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There has to be some backpressure on the supply chain. I appreciate that you used your clout to make the issue public, but sometimes I worry that it only goes so far as our little echo chamber.

If it's any consolation, the video I posted on YouTube is getting some traction.

If it can get a good number of views, maybe it can at least generate enough impact to cut off a few hundred units of sales. That won't make a massive impact, but it's better than nothing.

If Bosch allowed me to update the firmware of my unit to not lock out features, I'd maybe consider doing that locally over an ad-hoc connection. Wish they would've just included Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Matter instead.

I can almost guarantee that I will now start seeing references to this in dishwasher recommendation threads on forums and Reddit now. And it won't be me doing all of it, I swear! :)

> There has to be some backpressure on the supply chain

Sure it would be nice, but just like all things, not to be pessimistic or fatalistic—the HN rejection of something doesn't practically matter to most companies. I mean, why is it is that Steve Bannon is the loudest voice against technofeudalism today? Why can't we get louder and get other people listening?

Make stickers and go put them on the units at the store. Send Bosch a picture of how you've improved their labeling along with a nice note indicating that you'll do it again if they don't change their ways.

That'd probably get you banned from the store if they find you doing that and at best, it's only going to get the message out to a few customers until the store staff remove the stickers.

Jeff's using his internet fame to reach far more people. I previously thought that Bosch were a good brand (only had a blender and a temperature controlled kettle from them though), but now will avoid them.

Ok, but not all of us have internet fame. I've found that my "here's where to pirate this textbook" stickers are not typically removed. Maybe sellers of dishwashers are more diligent, who knows.

Fair enough. I do enjoy seeing various subversive stickers put on lampposts etc. Maybe complaining on the internet and putting stickers would be a better tactic, but placing stickers probably takes more effort.

Perhaps there's an opening in the market for an appliance company that brands itself on self-repair and self-hosted connectivity? All most people want is "push button and do the thing as long as I live".

Maybe there is, maybe there isn't.

I mean, we all know what people say they want and what they'll do when/if they buy something may be two totally different things.

And: creating a dishwasher (or $appliance) that does its actual job good enough to be worth buying isn't something that can be hacked up in a weekend or two.

Edit to add: maybe - as Bosch pretty much has figured out how to make good diswhasheres - it'd be easier and more approachable to hack, rip out, replace the control electronics. Chances are this is going to work on more model than the one...

The calculation about whether to repair something or not usually hinges around labor and material costs vs replacement cost. The more difficult something is to repair, and the more expensive the components are, the less like it is to be repaired.

It's probably also true that high turnover of goods across brands due to early replacement allows for slimmer margins and higher yields, and hence lower cost of purchase. So on the other extreme, make things break more often and sell them cheaper and more often, which seems to be the status quo.

The economic problem to solve, then, is how to encourage brands to increase the durability of their goods. There are some review publications that perform stress-testing, but few keep metrics on long-term durability in a real-world setting. At a minimum, I check consumer review sites before I buy just to avoid the worst brands, and there you do see some people coming back after a few years to leave a warning to other people. And perhaps this kind of feedback has some effect.

Hopefully people start prizing 'dumb' products, and start leaving bad reviews on products that rely on an internet connection, when they're left stranded after the connection drops out.

I want to know what dishwasher and washing machine Marques Brownlee (mkbhd) uses, and to know that is going to use his clout in this regard ... not to burden him, but he has almost 20M subscribers on YT ...

I don't know if I want an appliance recommendation from someone who launched a paid subscription app for phone wallpapers. That mindset does not seem compatible with the customer owning what they bought.

If there was any influencer I'd want to know that from it's Louis Rossmann.

Louis' dishwasher is a Blackberry ;)

Assuming you're American, your state's attorney general office is responsible for consumer complaints.

It's free to file an issue, and in most cases you'll get a direct response. The issue here is product fails to perform as expected, and resolution is that the manufacturer remove the unit at their cost and give you a full refund.

