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Comment by 9cb14c1ec0 | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, my non-smart fridge continues to run just fine. Why do we need smart fridges? That was always a bad idea.

The trouble is that 'smart fridges' turn out to be just a regular fridge with an android tablet on the front. Which is useless.

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.

Why not just open the door and have a look in the fridge?

...while I'm at the grocery store on my way home from work?

1. Look in fridge before work 2. Add any missing items to shopping list 3. Reference said list on the way home from work

1. When you finish the milk, voice record "buy milk" on the phone.

2. At supermarket, listen to voice recordings.

I'm actually working on a pet project to transcribe my 20 years of voice recordings and organise them, then sync them between the phone and desktop. Maybe in the coming weeks I'll know that I needed milk in October 2008.

I mean, there are plenty of voice assistants these days. We use our Alexa for this but both Siri and Gemini could easily do it. Whenever we run low on something, "Alexa, add milk to our shopping list" and then can look at application at grocery store.

And what happens when its your kid who finishes the milk and doesn't mention it to you?

Or you didn't finish the milk, but didn't realize it had gone bad until after you got home with ingredients for a meal depending on milk.

Have a shared shopping list with the family. Teach your kid to put the milk on the list after they finish it. Be at least somewhat aware of how old your food is. Problem solved. Somehow we managed this model for a century.

Somehow we also managed to get by before we had pretty much any kind of technology. Somehow we managed without trains, somehow we managed without telecommunications, somehow we managed without refrigeration, somehow we managed without websites and forums.

Maybe we could do better. Maybe we can automate this as well.

Yup, end game is becoming a Guild Navigator. Obese, immobile, suspended in a tank full of dopamine. Why beat around the bush with all this doing stuff and using our limbs or god forbid thinking? Straight to the neurotransmitters, pure efficiency.

I take it you don't bother writing things down, wouldn't want to have the paper take the place of your own memory turning your brain to mush right?

And obviously you just walk anywhere and everywhere. Wouldn't want your legs to grow feeble and useless. Even riding a bicycle is reducing how much exercise you'd get otherwise, it's simply a tool for the weak.

Well, then, of your cows can only be milked on the 'morn you'll have to do with milking one of the goats.

I think the point is these devices sell some kind of convenience. Anyone who grew up of a certain time is seduced with this idea of our world being perfectly in tune with our needs, like the Jetsons.

Now we have generations of people who grew up with surveillance capitalism and broken promises I wonder what the next big wave will be

I instead use the technology of "whiteboard on fridge, where I write what I want or what is running out." That way it works when I didn't even plan to shop, because I vaguely remember what's on the whiteboard on the fridge.

I'm biased working for an online grocer, but isn't the problem really that you are in a store making the decision instead of in your kitchen at home? Half the goods I buy anyways aren't in a fridge, so a smart fridge only solves parts of the problem.

Yeah, if the argument truly is, "I want to be able to know everything I need to buy for cooking," then you need "smart" everything - cabinets, bread baskets, a way of analyzing the produce sitting in a bowl on the counter, pantries, freezers, and so on.

Perhaps it's because I'm the cook of the family, but to my mind, if you're in your kitchen on a daily basis, it's incredibly easy to have a strong idea of what you have at home when you're at the store. It's never perfect and once in a while you double up or miss things, but that's life!

I'm not the only cook in my family though. Last two nights I made dinner, but Monday my wife did. I'm not sure who will cook tonight (I need to get my kids to start doing more of that). The result of that is nobody knows exactly what the other person used up.

We do have a shared shopping list. If I remember I'll put things I use up on the list, but often I'm busy at the time I notice because the thing on the stove needs to be stirred constantly... Last night I used one can of beans leaving two more - I didn't put beans on the list, but maybe I should have. Overall this system is working, but it is annoying and sometimes not ideal.

