Samsung fridge subscription fee

Draper's law: Any screen a company can control will eventually display ads.

thats too absurd
- I wonder how your comment will age in 1, 10, 100 years.
- It's not because it includes company control.

Smart fridges don't even improve storing food.

I won't buy a smart fridge until they can play Tetris with the food inside.

We've seen how this goes: Eventually if you need a new fridge, you won't have a choice.
- It's just like smart TVs.
- Get a cold basement, or get some rare vintage fridge, or stop using anything that needs refrigeration is my plan.
- And everyone needs a new fridge every 3-5 years now because they're all pieces of shit.
- Unless there begins to exist a new business based around lobotomizing smart devices.
- Nah, fridges are simple enough that I guarantee it's trivial to rip all the smart bits out and still have a functioning fridge. Or just buy and old one, my grandparents still have their fridge from like 1970s and it still works.
Do you really want a row of your food disappeared when you arrange it neatly?
- It depends on how long the food had been in the fridge...
But without a smart fridge, how am I supposed to play Doom in my kitchen?
Don't you do that every time you fill it?
I can play Tetris with food inside of me.

Just don't get the screen wet, if the screen is broken, the fridge won't work for "safety" reasons.

This reminds me. I need to call my uncle and ask him about that Fridge at his country place that's been running since 1994. He's selling his place and I want that fridge!

It's been running since 1994? He should probably think about catching it!
- daaaaad!
Sadly, fridges are the one appliance that uses the most energy, it runs 24/7, so running an older model will cost you a lot in the long term. I have a 20 year old fridge that hasn't had a problem ever, save a broken glass shelf and a door basket, and I'm replacing it with a dumb one with the best energy rating. It's the same with cars, although it's getting harder to find "dumb" cars.
My fridge is about that old too. It's entirely possible that fridge will still be chugging along in 2050. Whereas a brand new Samsung fridge has about a zero chance of lasting until 2050.
- Not zero, about the same as the survivorship bias of old appliances.
  And the electricity cost will be about 10 times lower.

Actually (put on fedora) a "smart" fridge is not necessarily bad.

No what absolutely sucks is lock-in and enshittification.

If you were to imagine a FLOSS OSHW fridge that used e.g. OpenFoodFacts and data from your purchases, e.g. OCRing your grocery list receipt or online purchases and genuinely helped with stock, recipes, diet, etc why not.

The WHOLE point is control, it's not the technology.

Exactly, we don't need to ditch computers and smartphones and go "back to nature" like some people say. We need control.
- Counterpoint - we do not need appliances capable of running operating systems with userlands. A pre-programmed microcontroler should be more than enough for most appliances
- I hate that any new tech nowadays is caveated by this perversion of right to ownership.
  It's gotten to the point that I either actively seek older tech, or just go for even more expensive niche tech by small private tech players like Framework. But then my worry becomes, are these small private tech companies actually principled or are they just waiting on their exit strategy to be bought out?
Yeah. People hate "smart" stuff and IOT and i sometime do too, but owning a bit of automation tech makes me realise the shitty thing about these tech is we're being forced to use it for even the basic shit and in THEIR term, which mean they can brick your stuff if they want to.
I have two aircond that comes with IOT that i can connect for extra feature, but that's entirely optional stuff, i can operate it like a normal aircond. We need stronger consumer protection and more personal control.
- Home Assistant ftw
- I get they can't support an old device forever, but then a local API should be available by law.
- “smart” stuff [...] these tech
  That's why picking the right tech matters. My heuristic is that if you need a proprietary app, it's NOT going to be on your term, hard pass.
  If you do need some connectivity, it's also probably bad.
  If you do not need connectivity and it's interoperable via standards then and only then maybe it can be good.
Theoretically, I suppose that you could reflash your fridge. It's unlikely that it's running a dedicated embedded system nowadays. It has to be either android or Linux (or maybe Windows if they're idiots, which is always a possibility).
- you could reflash your fridge
  Well yes, but honestly that's swimming upstream. I always discourage reverse engineering or hacking unless you do it for learning and entertainment purposes. If you love the challenge it's amazing. If you want to use the tool they you are giving away money to corporations you do not trust and you put a lot of weight on your shoulders to maintain all that over time.

Why the heck are people buying these things in the first place?

Company pays a kickback to condo building
Condo building puts one of these in every unit
Your lease is nullified if you interfere with the ad loads
- Black electricians tape. Lots of it.
Ape brain go "ooh new thing better than old thing!"
“I have money, please give me your most expensive/ best fridge” but in some cases the most expensive is not the best.
- These are nowhere near the most expensive fridges. They are on the higher side of the average range.
  In my experience, the people buying these fridges are low income, low tech knowledge people that got approved for (likely too much) credit.
- If you're wealthy enough to waste a lot of money on a fridge you aren't buying one of these abominations. Its going to be a built in like sub-zero.
  I honestly believe these fridges are not being bought in large quantities and are part of the tech bubble.
Family calendar, watch shit while cooking, read recipes.
- I don't even like exterior water or ice dispensers.
- My phone had all of that, and I can place it in a convenient location to watch while I cook. My fridge is beside or behind me as I cook.

