Samsung Makes Ads on Smart Fridges Official with Upcoming Software Update
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Samsung is introducing ads on its smart fridges via a software update, sparking outrage among consumers who feel betrayed by the company's decision to monetize their appliances.
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(<https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2714117-mountain-dew-twitch-...>)
I wouldn't call a "$1,899 to $3,499" fridge cheap.
If it was legal to kill for money they would do that too. In some ways that already occurs.
Ads + subscription ($18 for heated seats in BMW, anyone?) + optional accessories and you can squeeze 20% more revenue.
If your next question is "why do they need to keep making more money?", the answer is capitalism.
There's no way that this was ever /not/ going to happen under current laws (US).
Attention is the ultimate resource.
* a product manager decides to include ads in some digital product. Their analytics show plenty of "engagement". The engagement is actually people accidentally clicking on the ad while hunting for the tiny "close" button, but even if the PM suspects it, they have no reason to volunteer that information. They keep getting their salary paid and even earn a promotion based on the engagement numbers.
* the developers are tasked with implementing the advertising infrastructure - they get paid while padding their resume about how they're building "scalable" systems.
* the "scalable" system runs on a cloud provider and earns them a ton of money. Cloud provider is happy.
* some marketing agency is given a budget to go and spend on ads. The person there maybe even knows that advertising in the aforementioned product is a bad idea because most of their clicks are fake... but if their client is tasking them with burning money, why would they refuse?
* a marketing person at a big company that doesn't actually need any more advertising to succeed is given a budget and spreads it across a few marketing agencies including the aforementioned one. They get paid, why should they refuse?
At every layer (and I haven't even listed them all), people get paid by skimming something off the top. It doesn't matter whether the advertising works, because nobody in the chain has any incentive to admit it while the status quo is so lucrative, so the rational thing to do for everyone is to not rock the boat.
An executive can point to a profit stream and suggest that’s beneficial to the company while ignoring externalities that cost the company 5x as much. Nobody inside has complete knowledge if someone was a good idea or not so the appearance of benefit often replaces the search for actual benefit.
By a percentage every year.
Compounding.
This was always an obvious outcome.
What the outcome actually happening is indicative of however is that consumers are very very very bad at their job (consuming the best products) and do not have enough rights.
If a customer was entitled to a working product without this kind of deficiency, and we had courts that actually applied punishments to large corporations (instead of unilaterally and without justification, significantly reducing fines to nothing) we wouldn't have this problem. It wouldn't be possible to profit off of this kind of advertising because you would be too busy signing court documents about how you suck at building stuff.
There's only so many human beings who can buy your fridge. There's only so cheap you can build your fridge. There's only so much you can charge for your fridge. But line must go up.
This is simply what it looks like when the people with money and resources decide that a stable and reliable profit is a Failed business.
The execs will receive their bonuses in two years and then move to the next company to grift again, and again, until they retire.
What is a contextualized ad?
Another one: "you have consumed 20 units of alcohol this week, and run out. Should I order this 25 pack that is cheaper?"
This is distinct from demographic (trends based on physical attributes, like age) or geographic or behavioral (your buying patterns) and they already know the device targeting because it's their fridge.
Classic digital advertising vectors.
Smart is the consumer that is able to spot all this BS ideas that are putting in front of us and avoids it as much as it can.
The real problem is, there's not much on the market that respects the consumers in this regard. Ask for an SLA on a smart fridge functionality and you'll be met with a confusion and possibly a revelation there's nothing of a kind.
It's all ignored because most consumers don't ask questions about reliability, functionality, security and control - they don't think of those. And it's not a matter of technical or specialized knowledge, I'm sure even a caveman can understand "will this work tomorrow the exact same way it works today?" or "what happens to my fridge if you go out of business?" - it's a matter of awareness. People simply don't know yet how those new things can fail them.
Eventually people will learn about the issues, and start asking maker companies those questions. But it's all too new today.
Let me guess: now to operate a dishwasher I need to download and install a mobile app. And also regularly update the app and the firmware of the appliance, or maybe need a permanent internet connection to correctly operate. It' BS all the way down.
The only thing that companies are expecting from providing you a smart feature is to somehow monetize that on a regular basis and the easiest thing to do that is to either sell your data or locking you down to a fucking subscription.