>I'm not the only cook in my family though. Last two nights I made dinner, but Monday my wife did. I'm not sure who will cook tonight (I need to get my kids to start doing more of that). The result of that is nobody knows exactly what the other person used up.

My wife cooks sometimes too, but usually it's fairly easy for me to observe what she made and have a good sense of what went into the meal.

>We do have a shared shopping list. If I remember I'll put things I use up on the list, but often I'm busy at the time I notice because the thing on the stove needs to be stirred constantly... Last night I used one can of beans leaving two more - I didn't put beans on the list, but maybe I should have. Overall this system is working, but it is annoying and sometimes not ideal.

Same for us. I wanted to make pinto bean tacos last night but forgot the pinto beans at the store last weekend, because I'd assumed we'd had some. We used it as an opportunity to pivot and have a random meal that involved using up extras in our pantry and freezer. Life will always have annoying moments that aren't always ideal, there's no amount of automation that will eliminate them. It's good for us to experience those moments and use them as growth opportunities (not saying you don't, I'm just speaking generally here).

Last night I was cooking while my wife took my kids to practice - they got home just as I was putting everything on the above. In short she couldn't observe everything. This happens commonly in my house these days.

> Overall this system is working, but it is annoying and sometimes not ideal.

And costs you nothing. Is easy to roll out. Doesn't ever need replacement. Doesn't ever fall apart. Lasts forever.

The smart fridge will also screw up and not get it all right 100% of the time. And for that, it will cost you handsomely, will be difficult to implement in all your kitchen, will need constant replacement, will fall apart, will not last forever.

Framed like this, the smart solution is actually worse.

I remember when someone got a car to 100k miles - they called all their friends to see the car turn over to all 0's. They had to add oil before they left, and drove off in a cloud of smoke. They had to avoid puddles or the spray through the floors would get mud all over everybody...

Point is things advance. the first iteration might be as bad as you say, but they are likely to fix the bugs and make it better over time.

Well you are still paying orders of magnitude more than a pen and paper grocery list. For what in my mind is no new real functionality. Just the ability to get a bit lazier and think a bit less. I don't know about you but I'm trying not to get senile here. Thinking is actually a good thing, not a chore. A muscle that isn't under use atrophies.

makes me wonder maybe if NFC/RFID strips were cheap enough you could have all the items tagged in the house and your phone could tell you what you have.. but probably causes e-waste though

The other problem is that just an equivalent barcode but NFC product tag isn't going to tell you that you're down to half a stick of butter, it'll just say you have butter. And that's assuming you keep the packaging.

Anything you've prepared at home will also not be tracked by such a system.

Everyone is arguing over a feature that this fridge does not have.

And everyone is aware of that, because it was explicitly stated by the commenter that kicked this off, /user?id=Legend2440

It’s “wouldn’t this hypothetical feature be great” vs “my feeble mind cannot even imagine why anyone would ever want that”

Not the person you asked but I can answer that from my perspective:

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.

We need smart pantries to fully realize the “auto shopping list”, though… so a smart fridge is a half solution at best.

I even store produce (ex onions) on the counter tops, so I guess smart counters as well

>”a smart fridge is a half solution at best”

A car is a half solution to going to work. A stove is a half solution to preparing food.

Half solutions are what people need. They’re the solutions we are using every day.

There is this huge problem with advertising that makes consumers think a half solution is a 100% solution. Most smart product makers do that trick. But, apart from that problem, ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’

Edit: but no way would I buy any smart or connected fridge from Samsung. I don’t anticipate that being a positive experience

> A car is a half solution to going to work.

> A stove is a half solution to preparing food.

A working grocery tracking system is a half-solution to effortless shopping.

A half-working grocery tracking system is useless, much like a car without an engine.

>A working grocery tracking system is a half-solution to effortless shopping.

>A half-working grocery tracking system is useless, much like a car without an engine.

Yes. Something designed to be a half solution can be useful. But a full solution which is broken is probably worse than useless.

