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.
If I’d like emojis I’d use the clown emoji now.
A fridge doesn’t need AI. Or a firmware.
Or a firmware.
So are we moving back to bi-metallic thermostats?
Remember when there was just a little dial in the top of the fridge, that you turn, from “cold” to “colder”? Yeah. That’s really all that’s required. Fancier fridges had more than one dial, that controlled individual compartments, like your crisper drawers.
There’s plenty of middle ground. We had integrated circuits embedded in circuit boards for a long time before re-programmable chips started appearing, and those ones certainly didn’t connect to the Internet and brick themselves.
Given the fact my fridge regularly freezes my water, I’m reasonably confident that the bimetallic strip would possibly do a better job.
Why not? I’m sure we can easily make good ones at this point.
Y’all remember when Windows updated their OS and all computers without enough memory to run it were bricked?
Because we didn’t throw a fit then, when a company’s update destroyed our possessions, now we’re getting more of it.
This could actually just be more modes of planned obsolescence.
Uhhhhhhh too many times to count, yeah. Which incident are you referring to?
AI line of fridges
excuse me ?? smart fridge ?? AI ?? I don’t want to talk calories or nutrients, I just want a cold beer and fresh milk & vegetables. There will be a cold day in hell before I buy an AI capable fridge. I’ll go to a root cellar long before that! (i live in the woods, so yes, I CAN do that easilly)
And here I am using the same fridge that’s been going since before the end of the Cold War.
Half of my homes appliances are from the 70s/80s, and a handful are modern. Can u guess which ones are breaking? Fuck I will NEVER get rid of my cooktop and oven they are older than me and will likely outlive me still !
Old fridges do last longer, but from what I understand they use significantly more energy to run.
That’s for defrost
Appliance repair guy here and I have only one thing to say: 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
“Mourn” is a strong word here, but also, this is why you don’t connect your fridge to the internet…
It’s a fridge. It doesn’t even need an 8 bit microcontroller from the 1970s.
My washing machine keeps asking to be connected to the WiFi. 2 years I’ve been ignoring it, which has been very convenient. I think it just wants to watch porn.
So that’s what it means when it asks for a full load…
Plus it keeps collecting socks. Pervert.
I caught my mother’s dehumidifier connecting to WiFi to watch porn. The damn thing was actually dripping wet.
Imagine if you could make it watch advertising for your earnings… But yes, it would need the softwares belong to you, rather than to the washing machine’s maker…
There are apps which basically do that.
It can use a 32 bit microcontroller, like mine does, but it only has some pretty basic functionality like setting temperature and shutting down the fans if door opened. Anything beyond that is just overengineering.
it does, for massive user convenience. however, the more you add, the less convenience is gained from each addition, sort of like a law of diminishing returns-type thing.
My washer/dryer is “smart” and there’s no convenience there at all, honestly. It argues with me, it sits and flashes suggestions freezing the entire interface, it decides to just not do things at times. It’s hella annoying.
What convenience? You open the door, a light goes on, it is cold or freezing cold inside depending on the door.
The end.
My parent’s McClary fridge from the 1960s still runs on the original refrigerant.
Don’t tell me about energy efficiency when
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We are awash in renewable electricity
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Building new fridges every five years filled with e-waste running garbage software requiring a networking infrastructure on top of it surely used a few joules as well.
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It’s not in a landfill.
I can’t wait for the global energy crash, maybe we’ll be calmer and wiser when gas is 100$/liter.
for one, beeping after you leave the door open for 30 seconds. considering the longevity of a fridge, adding a microcontroller that does that is more environmentally friendly.
I think you don’t need microcontroller for that?
Microcontrollers are cheaper then analog clocks
Yes they are, but that wasn’t the point.
beeping after you leave the door open for a few minutes, also electricity is over a quarter a kilowatt hour some places.
Y’all just leaving fridges open all day where you are? In my neck of the woods “Stop staring and pick something, you’re letting all the cold out.”
fridges don’t always close properly
Well
A) Close it properly then. We have one of those at work, old worn out gaskets, fridge pops open when you close the top freezer, and somehow we can manage to figure out how to close it back up every time.
B) Replace your gaskets.
a microcontroller, couple sensors, and a speaker are cheaper
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Might I inquire as to what the convenience would be?
Digital display for thermostat/thermometer is nice.
Party Mode is convenient when adding large amounts of beverages (or leftovers) as it temporarily changes the compressor setpoint/cycle for a couple of hours in expectation of heavy usage.
Night mode / vacation mode can similarly change the compressor working profile to be either more quiet or energy efficient at times when it’s not expecting the door to open for extended periods of time.
None of these are essential features of a fridge, but they can be convenient.
Some things off the top of my head are:
- you could set the temperature to a number of degrees via a numerical display, which would be much harder to implement without a microcontroller.
