Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.
Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.
Of all the appliances that could be “smart”, I find the fridge the least exciting.
My heat pump has Wi-Fi. Cool, I can turn it on remotely so it starts heating or cooling my home.
Washing machine that tells you it’s finished and reports the ETA in the meantime - not an entirely unwanted feature, since the same program could take 1 hour or 5 depending on how much laundry I put in. Mine doesn’t have it and I don’t NEED it, but if I’m ever in the market again and two equivalent washing machines from a reputable brand (MAYBE I’d trust Miele. Definitely not Samsung, LG, most others) were priced roughly the same, I’d buy the one with it.
I just can’t think of a world where a smart fridge would work better for me than my dumb one though. I paid a bit extra to get one that had a better efficiency rating and a nearly silent compressor and that’s it. The only things I would find to be “upgrades” over this would be if it was a larger SBS one that made ice, but I decided not to triple the budget from ~600 to ~2000.
First you have to imagine that the data is 100% yours to control, and not going to be used for spying, advertising, etc.
Ok, with that in mind:
Have you ever gone to the fridge for something like milk or yogourt only to find out that it went bad and you didn’t know? I hate that. I’d love it if the fridge could warn me 2-3 days before something went bad so I could remember to use it. It could scan everything that went in and that should give it enough data to tell you when something was about to go bad.
What about going shopping and realizing that you didn’t check to see if you still had X at home, and whether X was still good. Like, I’m often buying green onions but I don’t use the whole bunch right away. Do I need to buy more? So, when I’m shopping I either overbuy just in case I don’t have enough, or I take a risk and maybe I don’t get green onions on my dish this time. It would be handy if I could ask the fridge whether I still had green onions.
Before a big shopping trip, I’ll almost always check in the fridge for what I currently have, then start on the list for things I need to buy. It would be handy if I could just hit a button and the fridge could auto-populate the start of the list based on what I currently have remaining, and what I’m low on, based on what I normally buy. I could always edit what the fridge suggested, but it would be nice not to have to manually go through and say “ok, milk, how much do I still have? Is it still good? Veggies, what do I have? What meats do I have…”
How is your laundry taking 5 hours? Just how much are you stuffing in those machines?
A washer that takes that long would be kind of insane, but a drying time in the 4+ hour range isn’t that wild, in my experience.
Thats a long time as well.
And here the dumb washer/dryer at my place takes 45 mins to wash and 1 hr to dry, every time
I assume it’s got a pretty small capacity. Bigger capacity washers and dryers take about the same amount of time to wash four times as many clothes, but they take the same amount of time to dry as three or four loads–you just get them all during the same cycle, without having to move anything over.
A smart refrigerator could cool down more when electricity is cheaper, for example when the sun is shining on my solar panels.
The only reason I can think of why a fridge should be connected to WiFi is to notify you if the door is left open, or the temperature is too high.
If my fridge could tell me that my milk is about to expire or if I could query it for what is in it, I would want that. But I cannot really come up with anything that current “smart” appliances have that a fridge could use.