I can't really think of a use case for a grocery tracking system that only tracks a third of my groceries. A system that tracks everything would be massively useful, however.

>I can't really think of a use case for a grocery tracking system that only tracks a third of my groceries.

Me too. I think I’m not communicating clearly. Sorry.

What I’m talking about is a system that does only one third of the steps in the total end-to-end process for ALL your groceries. You do the rest yourself, or use other help.

I’m not advocating a broken system that claims to do that complete process, but really ignores two thirds of your groceries. That would be damn stupid.

Do you understand what I mean?

“Half solution” seems like an odd way to say tool?

“tool” seems like a good way to describe a half solution. We use and combine various tools and our own skills to do what we want

You should be able to combine two half solutions into a full solution.

It might actually be easier to start with the smart pantry! An in-cabinet kit that can be tested entirely dry and warm and open, and then expanded to the fridge.

What I need is a whole kitchen camera that notices when I put things in the fridge/pantry and then take them out. Bonus if it can say "The lettuce in your fridge is probably expired, use it or toss it today".

The fridge/pantry camera is a useful addition, but most of the value would be a system that just tracks what I put in/take out.

Your enthusiasm is catching. I’m not sure I would ever consider a fridge with a built in camera though because of the bad manufacturer incentives. Maybe you could find a wireless camera that you put inside and the fridge related processing - the real point - is done somewhere else?

Id want to be careful of it getting cold and damp if you put a consumer camera inside a fridge. You'd ned one rated for that sort of environment

Seems like it would be better solved with a phone app you can just scan the receipt and log your usage. It would get you out of having to buy a $1000 fridge and also solve the pantry issue. Actively logging your usage vs passively might have other downstream benefits like being more aware of your macros.

That does nothing to solve my real problem, which is too little surveillance.

Why not do the more labor intensive, higher energy use, higher friction, less convenient version of anything? Why automate anything?

Why the blind insistence upon automating everything?

It’s not blind insistence, and that framing reveals a real lack of imagination on your part in my opinion. A truly smart fridge that had an inventory of all my stuff, knew expiration dates, etc. hooked up to my chat agent would be wonderful.

Do people have the memory of a goldfish or what? "I can't remember what's in my fridge" is not a problem I've ever had in my entire life. What is there even to automate? If you were talking about a smart fridge with an accompanying robot that automatically orders groceries, picked up the deliveries itself, and stocked your fridge that'd be something, at least... still an insanely, unbelievably wasteful use of both your personal and our planet's resources to save five minutes a week, but something. But that's not even what smart fridges promise. They promise to automate looking in the fridge, an activity that you must do every time you withdraw or deposit food from/into it anyways. Wonderful.

> still an insanely, unbelievably wasteful use of both your personal and our planet's resources to save five minutes a week

Actually a cheap microcontroller and a few cameras over the lifetime of the fridge that caused me to open it say 50% less would save more money than it would waste by my estimate.

> If you were talking about a smart fridge with an accompanying robot that automatically orders groceries, picked up the deliveries itself, and stocked your fridge that'd be something, at least

Yeah.

Step 1: fridge with smart inventory

Step 2: hook it up to grok bot

Step 3: grok bot orders your food from Walmart+ InHome

So every piece of this exists except the hypothetical sci-fi fridge.

Again, I’m stunned by the complete and utter lack of imagination and critical thinking here. You guys are the offshore contractors of HN commenting.

> Do people have the memory of a goldfish or what?

This is actually a pretty good point. Many people do have poor memory for a plethora of reasons. This would be a great accessibility feature.

Perhaps you could use your wonderfully amazing imagination to imagine the contents of your fridge as you last saw it when you opened it 8~12 hours ago to retrieve food or drink.

Great comment after being demonstrably wrong on all points. Again, trivial to imagine a scenario where other people use the contents of the fridge too. Or that when someone grabs the milk they aren’t doing an inventory of all the drawers, checking what’s out of line of sight because it’s hidden behind something.