Instead, please imagine your dishwasher has a standardized management and observation API that's exposed on a LAN and can be consumed by your local IoT management software (e.g. Home Assistant). Nothing here should have any WAN connectivity, except for a tightly firewalled channel for out-of-home user communications.
I run dishwasher overnight (YMMV) and I have forgot to turn the dishwasher on more than once before going to bed. It would be nice if it would be able to either start on a ping from a home hub's cron if it's loaded, has detergent and locked. Or if it's not in a good state, when the home hub would sense I'm about to start my night routine it could notify me that I forgot to do something about the dishes.
Or consider a smart washing machine. Home hub can observe its state and home automation can actually remind you that you forgot to move the wet clothes to the dryer. Or, well, if we're considering advanced robotics, it could summon a service bot with appropriate manipulators to do it for me.
Or a smart kitchen stove. If the hub senses I'm going out and the stove or oven are running, it should bug the hell out of me before I'm out of the driveway.
That's what I mean when I say "smart". Unobtrusive, helpful home automation, doing what I actually want from it, not doing anything I don't explicitly want, designed to be reliable, private and fault-tolerant.
Smart home should be about dwellers convenience and automatically meeting their expectations (as defined by dwellers themselves), not a data siphoning mess with constant risk of security breaches, that becomes dysfunctional if someone else's computer (cloud) fails.
I totally recognize almost nothing of the sort is currently offered on consumer market. You need to have skills and time, or hire someone with skills and time, to make a system like that. It's already possible today though. And I don't see any reason why the situation has to remain bad like this forever.
What's especially frustrating to me is that my appliances that should have a delay on them don't; specifically, my dryer and dishwasher should be able to delay until later in the evening when my electricity rates go down. Instead, I have to get them ready and press the button with my thumb like my parents did with their appliances 40 years ago.
But hey! These things can chew up gigabytes of bandwidth[0], so there's that.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/smarthome/comments/mn3p6c/lg_dryer_...
We have a frame TV also and it worked nice for the very narrow use case we had.
> "Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams."
(I've used em-dashes since before LLMs and I'm not fucking stopping now)
EDIT: s,',,
...it didn't go anywhere after that date. But I still have the anecdote.
The level of absurdity here with respect to "miss[ing] out on other features" strains credulity.
I don't know why I would connect a fridge to the Internet at all. Maybe there is a use case where you can get a picture of the contents of your fridge on your phone when you are out and about? Like you're at the grocery store and can't remember if you need to pick up milk or not?
Sadly, I'm including their TVs in this. I have one today, displaying the output of an Apple TV and not directly connected to the Internet because hah, no way, but I'll be shopping around when it comes time to replace it.
Pity. They make nice stuff. Not nice enough that I'm willing to tolerate their anti-customer shenanigans, but otherwise decent quality.
I control what devices in my house connect to the internet.
No one in my family has an issue with it, use a years and years old integrated wireless mouse/touchpad and happy days, everything works as you'd expect, you can use it as a regular PC (surprisingly handy sometimes) and I can adblock the crap out of everything/use unhook to decrappify YT.
I happened to have an "old" Thinkpad (T470P, 7700HQ w/ 32GB RAM and the nvidia GPU) I wasn't using so it's left on all the time, runs the TV and serves movies over HTTP for family to watch via VLC (VLC will happily "stream" over HTTP)
One of those easy to do things where I'll never go back :).
The shield also has a HA integration.
There's no need to risk an update that puts ads on the TV.
> When showing that the user has switched to HDMI input, show the full screen information: "HDMI1, brought to you by _____ [insert advertiser here]. Best experienced with Monster HDMI cables. Gold plated for the digital clarity."
(<https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus>)
That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open? Amongst other various dark patterns?
Your statement here kind of characterizes it as user error, but the manufacturers are absolutely hostile actors here.
Enough people connect their TV/smart devices willingly to the internet that there is no need for adversarial approaches like this (which are not trivial to set up - they'd need to maintain per-country partnerships with Wi-Fi hotspot providers, pay them and hope the ROI is worth it).
Similar FUD is being spread around HDMI's Ethernet channel; a way to carry network data over an HDMI cable. I have basically never seen it in the wild on any consumer device, but even if it were, it would still require the other device to cooperate and act as a switch/router to share its connection to the TV. Yet despite that every time smart TVs and privacy comes up someone mentions this.
