indeedy.
Get a cold basement, or get some rare vintage fridge, or stop using anything that needs refrigeration is my plan.
And everyone needs a new fridge every 3-5 years now because they’re all pieces of shit.
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.
Nah, fridges are simple enough that I guarantee it’s trivial to rip all the smart bits out and still have a functioning fridge. Or just buy and old one, my grandparents still have their fridge from like 1970s and it still works.
Sure it works, it also uses more electricity than the rest of the electrical devices in the house combined.
We’ve figured out how to do fridges a long time ago, there’s really not much to it: a well insulated box, radiators inside and outside, a pump, a metering device, and a thermostat. Sure, all components have been optimized a bit, but the power usage only went down by like half in the past 50 years, it’s not as bad as you’re describing.
About 3,5 times more energy used in 1972 than 2002. That’s quite a bit in my opinion.
Hm, that’s indeed more than I was expecting.
I guarantee it’s trivial to rip all the smart bits out and still have a functioning fridge
Unfortunately, it is not. The “smart bits” are doing the job of a control board in a dumb fridge. If the tablet shits the bed, you won’t get cooling until you factory reset it and get the tablet working again.
I’ve never had a fridge with a control board, it’s usually just a compressor connected via a two-connection control thingy which prevents it from starting too often, and a relay that’s controlled by a thermostat. If they managed to replace that with a control board… Why?
Just about every fridge sold (meant for residential use, in the US) in (at least) the last 10 years has a control board in it. The only exceptions are the really cheap and small top-mount fridges, and even then it is only the ones with physical knobs that might not have a control board. Anything with buttons or a display has a control board. Many appliances with knobs also have control boards (sorry to everyone buying laundry based on “it has knobs, I trust it more”).
As for why - because they can. What are you gonna do, not own a fridge? Keep paying someone to fix an old one (or learn to fix it yourself)? Very few people will do that. Most people will bend over and pay.
Wow, fuck that. Thankfully fixing the electrics of an old fridge is really easy (as there are so few components and they are very simple); and I’ve never had issues with refrigerant leaking.
Do you really want a row of your food disappeared when you arrange it neatly?
It depends on how long the food had been in the fridge…
But without a smart fridge, how am I supposed to play Doom in my kitchen?
Don’t you do that every time you fill it?
I can play Tetris with food inside of me.
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.
Or … just don’t connect it to the internet?
It is not because it has a wifi antenna or an ethernet port that you need to connect it. Especially if you only want to use the dumb features anyway.
Or … just don’t connect it to the internet?
It is not because it has a wifi antenna or an ethernet port that you need to connect it.
This is increasingly becoming a false statement, unfortunately. Companies are indeed forcing customers to connect in order to use the regular features. For instance, Roku TVs won’t let you change to a regular HDMI input without first connecting and accepting their ToS and updates.
Secondly, even when the forced connection hasn’t been implemented yet, the problem is not entirely fixed. These fridges with digital panels are notorious for randomly having that panel fail, and then the ENTIRE FRIDGE stops working, even though the actually useful compressor and refrigeration loop is intact. Of course, the company will also refuse to sell you a replacement digital panel.
A smart appliance disconnected is still significantly worse than a dumb appliance.
That’s why I also mentioned them being made cheaply and using junk parts.
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?
Yeah. People hate “smart” stuff and IOT and i sometime do too, but owning a bit of automation tech makes me realise the shitty thing about these tech is we’re being forced to use it for even the basic shit and in THEIR term, which mean they can brick your stuff if they want to.
I have two aircond that comes with IOT that i can connect for extra feature, but that’s entirely optional stuff, i can operate it like a normal aircond. We need stronger consumer protection and more personal control.
Home Assistant ftw
It’s come so far! It used to just be for tech nerds and privacy extremists. But it’s so easy to use now, everyone who wants to enjoy the IoT world again without losing personal control can do it!