You can’t be a software developer with such a poor imagination and intuition. Debugging would be hell for you. Even worse because you’d fail to imagine the edge cases ahead of time.

I personally can't do that. I deal with aphantasia (I can't visualize anything in my head). I can put something in the fridge and not realize it's there, unless I can see it. Then on the other hand I can create 20+ character passwords (no words, numbers, symbols) and not need to write them down. I have way above average memory recall, but will often forget about items aren't normally in the fridge.

> "I can't remember what's in my fridge" is not a problem I've ever had in my entire life.

I take it you've only ever lived alone then? Its pretty easy for someone in my household to consume food or add food without me knowing about it. And I definitely do not take a full and complete inventory every time I open the fridge.

I'd find it very handy to look at a glance and see the current stock of stuff I have in my house. I definitely don't know exactly how much butter I have at the moment, I don't know what the date is on the almond milk versus the whole milk, I don't know how many string cheese sticks are left after the kids grabbed their snacks for school. I don't know exactly how much salt or pepper or smoked paprika or herbes de provence or curry powder or semi-sweet morsels or baking soda I happen to have on hand.

I don't know the technology to seamlessly track all of this is realistically at hand, but it sure would be nice. I do agree, every smart fridge today either doesn't even try with this or just totally sucks at it.

But hey I guess you just have all that data totally memorized and you're entirely omnicient about everything your household consumes. Sure seems nice.

> Do people have the memory of a goldfish or what? "I can't remember what's in my fridge" is not a problem I've ever had in my entire life.

I have no problem remembering what's in the fridge. It doesn't do me any good because my wife and daughter also know what's in the fridge and they eat those things too.

Knowing I might need to pick something up while I'm out, particularly when nobody is home to check the remaining stock, would be handy.

Having said that, I don't want anything to do with the modern conception of a "smart fridge". If there was a self-hostable fridge camera I could install I might be into that. Otherwise, no thanks. I like my "dumb" fridge UI the way it is.

You must live a pretty uninteresting life if you think such a minor thing would be wonderful.

Why?

I always just want to know how much of X or Y is on hand when I’m physically out and at the grocer. You can just buy another but that usually leads to folks storing 5 bottles of ketchup or whatever

Because you are at the supermarket trying to remember what you have at home.

Because people are mentally unwell and would rather not spend any time actually in the moment and doing life. They’d rather just free up all this “wasted” time so they can sit on their arse and watch the 8th series of the latest Netflix programme. They live to consume.

Maybe they were testing spoiled food detection /s

The trouble here is that this smart fridge put safety-critical features behind a single internet-connected piece of shit. Appliance manufacturers really need to take inspiration from automotive manufacturers in terms of redundancy and localizing failure.

I hate to break it to you, but those guy's aren't far behind on the path of enshittification.

Remember this classic? https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

You break nothing much, don't worry - I was taking about equipment failure or malfunction, not targeted attack. Like, your power brakes or ABS can fail but you can still brake. Power steering can fail but you can still steer. Hell, steering wheel can pop right off and the steering geometry should still try to relatively prefer the center (not always ideal, but like, better than going fully insane like a shopping cart wheel). My point is there's no single CPU executing the entire vehicle where any malfunction can spontaneously cause the entire vehicle to stop functioning so badly that it won't perform any of its duties. Sure an ECU could fail and not run the engine, but that won't make you lose the ability to brake or steer if it happens in the middle of a highway. Something malicious can still command the rest of the vehicle to stop functioning one by one, but there aren't many single sources of that much failure.

At the very least, the system that maintains the temperature of the fridge (critical for food safety) should not be brought down by an exception in the system that displays advertisements on the front panel...