Not yet. Wouldn't be surprising, but most of the time the problem is "person holding the remote wants it to work, connects it to wifi when it offers, doesn't know that they shouldn't".
However, when you see the viral videos of "dream fridges" from the 1950s, it's important to remember that adjusted for inflation they would be something like $10k today. Of course they also last 10x as long, but you can still find fridges in that price range today with a similar value proposition. The question is whether or not you're willing to pay that upfront. I think we've all been so conditioned to accept that appliances go obsolete that it doesn't seem possible for a fridge like that to ever pay for itself.
It's the boots theory at work.
The "luxury" appliances can be double that and are still shit.
A commercial dishwasher will cut right through amounts of food that a normal residential dishwasher wouldn't touch (pre-wash is more for efficiency and to keep crap from piling up in the bottom tray of the dishwasher) and it will actually be ever so slightly less harsh on whatever goes in it (plastics are the problem mostly) because while it washes and rinses way hotter it doesn't have a stupid heating element that runs to dry things.
It will also use fucktons more water and more power and make more noise.
My last guess is more frequent cycles, meaning hotter water already at the spigot / dishwasher outlet, similar to the consumer recommendation to run the hot water for a minute prior to starting the dishwasher?
Plastics / tupperware were actually what I had in mind lol
If they're talking about the water being hotter, but not a "stupid heating element that runs to dry", then it sounds like they mean the hot air.
This in contrast to the consumer unit at home which heats the interior of the dishwasher for 45 minutes or so after it has done its washing cycle to dry things while still inside the dishwasher.
I don't know for dishwashers, commercial printers are expected to be serviced by the maker or affiliated business and getting parts as a mere peasant can be pretty complex. Surely rich people can just throw money at a contractor, but that's not what we're talking about I think (otherwise having a new one delivered everytime would also just work)
While I'm a computer farmer for my day job, I can repair a vast amount of different devices as long as they don't take specialised equipment like vacuum pumps. And while I don't consider myself a rich person, between my wife and I we're in the higher income brackets in the US, I still service as much of my own stuff as possible. And in general commercial stuff is in the same price ranges as the higher end consumer stuff.
I've had two boards die on appliances this year. Fortunately, warranty coverage paid for the parts. So now I have a practically new refrigerator and furnace. At least until they fail again in 3-5 years.
I wish more content like this existed. It’s the only type of review that is worth paying attention to.
Long story short if you live in an energy market like california the energy savings of the sub zero will likely offsets its additions cost over the lifetime of the unit.
[0] Excluding anywhere I lived for less than a couple months, like the middle of the Pacific or an exceptionally rough road trip through Wyoming.
Looking up the fridges myself, a Sub-Zero BI-42UFD/O is rated at 693kWh yearly, and a Frigidaire FG4H2272UF is rated at 671. There's no difference.
Does anyone have examples of consumer fridges like this?
Miele still has a good reputation, and you’ll pay for it. https://www.mieleusa.com/category/1022129/refrigerators-and-...
The problem is that there might be problems with the equipment or problems caused by the installer.
A few years ago, we ended up replacing a Sub-Zero fridge (27 years old) with another one because the repair bills were mounting. Because of the way the previous owner did the kitchen, using any other kind of fridge other than the 2' deep, 7' high kind would have involved remodeling. It wasn't quite $10k but it was close.
At our new house, we had a repairman fix the ice maker in our current fridge. It's 17 years old and could have come off the floor at Best Buy or Home Depot (NOT a Sub-Zero, in other words) but he recommended keeping it until it failed because the quality of current appliances is not as good.
Our water heater is going to need to be replaced because it's 17 years old and showing signs that it's getting too old. I want a heat pump water heater because the gas water heater is the only gas-powered appliance we have. Trying to assess reviews of heat pump water heaters and of the local plumbing companies is not fun.
What kind of fridge issues are you having? I just buy a $1000 Miele/Liebherr and it's fine for 10+ years. 0 repairs.
The rich person buys a $3500 pair of boots that comes with surveillance, useless AI, and bricks itself on the next firmware update.
The poor person buys a pair of boots, that are... boots.
But said rich person has at least one more fridge: a relatively-small, usually very elegant (in-wall, glass-door) fridge, located in the [badly designed for cooking, but pretty] "kitchen" that adjoins the butler's pantry [= nearest, usually secondary, real kitchen].