Is there a kind of open source dumb appliance movement out there? It sure seems like we need one.

They wouldn't be free as in beer, but it would be awesome to have widely available instructions to take existing mass produced parts and assemble a functional and serviceable appliance.

Or maybe just a control module and some sensors that you can use to retrofit smart appliances.

I'm sure the big companies would keep them from gaining mass adoption though, thanks to cheap appliances with ads and junk parts. They probably already have.

I had an idea to create FOSH (Free open source hardware) license and wiki that contains schematics and plans for making your own hardware, be it a fridge or printer, or handheld label machine but i dont know if it will be worth anyones time. I dont have electrical engineering degree so i couldnt do more than test the products and maintain the website.
Or ... just don't connect it to the internet?
It is not because it has a wifi antenna or an ethernet port that you need to connect it. Especially if you only want to use the dumb features anyway.
- Or … just don’t connect it to the internet?
  It is not because it has a wifi antenna or an ethernet port that you need to connect it.
  This is increasingly becoming a false statement, unfortunately. Companies are indeed forcing customers to connect in order to use the regular features. For instance, Roku TVs won't let you change to a regular HDMI input without first connecting and accepting their ToS and updates.
  Secondly, even when the forced connection hasn't been implemented yet, the problem is not entirely fixed. These fridges with digital panels are notorious for randomly having that panel fail, and then the ENTIRE FRIDGE stops working, even though the actually useful compressor and refrigeration loop is intact. Of course, the company will also refuse to sell you a replacement digital panel.
  A smart appliance disconnected is still significantly worse than a dumb appliance.
- That's why I also mentioned them being made cheaply and using junk parts.

On a related note, I was looking at RTINGS recently at their recommended TVs. One really important item for me is that I'm not subjected to ads.

It turns out that every single smart TV they tested has ads, and there's no way to opt out of those ads.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv

It's not possible to "vote with your dollars" to choose a TV that doesn't have ads, because 100% of the TVs have ads now.

I know you can get a commercial flat panel intended for restaurants and stuff that doesn't have any of those features, but those are hard to find, expensive, and don't have basic features like multiple inputs.

If you think you can get around this by refusing to connect your TV to the Internet, some of them start to interfere with your use of them until you do connect them. Which ones? I wish RTINGS told me.

And, making it all worse, you know that every one of these things is going to have an EULA that allows them to enshittify it even more at some future date. And, you can't get around that either, because either they're designed to stop working if they don't a recent update, or there's a bomb planted in an update that only activates months later, so rolling back (if that's even possible) won't help you.

I know US law is never going to help consumers with this, but I do hope eventually Europe addresses this. People in Europe do still sometimes seem to have some rights when it comes to big companies.

It’s not possible to “vote with your dollars” to choose a TV that doesn’t have ads, because 100% of the smart TVs have ads now.
There, FTFY.
At least Sceptre has a wide selection of dumb TVs. There are more brands if you search.
- It was 100% of the TVs that RTINGS had reviewed, which was 501 different TVs, but apparently no SCEPTRE TVs at all.
  Unfortunately, it looks like the SCEPTRE TVs don't get very good ratings:
  HD picture quality was only decent. It did an excellent job displaying the finest detail of HD content. Color accuracy was acceptable, but below that of most models...
  This model has fair sound quality with below average performance.
  https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/tvs/sceptre-c550cv-u/m393713/
  So, I guess there is one manufacturer who still makes dumb TVs, it's their low-end line and doesn't get good reviews, but it is a dumb tv, which is nice.
"there's no way to opt out of... ads"
FYI... You want an oubliette for ads, and PiHole is your friend there. No hyperbole. Easy install & upkeep, remarkably effective, active community of devs & fans of all sorts, and just nice people all the way down, IMHE. 🙇🏼‍♂️✊🏻
Essentially, said ads have to come from somewhere before being presented to your eyeballs/eardrums, and a PiHole let's the ad servers think they're doing exactly that, but sends them into the void, instead. Clean, efficient, silent.
Fuck capitalism, but don't tell it you're doing so. No reason to notify it of it's failure to inundate your household. 🤓🖖🏼
- PiHole let's the ad servers think they're doing exactly that
  PiHole blocks the ads by manipulating the DNS entries of known ad servers. So, the ad servers don't get any traffic. It's the ad clients that are affected. The ad servers never get any traffic.
  Do the PiHole block lists work for TVs? Probably. But, the block lists are mostly built for web / app clients. It probably works if your TV uses Google TV. But, it's possible that other TV operating systems like Tizen use a different source for its ads that isn't on the blocklist. The worst case would be if the ads came from the same domain as the updates for the TV OS. You could block that domain, but then your TV couldn't get updates. And some TVs, if they can't get updates will start to complain and interfere with your use of them.
  I wouldn't want to risk it, so I'd prefer to get a dumb TV that still had all the standard TV features: a TV tuner, multiple inputs, a high refresh rate, decent speakers, etc. But, failing that, I'd be OK with a smart TV that didn't have ads built in. But, apparently neither of those things is easy to find anymore.
I don’t know if this is helpful, but I recently bought a 55” Hisense and I just plug my old-school Roku USB stick into it. The UI is super basic and ad-free. It’s not 4k or anything, but for streaming shows and playing PS5 it works like a charm.
- Here's what RTINGS says about one of the Hisense TVs:
  Ads Yes
  Opt-out No
  Suggested Content in Home Yes
  Opt-out of Suggested Content No
  Unfortunately, like most TVs on the market, the smart interface contains ads, and you can't disable them.
  And someone on another site has a video showing an ad playing as soon as their Hisense TV is turned on. The person posting says it doesn't happen every time. And, maybe it's disabled if you have it set to turn on using "input 2" or whatever your USB stick is connected to. But, an unskippable ad on start-up means I'm not going to risk buying a Hisense TV.
Just don't connect your TV to the internet? I really don't get why anyone would do such a thing in the first place.
Never had any ads on a TCL TV because it can't reach any servers. And it happily is chugging along.
- Just don't connect your TV to the internet? I
  Some TV models start to complain if they're not connected to the internet, interfering with your use of them.
Do you really need multiple inputs? Pair it with a nice receiver and let that handle the inputs.
- How much is a nice receiver going to cost me?

