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Comment by weli | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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