- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37646129
Source: Reddit post— Private front-end.
Samsung Statement to Android Authority:
Samsung is committed to innovation and enhancing every day value for our home appliance customers. As part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen that value, we are conducting a pilot program to offer promotions and curated advertisements on certain Samsung Family Hub refrigerator models in the U.S. market.
As a part of this pilot program, Family Hub refrigerators in the U.S. will receive an over-the-network (OTN) software update with Terms of Service (T&C) and Privacy Notice (PN). Advertising will appear on certain Family Hub refrigerator Cover Screens. The Cover Screen appears when a Family Hub screen is idle. Ad design format may change depending on Family Hub personalization options for the Cover Screen, and advertising will not appear when Cover Screen displays Art Mode or picture albums.
Advertisements can be dismissed on the Cover Screens where ads are shown, meaning that specific ads will not appear again during the campaign period.
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It was bad enough getting ads at the gas pump
Fast charging stations tend to have the brightest, most gigantic ad video screens. So big that you’re subjected to them merely passing by and not even using the charger. I suspect they’re brighter than the sun because they get cheap subsidized energy to run the ad screens since it’s “for charging green cars” and they’re using a loophole.
I was talking about the L2 at my house but ok. The largest L3 charging network doesn’t even have screens, though it’s figurehead is a Nazi.
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“Thats what you get” comments aren’t helpful or productive. Don’t demonize the customer, demonize Samsung in this case. It’s not the customers fault… I highly doubt it said “Advertisements coming soon” om the box when they bought it.
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Feel free to make fun of ppl, but I hope you realise that these type of comments that ridicule the customers just leave the companies out of the fire and let them continue doing this to us.
Not everyone is technically inclined or educated on this type of stuff, not really their fault that these companies prey on them with this stuff.
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Samsung is pretty known to be a shit ass company
Im not sure that they are to the general public.
Edit: I dont think most people know much about the brands they support or use
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Thats the plan, though I think the void is starting to listen. The other option of do nothing is better in your eyes?
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Laughing at people won’t help change their minds, it will likely make them reinforce their decisions out of anger etc. So i think you are doing it wrong.
People won’t learn on their own, either we help and things get better (because ppl stop buying this type of garbage) or we laugh and they keep buying poopy for vengeance.
I argue it IS customer’s fault. To let Samsung be able to enshittify this much and still stand on the market.
Will they come and collect it for a refund if you don’t agree with the new TOS?
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If only. Would not be surprised to break core functionality.
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I think that people who would buy a fridge like that deserve to watch ads.
They probably enjoy it too, sick fucks
Ads are one thing, but how the fuck hasn’t Bixby been killed and buried yet???
It captures them a shitton of data that they very likely sell or use to get advertisers on board.
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Whenever appliances get brought up I always warn people to stay away from Samsung.
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LG is getting greedy though. They removed the Permanent Press button so that you have to connect it to Wi-Fi and use the app to set that cycle. Same with “just rinse and spin”. The app is so unbearably slow that I was motivated to figure out how to set up a Home Assistant server and make my own custom dashboard to use in order to avoid interacting with that damn app.
The actual wash/dry performance is excellent, though.
I’m going to say all LG laundry stuff must not be created equal. We have two washing machines at work and they both break every month . The only tech I can think of that’s worse are HP printers.
I fix ours (not my job, but it’s a good mental break from regular work), I start a new job next month and my boss asked what he should do about them.
Wait until they break and get something else, they’re not worth fixing. It’ll be cheaper and less downtime to buy something good.
Meanwhile I have a pair of Kenmore 80 series washer and dryer. They’re more reliable than my own heart and lungs, and I can get parts for them when a knob or a lid switch goes bad once every decade or two.
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I once had an LG washing machine that broke after less than five years. Not impressed.
LG is positively vicious on clothes. Also, fun fact, it’ll run a gentle cycle with the water turned off. It only seems to notice water level on runs that do load sensing.
Miele, Bosch, or gtfo for cleaning appliances.
And if you need a full sized machine from either Miele or Bosch, you get to employ the GTFO option early since neither of them make one.
I heard those linear compressors could be the best in the industry but they tended to fail. Did they finally fix that?
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Stay away from Samsung. Period.
They’ve been on my boycott list for a long time.
I know this is anecdotal but I bought a Samsung washer and dryer in 2013 and the dryer lasted 9yrs and the washer lasted 10. I did have to replace the heating element in the dryer around the 7yr mark but other than that they both were fine.
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I made the mistake of buying a Samsung washer/dryer set in 2017. The washer actually still works and the seal has held up well, but the dryer drum jumped its tracks within the first year, and both have been plagued with gremlins.
