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#fridge#smart#don#food#need#features#fridges#samsung#more#things
Discussion (149 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Obviously the review of a brand-new device or vehicle with 100 miles on it is going to have a disconnect from the realities of 60k miles of rocky ownership but I remain baffled when people buy a 7 year old used V6 Traverse, a vehicle extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure, and if I question their decision I get a "the reviews were good!". It seems like journalistic malpractice to not retroactively update reviews with a warning when critical widespread shortcomings are found later in a products life.
I'm guilty of it as well, if forced to choose blindly I'd pick Sony over WMFSENSY. But I'm beggining to wonder, with the recent casualness with which brands lower quality, whether they'll be a generational change and people will start ignoring brands entirely.
I'm starting to change my mind myself. My last Nike shoes weren't even the same size/shape (apparently they make left and right shoes in different countries now). At that point might as well go for the knockoffs.
This feels like a joke about just in time inventory and globalization, but I'm worried that it might be true.
The most natural way for shoe mismatches is from the showroom. Customer grabs 5 pairs, tries some on, they get mixed up when returning to stock. Same shoe and size (hopefully, lol), but different production number and different factory/origin.
Only at the same price. If there's a big discount, I'm going to prefer the random letter jumble from China because it's probably a standard design that a lot of factories are producing because it works well enough.
The only reason I lean towards Sony all things being equal is because I know that Sony gets sued when things go wrong, and won't just drop the brand and close up shop like the random letter jumble.
Also I would prefer Sony if lead would be a problem somewhere in the thing I'm buying.
The problem with this is it's a bit hard to put "well known" in a news article about a negative piece of news, because the manufacturers tend to threaten to sue you unless you have some kind of source or some kind of actual numbers. So this ends up just circulating as received wisdom within the car-knower community but not to the general public. Unless they get lucky with Reddit search results.
I noticed today that Autotrader.co.uk have recall warnings for certain cars, though.
Needs changing at 100,000 to 150-000 miles or every 10 years.
The 10 year service is a spendy one.
Goes to show how long brand name goes, especially on appliances.
I’m puzzled as well, buying a car that depreciates 60-70% in 7 years seems like a horrible idea, you could spend roughly the same on a Toyota Highlander or Honda Pilot and only face 30-40% depreciation after 7 years. This information is freely available if you google “[vehicle model] depreciation curve”.
Nissan (and Stellantis, Mitsubishi) decided to stop making better cars and focus almost exclusively on subprime lending, the rest of the story tells itself once you have that information.
That's just one of those secrets that you need to know, though. It's like knowing to ignore the unemployment rate (in the vast majority of cases) and instead to look at the prime-age employment rate. People rarely think of something like that without being told.
OK, that's a fair statement, but!
My 2017 Altima has been great. Comfortable to drive, bluetooth connection that doesn't drive me crazy, space for passengers and cargo, manageable maintenance, I even use it to tow a small trailer with lawn equipment, no issues! I'm up to 190,000 mi with only minor repairs that I could do myself. I got my money's worth out of this one.
That said... I do avoid smart appliances, especially LG and Samsung. The additional features do not seem to add enough value to overcome the potential problems.
Just total engineering incompetence of forced updates with new features for no reason that degrade core workflows and introduce needless instability.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
My idea of a dumb fridge: a fridge that updates firmware, bricks itself, and lets all my food spoil.
- 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 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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/1ow6cpu/appa...
https://old.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1pi2ax1/woman_...
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
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.
I will take a solidly engineered fridge with a good energy usage profile every single time over some overengineered wifi-connected piece of crap.
Never underestimate the value of convenience to people.
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.
[0]https://youtu.be/OvUr00GPcIo?is=zSoGzA6fV49JTSpV
You can hard reset the latter one by holding down the home button for ten seconds, but while it turns back on the indicators don't function... even while driving
They take this type of bug very seriously but obviously any platform will have bugs. It’s the legacy automakers I worry about, since their software has always been outdated crap and this problem needs the best in test automation
My Jeep Cherokee had a freakout one day: the power steering stopped working mid-drive, on the highway. I was 50 minutes from my house, had to turn around and drive back home (an exhausting exercise given that modern cars are not built to function without power steering). I got to the dealer, parked in the lot, turned the car off, wait 30 seconds, turn it back on, everything worked fine.
That never happened again, but once is enough to put somebody in a dangerous-to-life situation.
It's not just the infotainment system we should be worrying about. Most modern cars are now distributed computer systems.
You must not fear it that much.
This is a direction all manufacturers are going into, so there is little actual choice. And buying used is not a real solution; where do tomorrow’s used vehicles come from?
Recent household BS: music playing out of my thermostat.
Wife tried playing music out of Sonos, but the clunky app was laggy and had also signed her out of Spotify. No problem, you can also just play direct from Spotify app into Sonos speakers. She opens Spotify, selects "Living Room" and next thing you know our THERMOSTAT was playing music.
Neither of us know this was possible, neither of us enabled it, apparently it's existed for years but for some reason Saturday was the day that "Living Room" thermostat beat out "Living Room" Sonos in the Spotify sort order.
There were product managers on both sides of that decision to prioritize enabling such a stupid feature.
I'd pay for it to not be possible. I'd disable it on either/both ends if they had a toggle, which of course they don't. MVP baby.
Probably not. And that is why it happened - nobody thought about this at all until everything working as designed fails.
That is the thermostat probably is an off the shelf tablet with a speaker that they put other things on to make it a thermostat - this is the obvious thing to do and a lot cheaper than making your own completely custom hardware for this job. The software on the thermostat is likewise off the shelf (probably android) which has spotify in the base install and nobody took it out. Then you set the thermostat to be in the living room - again because that is the obvious thing to do. Finally your wife plays music and spotify sees two devices in the living room and picks one - which happens to be the wrong one but they have no way to know that.
The above is entirely likely and at no point (until know when I point it out) has anybody thought of it.
Apparently a firewall rule is about the only way to stop this.
Excessive needs bring you excessive pain.
It turns out that grocery stores with real time inventory on websites & pickup/delivery are a much better solution.
I have my weekly order I add my usuals to, and then add items to the cart all week as I noticed I am out/low while making dinner.
TIL that they really shouldn’t.
The future truly is incredible
It only happened when it was particularly cold outside. I eventually figured out that there is an external temperature sensor that causes the fridge to stop cooling below a certain external temperature. And that space in the kitchen was particularly cold in the back. But I could never read it below 55, so I think the sensor was faulty.
But the reading on the front is what really annoyed me. I had to keep a thermometer inside the fridge so that I didn't accidentally eat food that felt cool enough but was bad.
This happened every year. I eventually gave it away for free, with a warning to the person.
Granted, I think the very concept of a smart fridge is a bad idea no matter how you execute on it... but they still managed to take a bad idea and execute on it badly. Amazing.
For example, nuclear weapons are certainly well-engineered, but I think it's reasonable to disagree on if they were a good idea or not.
This extends all the way up to software. Be wary when someone pushes a modern replacement of a reliable and effective tool you already have.
"Smart" that I can back is simple sensor acquisition over open protocols. I would appreciate being able to MONITOR my fridge/freezer/stove/oven/washer/dryer. Changing shit over those connections is not needed, nor wanted.
Idiots who still laugh at "conspiracy theorists" deserve this shit upon them heh