Arranging an alternative purchase is your issue.

And contact your local news media as well. They love stories, particularly if there's existing footage they can air. VNRs (video news releases), the original "fake news" became a hot item in the 1990s Because Reasons. And you've already got the footage and audio.

Please have a look at this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43469297

It's linking to a website with the following explanation:

  However, perhaps inline with the German attitudes towards privacy, the BSH "HomeConnect" appliances have a no-cloud mode built into their app without any hacks required to disconnect them from the internet. They do require a one-time connection to perform key exchange of a long-live authorization key, but from then on the appliances can be operated entirely disconnected from the network.

Dishwasher electronics are subject to elevated heat and humidity levels. A DIY solution will be extremely unreliable. An amateurish job on the power electronics can be a fire hazard and will void any insurance policy if they find out what you did.

Funny how there is always someone who posts "you do X, and you will fail", and then follow up with "you will get hurt and/or hurt others" and then "we will punish you for trying". Like they work for the corporation, to spread the message of hopelessness. Embrace the tyranny of fate!

Maybe someone who is skillful enough to be able to DIY a micro-controller will also think about these issues and deal with them too? Or is that too hard to imagine?

It isn’t so much a matter of skill really. Just, there’s a random probability that any electronic device will catch fire because the manufacturer cheaper out on some component. If you’ve screwed around with the internals, it takes it from the “obviously not my fault” scenario to “there is an argument to be had.” Being right but having to argue with your insurance company anyway is still a pain, right?

> Funny how there is always someone who posts "you do X, and you will fail" ...

That is not what the post to which you replied said nor implied. Instead, it reads thusly:

  Dishwasher electronics are subject to elevated heat and 
  humidity levels. A DIY solution will be extremely 
  unreliable. An amateurish job on the power electronics can 
  be a fire hazard and will void any insurance policy if they 
  find out what you did.

This is clearly a warning to those reading this thread. Likely also an attempted knowledge sharing with the post's author.

> Maybe someone who is skillful enough to be able to DIY a micro-controller will also think about these issues and deal with them too?

Maybe all people who attempt such things are not aware of the concerns raised?

99% of people who played with an Arduino in school are not EEs and are woefully unqualified to be doing that sort of tinkering for a hardwired appliance managing high voltages, water valves, and heating elements that can all cause mayhem when a self-taught Dunning-Krugerian steps out of their wheelhouse.

Need more Doug Jacksons (SV Seeker) in this world.

Safety third.

The "control board" which has all the high voltage stuff is totally separate from the computer. What Jeff wants to is totally reasonable, if a bit annoying because the computer bit is installed inside the door rather than externally accessible like the control board.

> will void any insurance policy if they find out what you did.

That sounds draconian, do you have any examples of home insurance policies that do this? Is this common in reality?

Home insurance terms are generally long and written to try to avoid paying out. Not sure of the specifics for home insurance, but car insurance is generally written to void cover if modifications have been done to the car which were not called out at the time the cover was started.

The world used to be driven by DIY. Now, people are afraid of it (or advocate against it) in some way. What changed?

People living in shared spaces. If you burn down your house in a village, there's a good chance this can be stopped before it reaches your neighbor's a few hundred meters away. If you burn down your apartment, there are now multiple neighbors without a home.

> the reality is I've already sunk about 6 hours total into the whole operation

That's a bit of a sunken-cost fallacy.

Here is a device that is going to be used every day for the coming 5 to 10 years, with a least 3 useful functions that cannot be accessed, and it's going to annoy you every time you use it.

Some devices simply have to work without friction, and that is worth spending home maintenance time on (and our hard-earned cash). Dishwashers, washing machines, printers..

Life is too short to waste time and energy on those, and I would argue that the energy, time, friction and annoyance you are probably going to encounter on the lifetime of that device is probably more than the 6 extra hours that would have been spent returning this unit.

Just my 2c, from the sideline, not walking in your shoes.