Fuck Samsung appliances and honestly most things Samsung sells.
I am not going to say people should buy a Samsung appliance especially with this nonsense.
But you’re falling for, and propagating, a pretty common fallacy. it isn’t that Samsung appliances are significantly worse (Consumer Reports puts them in the bottom half of the ranking but they are very much “fine”). It is that people buy them a lot.
You see this with all kinds of brands. “Never buy Shark. Everyone who buys a Shark comes back and return it or buy a new vacuum in a few years”. It isn’t that Sharks are failing more than others (they are actually #1 or #2 according to CR, depending on the metrics). It is that they are what sell the most.
It also has to do with design/repairability. Samsung seems to go out of its way to design their products to be cost-prohibitive to repair and difficult/impossible to disassemble without damaging them. Lots of glue and brittle one-time-use clips. Lots of breakable switches and dials mounted on a custom mainboard.
The most crashed make and model of airplane in history is the Cessna 172.
The most popular make and model of airplane in history is the Cessna 172, in production since the 1950’s and some guy in Kansas is slapping one together as I speak.
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And I am trying to explain to you why your “experience” is very limited insight on a heavily biased sample.
If you sell 500 widgets, some percentage of those customers are going to have problems. If 450 of those widgets are from Innertrode, a majority of that percentage are going to be with Innertrode widgets. That doesn’t mean Innertrode makes worse widgets. That just means you, like most people, could do with a primer on statistics.
I haven’t seen fans of Apple act this irrationally…
Yes. Pointing out that (mostly) independent consumer information groups have drawn opposite conclusions to you and pointing out this is a very common phenomena in sales is “irrational”. Who needs facts when we have feelings, amirite?
And people wonder why there are so many complaints online about hating sales people.
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I didn’t read this comment because it’s a bunch of gaslighting bullshit.
Got it, pointing out common phenomena and referencing a very well established and (mostly) respected consumer information group (Consumer Reports. Would link to the data but I always forget what is and isn’t paywalled with them) is “gaslighting”
And everyone who points out an alternative to your conclusions is mentally ill.
(Actually this is more of a worldwide phenomenon but Donald Glover is just too good to not post. And… it was shockingly hard to find an easy to grab image from that song that is not gun violence or way more intentionally minstrel-y than anyone would get without an even longer explanation of the joke than this).
The reason people say Samsung sucks isn’t because they’re bad at statistics, it’s because they can look at the blatant planned obsolescence.
For example, the “spider arm” on Samsung washers is deliberately made from the wrong metal so it literally disintegrates due to corrosion and breaks into pieces after a few years (i.e. shortly after the warranty ends), even as every single other metal component in the damn thing is made out of stainless steel and remains pristine.
That’s not my picture, but that’s what happened to my washer. I took it apart and saw for myself. And it’s not random bad luck, either; it’s designed into the product for it to fail that way.
So that’s why when some of us say we know for a fact that Samsung is shit, WE KNOW FOR A FACT that Samsung is shit, and we can demonstrate exactly WHY Samsung is shit. So don’t fucking tell us our experience is “limited” and “biased!”
The condensers are garbage
Guessing you meant compressors. If their condenser tubing is faulty, it’s a potential fire hazard.
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Meanwhile, my parents have some old random branded washer and dryer from the 90s that still works today. A few years ago they replaced a part, something to do with draining. Cost them all of 40 bucks and a couple hours.
They truly, and intentionally, don’t make em like they used to.
I have my great aunt’s Sunbeam waffle iron from the 50s and it still works great. Appliances used to be made to be repairable, and there were appliance repair shops all over the place
That’s just survivorship bias. You can absolutely still get reliable appliances that are cheap to repair. I’ve had to replace a few parts on my Maytag dryer (because my wife abuses it), and I only paid like $30 for a coil assembly and replacement sensors. My washer is still going strong after 10 years.
They’re often expensive, but so were reliable appliances in the good ol days. The main problem is that people want relatively cheap stuff, and that cheap stuff is made with cheap parts that don’t last as long.
Appliances used to be major purchases, and the modern consumer wants a cheap new appliance now instead of saving up for months.
Planned obsolescence is very real and one of the reasons we can’t have nice things.
That’s just not true. It’s not so much planned obsolescence as it’s companies making appliances to fit a price point and using lower quality parts to do so.
You can absolutely still buy appliances that will last decades, but they are expensive. 50 years ago you could absolutely buy a cheap washer that would need to be fixed frequently.
Are you suggesting that planned obsolescence doesn’t exist?
Never mind, you didn’t suggest, you straight up said it.
I am suggesting that companies specifically designing products to fail at a specific point isn’t as prolific as people like to claim.