Right, I'm sure the fridge has the ability to set the temperature through the touchscreen or remotely but the inverter controlling the compressor should default to a medium setting when no commands (a specific temperature or an off command) are given by the computer. It would cost only a couple dollars to drop in a microcontroller between the computer and inverter to monitor for a periodic temperature command. No command after 1 hour? Set the inverter to cold and wait for further instruction.

I could see this being kinda annoying if you've told the fridge to be off (like in an unoccupied house) but it instead turns on because the computer has bricked itself but considering fridges usually have food in them for the majority of their lifespan, defaulting to cold is a fail-safe mode.

Fridges are one of the more critical home appliances. Sure, it's not going to be the end of the world if your beer fridge cuts out but hundreds of dollars of food is not something everyone can easily replace. EBT doesn't cover buying replacement food if it spoils. People also keep expensive prescriptions in fridges. You probably have at least two appliances for heating up food, a stove, oven, or microwave, such that you have some less convenient alternative available. But most people do not have an alternative fridge they can simply move all of their food to.

Yeah, this is what I'm talking about. The compressor should have its own system to regulate the temperature, not depend on some master control unit that also commands every other function of the fridge. Because if that master control unit gets so stuffed with functionality that a bug in one thing breaks everything else, you get hundreds of dollars of spoilage, yeah. For some families that's the difference between eating and not eating for days (or much longer).

I think what's happened here is the inverter does not have its own setting at all, it's controlled by a central computer, which in this case failed.

Maybe some fridges have cameras with object detection and can tell you what % your milk remains, but this one does not do any of that.

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'm not sure how any of that is actionable. I already know how to make my fridge more efficient - but if I knew how to get my kids to close the door instead of leaving it open while the pour their milk (on the other side of the kitchen) I'd do that.

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.

its not

You’re only losing cold air, which has very little mass compared to what you’re actually storing in your fridge. The energy cost to re-chill the air in the unoccupied volume of your fridge can’t be that significant, I’d imagine.

It’s be an interesting experiment to put a temperature probe in something like a block of cheese, let it cool to the ambient fridge temperature, then open the fridge door for a few minutes and see if the temperature of the cheese even measurably changes over the next few hours or whatever amount of time.

I’m still on the fence about closing the door for a short task like pouring milk. My understanding from the physics of opening the door, you’re mostly already replacing all the air in the fridge with air from outside the fridge. So convection already did its job of robbing your fridge of cold. Closing the door to open it again a minute later just gives you a second convection inducing action for air that might have been trapped the first time.

I would love to see someone at the level of technology connections do a breakdown of the physics here, and where the likely crossover point point is for different kinds of fridges. My current (probably illformed) belief from the suction and imagined resulting air exchange of all the fridges I’ve lived with is that leaving the fridge open on the order of seconds is better than opening-closing-opening-closing in terms of cold loss.

"In theory but the benefit would be pretty negligible i think. Let's say for argument that most food is water and your fridge is 25% food and 75% air. The specific heat of air is 1 kJ/kgK, specific heat of water is 4.2 kJ/kgK. But also the density of air is 1.2kg/m3 and the density of water 1000kg/m3. Assume 1 m3 volume. So that would be 250kg food and 0.9 kg air. To change temp by 1C would take .9kJ for the air and 1050kJ for the food. So the air in a fridge holds a fraction of a percent of the total thermal mass of the contents. Whether or not that air changes temperature by a few degrees won't change things much at all. You would spend far more on balloons that you would save on energy."

* https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/1618mku/would...

The air exchanges in seconds, yes (as evidenced by the post-door-closing suction), but the air doesn't stop flowing through the fridge as soon as the air changes once, and the air enters warm and leaves cold, so (by conservation) heat is being robbed from internal surfaces. So you're still losing more heat by leaving the door open longer.

Door open --> Door close --> Suction --> No further heat loss afterwards

Door open --> Continuous heat leak

> get energy saving tips

Here's a tip to save some electricity on the fridge: unplug all the smart stuff.