Jeff has 5 kids (mentioned in the video). I'm surprised he had 6 hours to fluff around with a dishwasher in the first place. I have 2 and certainly am careful about how I spend any free time I manage to find.

I didn't watch the video, so I didn't know the specifics, although he did mention a tight schedule and children in his post.

But especially in such a case, I still believe that the general point stands. If time and energy is tight, you cannot afford to have friction points due to the appliances you use daily, because the friction they cause is a perpetual reoccurrence that is really energy draining.

I understand that time is short and budgets can be tight, but on such things, put the effort and the money in to make sure they work the first time around, and to make sure they stay out of our way.

Life is too short to be the slave of the malfunctioning devices around us, and it's only once the re-occurring low-level friction points are gone that we generally realize how draining they can be in everyday life.

For what it's worth I have an 800 series and it also made some features like delay start app-only. Even if I was ok with that it's still a terrible design for a multi-person household. See also: cars that are going app-only for remote start.

>If taking a stand means sacrificing another 2-4 hours

>Plus, now I have a long-term project to hack my dishwasher.

So you'd rather waste more time, probably days or weeks, on a hack where Bosch can change implementation anytime, than return it?

People will make the choices that are rational for them. When your job is making content about hacking stuff, wasting 8 hours on hacking a dishwasher that both generates content and generates useful information for other people is a better use of time than wasting 4 hours returning a dishwasher in the hopes that you personally will be the straw that breaks the IoT camel’s back.

so the next step here is Bosch puts eco mode behind a paywall.

Returning an appliance though will leave you without that appliance for a while. Attempting to reverse-engineer it shouldn't affect his ability to clean dishes and is also fun to do.

> I've already sunk about 6 hours total into the whole operation...

I suspect you're going to sink a whole lot more time over the unsatisfactory lifetime of the dishwasher. It sounds like the sunk-cost fallacy.

Out of curiosity, how long did 'ya spend on that blog post, the YouTube video, and various platforms reading/answering comments related to this experience?

Do you have a Home Depot or Costco near buy that offers free installation and haul away? Most people who get these appliances have the store do all of the work you did.

It’s cheap but it’s not available for 1+ months so you have to live without a dishwasher for a month. Idk about your family but mine would struggle for more than a week without one

I thought delivery only took a few days. Where are you that it is a month?

If only there were some temporary method to get dishes clean without a dishwasher. Because it is temporary, it would be acceptable if the method required more human labor than the dishwasher method.

If only a person were to do some math and realize that spending four hours installing a dishwasher is less time than doing dishes by hand for a month. (and dealing with 50% odds of getting a terrible install by grumpy people who ding up stuff in your kitchen)

I mean I could but time is money. Time spent washing dishes could be better spent installing the dishwasher.

Yea, most places will do the install for free/cheap. At some point you have to choose how much your time is worth.

Well, that's true on the face of it. But, at least where I live, this service can be hit-and-miss. The retailer of both my dishwasher and washing machine provided this service, and both times it was a shoddy job.

On the dishwasher, they had a hard time routing the hoses properly, so the unit was sticking out something like 3 cm from under the furniture. I had to redo it myself.

On the washing machine, they routed one of the pipes with too narrow an angle, so that the water wouldn't come out. Fortunately, to the point of this post, the machine was "smart" enough to figure this out and complain about it (via a code on its display).

Yup. It's time to replace the controlboard with an ESP32 or something! Did you keep your old dishwasher?

I'm having a local appliance recycler pick it up tomorrow — they aggregate these machines, repair various ones using parts from non-working units, and get them back into use again. I'd rather that than it sit in my house until I get time to hack it together again.

Hey Jeff, I follow you on YouTube. I hope you're recovering well. Wishing you all the best.

Except if customers like you don't take a stand now then by the time you get a replacement all the other Brands (some of which are made by the same company as Bosh appliances) will have likely moved to the same bullshit.

How long did it take to write the blog post

About 20 minutes; it's a lightly edited transcript of the video.