It’s cooking absolutely but we need a whole class of contributors that only work with support and uiux that really enjoy helping people because there’s always that one little thing that’s vague in the docs and obvious to everyone else
I get they can’t support an old device forever, but then a local API should be available by law.
“smart” stuff […] these tech
That’s why picking the right tech matters. My heuristic is that if you need a proprietary app, it’s NOT going to be on your term, hard pass.
If you do need some connectivity, it’s also probably bad.
If you do not need connectivity and it’s interoperable via standards then and only then maybe it can be good.
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.
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.
It’s not possible to “vote with your dollars” to choose a TV that doesn’t have ads, because 100% of the smart TVs have ads now.
There, FTFY.
At least Sceptre has a wide selection of dumb TVs. There are more brands if you search.It was 100% of the TVs that RTINGS had reviewed, which was 501 different TVs, but apparently no SCEPTRE TVs at all.
Unfortunately, it looks like the SCEPTRE TVs don’t get very good ratings:
HD picture quality was only decent. It did an excellent job displaying the finest detail of HD content. Color accuracy was acceptable, but below that of most models…
This model has fair sound quality with below average performance.
https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/tvs/sceptre-c550cv-u/m393713/
So, I guess there is one manufacturer who still makes dumb TVs, it’s their low-end line and doesn’t get good reviews, but it is a dumb tv, which is nice.
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.
Just don’t connect your TV to the internet? I really don’t get why anyone would do such a thing in the first place.
Never had any ads on a TCL TV because it can’t reach any servers. And it happily is chugging along.
Just don’t connect your TV to the internet? I
Some TV models start to complain if they’re not connected to the internet, interfering with your use of them.
Do you really need multiple inputs? Pair it with a nice receiver and let that handle the inputs.
How much is a nice receiver going to cost me?
Whatever it takes! This is how you get the best home audio!
Ok, so that isn’t a suitable recommendation.
If you’re serious, there’s a range of products available to match your needs. Do you want full surround support? Just stereo? Bells and whistles or basics? How many inputs? Specific power requirements? The price ranges can take you anywhere from the low hundreds to the many thousands. Need some requirements first.
The price ranges can take you anywhere from the low hundreds
So, the price of a TV. If I had lots of money to spend I’d love to have one, but realistically it’s not worth it when it’s that expensive. I’ll just get a TV with multiple inputs.
Why the heck are people buying these things in the first place?
Ape brain go “ooh new thing better than old thing!”
Company pays a kickback to condo building
Condo building puts one of these in every unit
Your lease is nullified if you interfere with the ad loadsBlack electricians tape. Lots of it.
“I have money, please give me your most expensive/ best fridge” but in some cases the most expensive is not the best.
These are nowhere near the most expensive fridges. They are on the higher side of the average range.
In my experience, the people buying these fridges are low income, low tech knowledge people that got approved for (likely too much) credit.
If you’re wealthy enough to waste a lot of money on a fridge you aren’t buying one of these abominations. Its going to be a built in like sub-zero.
I honestly believe these fridges are not being bought in large quantities and are part of the tech bubble.
Family calendar, watch shit while cooking, read recipes.
I don’t even like exterior water or ice dispensers.
Cool story.
Drink verification can to access refrigerator.
Then you are stuck, cause the verification can is inside.
That’s why it’s important to have a redundant backup fridge with a recovery verification can.
Yes! Why hasn’t anyone posted the copypasta for this?
I try to leave and my bracelet mandated by the Terms of Service immediately administers an electric shock.
We have determined that we’ll be able to fill 80% of the user’s display with advertising before inducing seizures.
You’ll have to own the Oasis first.
meanwhile the fridge from 1986 is still running in my garage and doesn’t need me to ask how it’s feeling or update firmware
Damn it, can’t get to my verification cans!
For those who have no idea what stoy is talking about, I present this glimpse into the future:
…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.
Also the ads are taking 3x as long as normal to load because your fridge, washer, dryer, smart picture frame, and smart light bulbs are part of a botnet-for-hire, unbeknownst to you