A fridge only uses a couple kWh a day and there's not much to optimize other than "keep the door closed" and "don't overfill it".

Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.

> Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.

Fundamentally due to product lifecycle expectations, I wouldn't even want that!

I hope a fridge will last 10+ years.

Unfortunately any SaaS/cloud-connected piece of hardware is going to have some combo of firmware/OS/security/app update deprecation well before 10 years is up. The last people I expect to maintain software that long is the maker of a fridge.

CalDAV has been a standard for nearly 20 years. This feature could be done in a way that doesn't require to to talk to their servers, you could just put in the URL for whatever calendar you already have.

A simple tablet holder on the fridge door would do this way better.

Good thing it's still very easy to buy simple fridges that come with none of that crap. (Oh, cool, another huge Android tablet that's several versions behind latest and is a cracked door for red team agents to hack my house with and adtech to slurp up all of my refrigeration habits. I'LL BUY TWO!)

I can see why customers might want something like this though. We have a Skylight calendar in our house. It's just a big ass calendar. The software and service that Skylight provides makes it a VERY GOOD big ass calendar, but I can see some people thinking "i use my fridge all the time; why not just have a self-updating calendar there?". (Magnetic calendars on fridges are very popular.)

But, no, Samsung and LG literally sell this concept as doomscrolling as a service. So dumb. They look super tacky also. EVERY ultra high end fridge is literally two solid doors or designed to disappear behind closet doors. Nobody's staring at their fridge while pulling out their eggs and bacon for breakfast lol

so these cameras can see thru milk cartons? Impressive

Why does it have to be a camera? Surely there are other sensors in this age of untethered innovation that could apply. Give me a "smart nose" that will explain whether the unusual smell is coming from the vegetable drawer, dairy section, or no man's land in the back of the top shelf. Give me a top-of-the-line thermometer that can warn me if leftovers are going into the fridge too hot.

These sound useful but hard. Putting a tablet on the front sounds easy but adds no value. Guess which one they picked? Apparently people will still buy.

It would be nice if that was all they were, but evidently a software update can render the fridge unable to run, so it is clearly much more. These things have transitioned from IT to OT.

> fridge with a camera inside

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.

Well the camera only needs to work while the door is open. Stuff isn't going to magically appear/disappear while the door is closed.

Or turn the light on for a bit when the camera is checking things.

The state maybe change however. Would be nice to hear mold has grown on an item at the back of shelf 4.

This wouldn't work in today's environment because any engineering capacity won't be directed towards making the thing useful when Samsung or whoever can sell the inside of your fridge in return for "recommended products".

Why? Just open the door and look in it.

My idea of a smart fridge: a fridge with Zigbee Temp/Humidity sensor connected to my Home Assistant automation system that alerts me if things get out of whack.

My idea of a dumb fridge: a fridge that updates firmware, bricks itself, and lets all my food spoil.

You can get a Zigbee temp/humidity sensor and throw it inside the fridge.

Why do you want that? Generations of humans have existed just fine with modern refrigeration without any of these extra... What you would call features and I would call simple bullshit.

They have started trying it when the problem was much more difficult than it is now. I think a fridge that does this itinerary well is not too far away.

Yes! I've been thinking about placing a tiny camera in the fridge for such a long time. This is especially important if you have a summer house or another apartment — you never know/remember what is in the fridge.

Taking photos of the fridge is a solution, but then phones were too stupid until recently to be able to find those. Even know it's a mixed bag.

We live in a world of dumb devices that could be so much smarter.

I just open the fridge and look. It's not an onerous task.

Thankfully, we were born with eyes and brains.

I've had a wifi-connected[0] Samsung fridge for 6 years. A few connected features that I like but aren't life-changing:

- 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.

> The app also records when the filter was changed

The filters I buy come with little date stickers to put on it.

Those are undoubtedly useful features, I just question why they should need the cloud:

> - Reminders to change the ice/water filter get sent to my phone.