- maybe you could have PID control over the compressor rather than bang-bang control, so the temperature would be more stable.
- these days, a bimetallic strip costs more than a microcontroller and a chip thermometer, despite the chip being much more accurate.
All of this only requires a really dumb microcontroller, though, not one with networking. I don’t see how that could be useful until your fridge could magically track what it contains so you could ask it if you needed to buy stuff while you were shopping. I don’t think we have the technology for that yet.
I think we probably do have the tech to track what’s in the fridge but we’d need a camera and some kind of ai watching it always…
Image recognition will be able to figure out the obvious items, and hopefully the expiration dates, too, but it’s not going to be able to figure out that opaque containers are nearly empty or identify leftovers in tupperware. It’s also probably going to be unable to identify when loose produce is past its best unless it’s extremely rotten.
beeping after the fridge hasn’t been closed for a while, or controlling the temperature, or turn on the lights when the door is open.
Yeah that can moatly be done without one. The beeping maybe not but the temp and lights can be done completely analog. Our old fridge literally had a push switch that turned off the light when closed (20yr old fridge)
Just wondering, is it confirmed that food actually spoiled? Because making the actual cooling dependent on smart functionality seems incredibly stupid. I assumed it would just be all the smart features that stopped working, but if it couldn’t even cool anymore… woooow XD.
Looks like it. Also seems confined to just Korea. The cooling itself was affected.
“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote, per a translation.
I mean I can sorta understand some convenience functions but it oughta have some default setting it falls back to. Especially temperature settings.
I do have a Samsung fridge but nothing that fancy. I mean I tried to get it to trigger an Alexa routine to play a message when the door opened but that didn’t work. Alexa saying “Close the door fatty, you’re not really hungry” could have been motivational.
You know, there are plenty of cheap window sensors you could just as well attach to your fridge door to achieve this XD.
Time for me to get on my Samsung soapbox, and it is for an entirely different reason but very relevant for why you shouldn’t buy a Samsung appliance!
Never. I repeat NEVER, buy a Samsung home appliance. For this reason ONLY. Especially when it comes to food preservation… or simply keeping food cold.
Here is the thing. Samsung will not let approved service repair companies stock parts. I repeat, WILL NOT LET APPROVED SERVICE REPAIR COMPANIES STOCK PARTS. So if you buy a Samsung refrigerator through Home Depot… and it breaks under warranty… you will get an apologetic service technician that will confirm that your appliance is broken.
Great!… I already knew that. That’s why all of my perishables are starting to smell funny. The service person feels bad for you but they don’t have the part to fix your appliance. They can order the part within 24 hours and be back this time tomorrow. Did you already have to take the day off work for the 6 hour service window???
Well this is all super annoying especially if you bought the EXTRA large capacity refrigerator and freezer… that NO ONE has enough coolers and ice to preserve…
Okay, so the service person orders the part and, dang… that wasn’t the problem!
Weird, Okay so NOW the service person will order the more expensive part that is actually the problem. All of the ice in the cooler has melted. All of your cooler food has spoiled.
The refrigerator THREE DAYS LATER is now fixed. F#*k Samsung appliances. And this is the annoying part about all their 5 star reviews. Yeah they look nice when you give them their stars but their reliability is GARBAGE!!!
If an “appliance company” will not let service people stock parts… for the love of god DON’T BUY IT.
Lastly… Samsung ice makers ARE THE WORST!!! You will only have REGRETS. REALLY!!!
Do you have a link to that not-stocking of parts?
Sounds like experience and not reading knowledge.
Trully what people really need in their lives are additional risk factors for their peace and quiet in exchange for little or no value.
I’m just happy that I’m moving in the very opposite direction, avoiding externally controlled computing devices like the plague and instead having my own stuff when I actually need some smarts on my stuff (which, at the moment, is mainly my TV media player).
We’ve recently had some big brownouts in the city and country I live in and those made me keenly aware of risks to my peace and quiet (for example, electronic payments don’t work if there’s no power, so if you don’t have actual cash on hand things can get pretty tricky) and nowadays there are way too many unnecessary dependencies on external entities in exchange for little, none or even negative value for us (don’t get me started on Smart TVs) - it’s long been the case that a big utility provider going down would be quite a pain in the arse, but nowadays lots of people’s risk exposure profile is so stupidly wide that “random company turning to vibe coding and sooner or later forcefully pushing an update that bricks your ‘smart’ device” or leaves your home network and digital devices one it wide open for people wanting to steal financial info from it, are maybe one of the biggest risks.
Wait, so there’s not even a hard thermo in it to fail safely? Well done guys, you really saved 10p per unit on that one
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…”
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.
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.
And here the dumb washer/dryer at my place takes 45 mins to wash and 1 hr to dry, every time
Thats a long time as well.
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.
I wonder how many microphones they put in those smart fridges?
All my verification cans are warm 🤮
