Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

It will sell very well because it a) will be cheaper than non-advertising laden fridges, b) will make more money meaning they can spend more on marketing and c) it has an air of "living in the future" about it.

Most of us here see it for what it is, because we know what happens to the data.

I think the future is going to have more of this.

But, I can also imagine people paying more for almost everything that is ad-supported today to get non-ad supported versions in the future, not because of the data concerns, but because of the opportunity for status signalling - ad-supported devices like this will be seen as something "only poor people have" within two decades. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

View on HN

Within two years they will launch a monthly ad-free subscription tier.

That might force them into providing better warranty support: if my fridge isn't working any more, I'm going to stop paying them money. Obviously subscription-free becomes another tier of status, but if by paying a monthly fee I get 24 hour maintenance support for fear of losing my sub revenue, well...

There's already parallels around this to an extent. I pay Apple money every month for storage, ad-free TV, music and games, confident my data is my data. As a result, they might have a customer for life, because the alternatives are awful in comparison even if I pay less per month or overall for them.

I have very good experience of Samsung’s warranty support for a washing machine, actually.

The thing that makes corporations give better warranty support is not more money. Giving them more money does not incentivize them to suddenly give better service or make higher quality goods. The thing is consumer protection laws. In the EU, consumer goods have a minimum two-year warranty period. This incentivizes higher quality manufacturing.

> confident my data is my data

this attitude strikes me as remarkably naive in 2025. apple is well on its way down the slippery slope.

Paired with "priority support" and "cheaper" repairs for the much more frequent breakdowns

> It will sell very well because it a) will be cheaper than non-advertising laden fridges,

Will it? Investors would prefer full price fridges with full price ads.

Most consumers won't even know they've installed adware until the appliance is turned on, and what are they gonna do? go to all the effort of returning and buying another fridge?

Captive audience

Dark patterns like that will die out soon enough and they'll harm the share price: Samsung are going to tell customers what they're getting.

And while investors would prefer full price fridges with full price ads, the ad economy only makes sense once you have decent reach, so it makes sense to lower the cost of acquisition of the device, take the hit as a customer acquisition cost and then sell the larger reach to advertisers.

This is the model for every ad-supported device and service to date, I'm not sure they're going to reinvent those economics for a fridge.

All that smart tech can't be offset by the small amount of ad revenue they generate.

It's still much cheaper to buy a normal fridge without all of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com