Cheaper parts have lower MTTF specs, so by default a cheap product will fail sooner than an expensive one.
That’s not to say that expensive appliances can’t use cheap parts, but I’d argue the main goal is to increase profit margins rather than to increase turnover.
Yeah. It’s not “how evilly can we design this to only last three years”, it’s “how cheaply can we design this to last only at least as long as it has to”. There’s a difference between making it fail and just not caring if it continues.
Like how the mars rovers had a design lifetime of like three years or whatever, and anything past that was just a bonus. NASA didn’t design them to fail after three years, they designed them to last at least three years at minimum.
How about this (not OP): most things people attribute to planned obsolescence are not planned obsolescence.
Yes, but the other poster is correct with the other half of the argument. Right now at this very moment in history, appliances are the cheapest adjusted for the median household income than they’ve ever been. Why? Because that’s what consumers demand. The manufacturer knows full well they can’t make a durable machine at the price point consumers are willing to pay, but it’s okay for them because they also know consumers will happily buy another one in 5 years.
Don’t like it? Buy a Speed Queen washer or dryer.
“But there’s no way in hell I’m paying $1449 just for a damn for a washing machine!!!”
Yeah, my point exactly. And theirs, too.
Guess what, my dudes and dudettes: That oldschool classic Kenmore or whatever-the-hell washer your parents had when you were growing up that’s still trucking? Adjusted for inflation, that’s about what it would cost in today’s money, give or take a couple of percent.
(I sourced that Sears pricing by stealing it from here, by the way. The management apologizes deeply in advance if you wind up pissing away your entire afternoon going all nostalgic over the contents of that link.)
Yes sir
Good. If your fridge is connected to the internet you deserve to be served ads.
Anyone who fell into the trap of buying a fridge with a screen in it kind of deserves this.
I hear what you are saying. But our society is pretty fucked up if you “deserve” something bad because you bought a product without imaging how the manufacturer can make it worse in the future.
The owners should be able to return the product if something like this happens, no matter how long ago they bought it.
Yes, some people think that naiveté is worse than malice or cruelty for sone reason…
Malice thieves on our naiveness.
Indeed, but it is more just and effective to stop malice before naiveness
without imaging how the manufacturer can make it worse in the future.
We reached the point where companies do shitty things with all their digital services years ago. As long as it’s not open source, you’ll get shit “features”. And even if it is open source, it can be reverted on a whim (hello bambulab).
Help! My spy machine is spying on me!
Right‽ Why the fuck would you buy a fridge with any more than a compressor and a fan?
Yeah but imagine how cool stuff could be if companies didn’t 100% of the time ruin their inventions
I literally can’t imagine a box that makes things cold being made cooler by having a screen on it
“I can’t see the value in this thing for myself, therefore it’s stupid.”
Some people use a whiteboard or notepad magnetically stuck to their fridge to keep track of things: shopping lists, to-dos, notes to other members of the household. Some people stick photos to their fridge. This has been a thing since John Fridgemagnet stuck the first magnetic plastic letter to his icebox in 1968.
Putting a screen in the fridge serves a similar purpose, with the added benefit of integration with modern online calendars, remote access to the whiteboard/notepad (in case you forgot the shopping list at home), it displays a rotating slideshow of photos, and adds things like weather and news reports that you can quickly check while you’re grabbing the orange juice.
It’s not a stupid idea for the people who would use that functionality, but the product itself becomes stupid when the company starts forcing ads into the system or intentionally hobbles the software that was available af time of purchase (yes, Samsung did that too).
I’d never buy another Samsung fridge, but only because the ice maker still doesn’t work after three warranty replacements/upgrades to a “fixed” design. My family uses the screen feature all the time.
Aside: I really enjoyed your pun. 9.5/10
I don’t disagree but what’s also true is that some products are already as good as they can get and no longer need innovation. I know this is a bold claim but I’d argue that my dumb fridge without screen or internet connection keeps my food just as cool as the latest smart fridge.
some products are already as good as they can get and no longer need innovation
I just saw a poster for a sort-of cool fridge innovation: It has a door-in-the-door that you can open to get out commonly used things without having to open the main door and let all the cold air out. It’s called a “Conservadoor” refrigerator.
The kicker is that I saw this on Antiques Roadshow and it’s from the 1950s.
I don’t know why, but I remember seeing that somewhere, too. Fantastic idea. Ergonomic AND energy efficient. Though, I feel like adding in a mini door somewhat lowers the insulative abilities of the main door, so I’m not sure of the trade-off.