They use this "kitchen" to whimsically prepare avocado toast when hosting "guests" (e.g. people from Architectural Digest); or when vlogging / hosting their reality TV show about all the cooking they love doing. (At any other time, e.g. when hosting actual guests, if they want to make use of this kitchen [rather than simply speaking in their lounge until dinner is served in their separated dining room], it won't be by cooking there themselves, but rather by sitting around the kitchen island or the [probably open] secondary dining arrangement nearby, watching their private chef cook there, while they or their assistants try desperately to cover for how gimped their workflow is by having to use the faux-kitchen.)
And of course, even if the rich person does some whimsical/performative hobby cooking, the staff will have prepped and mise-en-placed anything they'll need from the butler's pantry onto the (huge) kitchen island in advance. (Like a cooking show!) So even then, they won't be needing the "kitchen" fridge. With the extreme edge-case exception of needing something to stay cool until the very moment it's needed; or needing to repeatedly chill it (think "making croissant dough", though I doubt a rich person would ever try.)
I think I've only been in one hectomillionaire's kitchen, though it can be hard to tell, and the only resemblance to your description is that he had a large household staff. But it wasn't his main house, and I don't know if you consider someone who isn't even a billionaire to be "truly rich".
They're pretty conventional.
Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know, but the regular old very wealthy (the sort you don't know who they are, and I think they prefer it that way) live what you would probably consider mostly very pedestrian lives. More trips? Yes. Multiple homes in nice places? Yes. A couple of nice cars and a (reasonably sized) boat? Usually. Chartered flights? Absolutely. An army of staff and never doing even basic shit themselves? Nope and no on the doing basically nothing unless they're really geriatric (and then can you blame them anyways).
Yeah, if you're "rich" as in "retired", your life is usually pretty mundane. Most such people don't even live in any kind of mansion these days†, but rather just in very nice homes that are perfectly-sized and perfectly-cozy for them and what they like to do — with some verrrry long driveways, if they're in the right part of the country for that.
† (Mansions as a concept evolved from palaces; both exist mostly to provide enough rooms to host guests when some other rich person decides to pilgrimage themselves and everyone they know over to your place to stay for three months — in turn because that was really the only good way to visit someone with full amenities, back before air travel. Nobody needs to do that these days. Any modern mansion exists either as a status symbol, or because the owner likes hosting parties [or imagines they might one day host a party, but never actually does]. Mansions are especially useful, in the modern day, for people who throw fundraiser galas, like politicians.)
> Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know,
I don't think it's SV people doing this. (The SV entrepreneurial "grindset" is a form of protestant work-ethic mindset; most tech millionaires find it hard to allow themselves to have staff. They might have a lot of people on retainer — lawyers, personal trainers, private-practice doctors, etc — but they would find the idea of paying the full salary for the exclusive use of even a maid to be a bit strange, instead preferring to just "hire a service" for that. Right up until they have a security scare, that is... but I digress.)
Rather, the personal-staff (private chef, limo driver, landscaper, several maids, etc) setup is, these days, something for the busy rich — think "runs ten businesses because they don't know how to stop", or "has an infinite queue of people needing them to make a decision about something" [politician, chaebol owner], or "thrives on fame, and so can't stand to turn down packing their schedule with ever-bigger gigs" [celebrity actors]. You find it in LA and in DC, not in SF.
These groups "have people" because they literally wouldn't be able to fit self-care into their schedule without "people."
In _principle_ the truly rich person would be better off with a really expensive fridge. Except the chances that it performs better or lasts longer are tiny. So for 4x-10x the price, you have no improvement. The only way to improve your outcome is to spend enough time doing research such that you can figure out if _any_ refrigerators aren't pieces of crap. A for-real rich person has more money than time, so this isn't worth it either. Yes, they might settle on the first fridge that's available and looks nice -- and this _could_ be a premium fridge -- but they really don't get any benefit from a premium fridge either. ie, there's nothing to really push them from a $2k fridge to a $5k fridge unless it's just something like capacity.
In other words, poor-to-middle class should NEVER buy a premium fridge -- but only because the market is terrible and "premium" _usually_ does not mean "more reliable." (if premium meant "much more reliable" then they should buy premium when they can afford it, as it would cost less over time due to longevity.) However, a rich person also accrues almost no benefit from a premium fridge, as the real cost to them is research time and not money.