How do you deal with all your other maintenance tasks around the house? with other appliances? with your car? Why not use a central system, like a task/reminder app?

> - 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.

I would understand a child leaving the door open but a teenager doing it that often is kind of wild? Regardless, wouldn't a reminder beep that starts when the door has been open for 5 minutes be better? Must everything be on your phone? It's not even actionable if you're not in the house, where you'd hear a local beep.

> Why not use a central system, like a task/reminder app?

I do. I have OCD. Redundant systems and being able to confirm things are key for me.

> I would understand a child leaving the door open but a teenager doing it that often is kind of wild?

Teens can be absent minded. You might be shocked by how common it is for families with teens to replace a set of forks that just disappeared one by one.

> wouldn't a reminder beep that starts when the door has been open for 5 minutes be better? Must everything be on your phone? It's not even actionable if you're not in the house, where you'd hear a local beep.

It does beep when opened too long.

Remote notifications are the point. They are actionable: when I get the remote notification, I shoot off a text "close the fridge".

I see reasons to have smart features in a fridge. Reminding you what food is going to be bad soon. Letting you know a list of recipes you can do with what food you have. Hell even being able to see and set timers without having to take my phone out. What I cannot fathom is the fact that the module running those smart features is not separated and modular enough so that basic functions like refrigerating are not dependent on an entire Android stack running.

I cannot relate to this. The past 15 years have made me so tired of connected devices (and subscriptions) that simple products feel like a relief. Side note, I bought a great, magnetic timer for my daughter that we keep on the fridge for just a few dollars.

> Reminding you what food is going to be bad soon. Letting you know a list of recipes you can do with what food you have

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.

Right now, no. The technology just isn't there yet.

… and makers don’t have an incentive to even deliver such features, because people are already buying them?

At least I wouldn’t know what’s stopping them from building actually-useful features, tech-wise. Or was it just always a bad idea because fridge placement is random and items are often hard to find/detect?

I don't think many people are buying them tbh.

The technological issue is that computer vision is hard, even after the last five years of AI progress.

My 'smart' fridge came with an app. Which only function is to perform diagnostics on the fridge when something goes wrong. A while ago, the fridge stopped cooling. I ran the diagnostics, which reported everything as A-OK. A service call found that the compressor had died. So, yeah, they cannot even do the basics, let alone something actually useful.

All of those features just seem so gimmicky, and I could never imagine myself actually relying on them. If you are a functioning adult, these things are barely convenient, and the novelty wears off very quickly.

I will take a solidly engineered fridge with a good energy usage profile every single time over some overengineered wifi-connected piece of crap.

People pay 10-20% extra for food to be delivered to their door just for the convenience of only having to open a single app rather than call the take out place directly.

Never underestimate the value of convenience to people.

> Reminding you what food is going to be bad soon. Letting you know a list of recipes you can do with what food you have.

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.

It's one of the tragedies of modern tech. We could make a time saving smart fridge but we end up with ads and data collection with a veneer of usefulness.

Why not just attach a tablet to your fridge? Then you can easily upgrade and replace it over time. Maybe the fridge maker could integrate some internal sensors and let a generic tablet interface with them, if you want to? No need for some integrated "smart" (dumb) feature that bricks the fridge and fails at doing the basic job a fridge is supposed to do!

I'd love to text my fridge from the grocery store and ask it how much cheese is left. It's a good idea. It's just that these days, we're just not making the kind of company who can be trusted to implement it. Gotta fix that first.

Because the fridge company can make more money by displaying ads on your fridge, and consumers can save more money by buying the fridge with the ads and taping cardboard in front.

Have any data that the savings are passed on to the consumer? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't see any modern, late-stage capitalism companies doing anything that actually benefits the consumer.

They aren’t. The smart features are more expensive to make and the added features justify a higher price. Most people don’t care either way and will buy it when they see a discount and feel like they got a good deal.