Ergonomic AND energy efficient
FWIW I don’t think it’s really all that energy-efficient. Air, being much less dense than solids, contains comparatively much less heat energy. The “cold” of a refrigerator is mostly stored in the things inside it, not in the air inside it, so letting all the cold air out to be replaced by warmer air does not have a huge effect on the overall temperature of the fridge. I think you’re right that having a door which interferes with the insulating envelope is going to be worse than just opening the main door once in a while.
We need technology connections to make this experiment a reality
I’m a big fan of “make it actually better or leave it the fuck alone”
Anyone who bought one of these ridiculous monstrosities and didn’t expect ads is an idiot.
It’s a fucking box that makes things cold. Humanity is cooked if we can’t bring ourselves to look away from a screen for all the time it takes to get a slice of cheese out of the fridge
“we’ve discovered we can fill 80% of the customers field of view with ads before inducing seizures”
Why the fuck would you buy a smart fridge.
When the idea of them first came in to play the thought were items put in would have rfid tags or another identifier and your fridge could help you keep inventory and track when things might be going bad, suggest recipes and whatnot.
We shoulda known it’d be ads tho
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More like asking yourself “do I have milk” in the supermarket and being able to check that in a phone app.
They planned on having it automatically order more milk for you, but I guess Amazon wasn’t offering enough kickback for that. So we get ads instead.
I’m calling it here that other companies will start advertising dumb fridges on these smart fridges.
How else are you going to look at Facebook while you drink milk out of the carton if you forgot your phone in the living room?
It should display what is inside the fridge, without the energy loss of a window.
It should have a bar code scanner and a complete food inventory system.
It should be the “kitchen’s tablet” able to show recipes, watch cooking instruction videos, have a high quality curated knowledge compedium in a convenient and easy to access way.
It should be able to stream outside cameras and answer door bells.
It should be able to take video calls from Mom on XMPP.
It should have high precision control and diagnostic systems.
It should run ENTIRELY on open source software, not damn blob drivers, the display panel should connect internally with an HDMI cable.
Run Proxmox and all my menagerie of LXC containers, don’t cheap out LG!! I want 64 GB RAM and 2tb ssd and a slot to add an HDD.
It should auto-doomscroll for me while I peel potatoes.
It should be able to run a smart voice assistance running Mistral 8x70B medium, locally and OFFLINE but networked and answer my agentic commands with a posh british accent.ok, good enough, send it
I would buy and work and invest for whatever company you create.
Imagine if didn’t make things that sucked.
Where I live we had little cheapass gas station cake company called Vachon
Say what you will, they were a staple and “our beloved trash cakes”
Some company came in, bought it, and made them suck hard.
Replaced animal fat and sugar with seed oil and HFCS.
Nearly all the better cakes are getting cancelled and the company is probably on the verge of bankruptcy.
I haven’t bought those shitty cakes in years.Imagine if we had a trend of doing not-that.
You got a bit trigger happy for the last few points, but seriously, why isn’t the first 3 standards now. It can’t be that expensive to put that in a fridge, and with an open platform manufacturer could even get away by providing the barest software offering and let us do the job for them.
I just bought a fridge after my 15 year old one shit out. Let me tell you, trying to find a decently sized, dumb fridge with an ice and water dispenser is like finding the holy grail.
Samsung has evidently partnered with some timelords to get over 30 cu ft of fridge space in a 70"tall frame - including their door sized tablet.
Bosch has the next biggest but locks stuff behind an smart app. Hell, even LG has smart features to help you with your ice maker that will probably either be DOA or will break in a year.
I finally found a Whirlpool that isn’t smart and has a decent sized fridge, but it was a struggle.
Just duct tape an iPad to the refrigerator door. It’s cheaper and it works better.
Even cheaper to tape up a piece of paper that says “GO BUY SOME USELESS BULLSHIT”.
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You could add a printed ad with adhesive tape to the front door of your fridge to have a similar experience like all those “smart” things…
In the past, the typical example for a “smart device” was a refrigerator, that would automatically buy milk online once it’s empty, but I’m not sure if that really works (or makes any sense). But at least you can now see ads together with weather and news on your refrigerator door.
Don’t connect your devices to the Internet if they worked before without the Internet.
I’m now at the point where I actively seek out variants of devices that don’t have wifi capabilities. Did that for a ceiling fan and an AC unit. They were a bit cheaper, too, so win-win.
I wonder how long it will take for the “dumb” versions to become more expensive.
And pay attention if you are buying one that you don’t need to connect it! Let the company know you’ll buy a “dumb” fridge to avoid their bullshit.
but then how will I watch tiktoks on it!
Presumably on the Smart Clock?
“Innovation” used to mean better prices and/or better products. Adding adverts to a product you already own isn’t innovation.
It is innovation.
Just for the company, not for you.