So, who are these products for? Probably middle class people who want to _appear_ rich.
However, probably the major cost of fridge failures is not replacement but the destruction of the fridge contents. A friend of mine recently lost their freezerful of food. Apparently after a power outage the freezer forgot whether it should be a freezer or a regular fridge and defaulted to "neither". This is an example of a "premium" feature making the freezer worse.
So US$3500 is 12 times the cost of a poor-person fridge (excluding used fridges and "oh, I just go over to my mom's house") and ⅓ the cost of your rich-person fridge, which puts it much closer to the latter.
But I wouldn't be surprised if Wolfgang Puck or Gordon Ramsay has a custom walk-in fridge that cost a lot more than US$10k.
• The rich person's remodeller (or the developer of the house they buy) buys a commercial-kitchen prep fridge for the house's kitchen. This is a big, powerful, durable, repairable, no-frills, utilitarian fridge, that could be viewed as attractive or ugly depending on your opinion on brutalism. The rich person never sees this fridge. It's kept in the butler's pantry and only their private chef ever touches it.
• The rich person's interior designer then buys an elegant/classy half-sized in-wall glass-door fridge to live in the kitchen itself. This is intended for the rich person's household staff to keep constantly stocked with snacks and drinks for the rich person to grab. (Also, if the rich person thinks they want to cook one day, the staff will prep the exact ingredients needed in advance, keeping them in the butler's pantry until called for, but will then stage any "must stay cold" ingredients here.) This fridge is generally a piece of shit, made with huge markups by companies that make fancy-house furniture. But it sure is pretty! If (when) it fails, the staff can temporarily revert to just serving the role of that fridge, running to the butler's-pantry fridge or other cold-storage area (maybe a walk-in!) when the rich person wants something. (Also compare/contrast: in-wall wine cooler.)
• The rich person's household staff might respond to the rich person's request for more convenient access to snacks/drinks in certain areas of the house by buying + keeping stocked one or more minifridges. There'll certainly be one in the house's bar. (There's always a bar.) These are sturdy commercial-grade bricks, built by the same companies that build the ones that go into hotels; but these companies serve rich people just as often as they serve hotels, so they tend to have an up-market marque that makes the fridge look fancy while reusing the well-engineered core.
I appreciated the kernel of truth: industrial fridges will not come with adware in the foreseeable future. Buy industrial.
You can buy:
• a big ugly powerful repairable/durable industrial one (like a server);
• an average-sized, somewhat-fancy (because high-trim), repairable/durable commercial one (like a workstation);
• or an average-sized fancy "aesthetic" one, made by a design company rather than an appliance company, that isn't repairable or durable (like one of those bespoke "sleeper desk PCs.")
The same goes for most things you can spend a lot of money on. A sound system, a vacuum cleaner, a car, etc. In each of these cases, "premium" has these same three distinct meanings. None of which involve showing you ads. But all of which have their own trade-offs. And all of which are usually quite a bit more expensive (each for their own reasons) than the highest-trim product sold directly to the average consumer by what you'd think of as a "consumer brand."
Oh also, for vacuums at least, shop vacs are apparently the way to go. And for audio, DIY beats the pants off anything commercial (unless you don’t mind spending thousands of dollars more).
- consumer kitchen mops break in 1-2 years. Get the commercial one for 2x and it lasts
- my bike is locked to an 25mm thick toughened steel industrial eye-bolt (set into concrete) which cost < $10. A consumer item intended for that purpose costs ~$70
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/modern-appliances...
You, the poor person, spend $150 on crappy Nike athletic footware, that isn't sized to fit, will fall apart in 6 months (3 if you're using them for actual athletics), but are unfashionable in 3 weeks (but you'll buy them for your middle school children anyway). And you'll think you're rich doing it. Never mind that the cost was $4.75 (up x2 what it was pre-Covid) in Bangladesh, plus $0.30 shipping across the Pacific. The sweatshop worker got a cut of $0.04 for the pair.
The analogy doesn't work though, because people nowdays are paradoxically even stupider than they were in Victorian times.
Manufacturers which are aiming at being dirt cheap and selling lots of products, have low margins and simply cannot afford too many replacements / warranty repairs. High margin products don't care, they could make you three in that price and still be ok.
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