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

any instances of this in the wild? it seems like fridges are pretty cheap anyway and ones with smart features are more expensive? i don't think this a tv-like scenario.

It's apparently common enough for funny things like this to happen.

https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/1ow6cpu/appa...

https://old.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1pi2ax1/woman_...

Reddit now requires login. What are these?

There was a fake story that went viral last year about a woman being sent to the psych ward after seeing the Pluribus ads on her Samsung fridge.

The ads were real though: https://ibb.co/5hbG7ymS

https://archive.ph/U3CVN

Cant manage to get an archive link for the second one.

Does anyone know of an xcancel like service but for Reddit? OP links just lead to a login page.

They now require login for old.reddit.com. You can remove the subdomain and access the modern JS laden slop without an account unless they deem it 'Adult Content'

Redlib works. Either self host or use a public instance: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib#instances

Smart appliances just seem like a ticking time bomb.

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.

Just solder a jtag connector to them and let AI dump the firmware, decompile, reverse engineer and flash a non-updating, sanitized version.

That does sound like a fun project! Not on an appliance that I rely on working 24/7 though. Maybe an idea to apply to a broken unused one.

Well, they break anyway.. so might aswell break into the ones that are destroyed

"I want my appliances to last far longer than devices like my phone or computer."

... and hopefully be simple. My washer and dryer (made in late 90s) are dirt simple inside, with parts readily available. I recently had to replace the belt in the dryer, and a water valve in the washer. It was a diy job, with the help of a few youtube videos.

My neighbor guest's car got stuck in their driveway recently when an electronic parking brake malfunctioned. It really feels like all the gadgetry is a step backwards.

But your non-smart fridge doesn't support surveillance capitalism or a subscription model! How will investors keep making money on you if you think you can just decide for yourself when you need to shop for food?

Our fridge is a smart fridge, though it doesn't have a screen on it, AI in it or anything like that, and the smart fridge capabilities can be easily removed (it's a pluggable module).

I like knowing if I (or someone visiting our house while we're gone) left one of the doors open or when it needs maintenance done on it.

You think smart fridges are bad, my wife bought this $300 "smart toothbrush" that I'm just like... facepalm. All it does is connect to an app and reminds you to brush your teeth or something. It's so dumb I'm just waiting for it to break.

Are you sure that's all it does?

My $150 "smart toothbrush" (some Oral B iO model) has accelerometers to track its head position and the app lets you know if you're not covering certain areas well enough. Since using it properly (i.e. checking the app and adjusting my brushing) I don't have to go to the hygienist as often.

Pretty much all electric toothbrushes have a mode that tell you how long to brush in an area, you're describing a gimmick to justify $150.

It's beyond just "30s in each quadrant".

https://www.oralb.co.uk/en-gb/product-collections/oral-b-app for an example.

As I said it showed me I was neglecting certain areas over time and fixing that saved me more than the price of the toothbrush in under a year.

But feel free to continue to disagree with it as a gimmick. In my experience most people that do this are some of the lucky people that could brush their teeth once a week with a stick and still have no dental trouble, meanwhile a small percentage of people seem to have to take great care of their teeth, avoid a vast array of food/drink, and still end up paying out thousands each year to a dentist. Genetics plays a big part in it and you don't get to pick your genes.

Even if it worked right, you know they will eventually force a paid subscription just to keep the fridge running.

That one tweet that went viral was funny

We don't need this anti-innovation mindset.

I genuinely cant tell if this is sarcastic. Im all for innovation where its productive, but some things already just work.

There's innovation [nods head] and innovation [shakes head].[0] We've seen what kind of "innovation" "smart" fridges have been.

[0]https://youtu.be/OvUr00GPcIo?is=zSoGzA6fV49JTSpV

I think it’s at least equally important to be sceptical of bad ideas, in order to let good ideas win. From a consumer perspective, smart fridges are usually bad.

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