Drink verification can to access refrigerator.

Then you are stuck, cause the verification can is inside.
- That's why it's important to have a redundant backup fridge with a recovery verification can.
Yes! Why hasn't anyone posted the copypasta for this?

Damn it, can't get to my verification cans!

For those who have no idea what stoy is talking about, I present this glimpse into the future:

PiHole saves the day yet again.

Until it's deemed illegal to block ads and you lose points on your social credit rating, more bodies for the corporate prison system.
The fridge couldn’t reach the manufacturer’s servers, it gives an error and locks itself refusing to being open and a message appears “Cannot verify subscription status. Contact technical support”
- Sounds like something that can be fixed by a little angle grinding.

We have determined that we’ll be able to fill 80% of the user’s display with advertising before inducing seizures.

You'll have to own the Oasis first.

meanwhile the fridge from 1986 is still running in my garage and doesn't need me to ask how it's feeling or update firmware

...That's a Bosch refrigerator with a tablet stuck to it, presumably with a magnet. (Yes, we ruin everything for you on the Internet.)

Still. Samsung would absolutely try to pull this if they thought they could get away with it.

Well yeah I mean the image is a joke...
- Sure, but for some godawful reason Samsung genuinely does make a series of refrigerators with a stupid touch screen in the door, it's just that this isn't one of them.
  Another random fun fact about those, since we're kibitzing and we'll never get a chance to touch on this topic ever again, these silly fridges run Samsung's Tizen operating system which at one point was supposed to be a successor to MeeGo, i.e. in and of itself the successor to the Maemo OS which ran on the venerable Nokia N900. But this categorically failed to set the world of mobile phones on fire, and nowadays is relegated to being used to making Samsung fridges and televisions annoying. Just one of those things, I guess.
https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-confirms-smart-refrigerator-ads-are-coming-3598848/

I was in my local Lowes hardware and one of the Samsung fridges on display kept actively trying to connect to my Samsung phone. I must have gotten 5 or 6 notifications from the fridge letting me know I could connect.

I try to leave and my bracelet mandated by the Terms of Service immediately administers an electric shock.

They stopped looking at a screen for a second to open the fridge, quick install a screen on the front! Prediction: Screens will appear inside the fridge as well.

It detects if you look away from the 67 ads and starts over if you do.

Unauthorized Bread

Came here to post that. More context: Short story by Cory Doctorow about apartments having mandatory proprietary toasters that only toast bread baked by the company , which then goes out of business, which makes the authorization handshake fail, which makes all the toasters useless, and then plot and stuff happens. It's a good read.

Also the ads are taking 3x as long as normal to load because your fridge, washer, dryer, smart picture frame, and smart light bulbs are part of a botnet-for-hire, unbeknownst to you

Meanwhile some Europeans inherited a 1962 Liebherr Fridge that still works in 2050

Every cooling cycle blows a hole in the Ozone layer the size of Sweden
- We simply put all our printing appliances into the stratosphere. The ozone produced from the printing process closes the hole again
Most of the older stuff is really energy inefficient. That said they have looser tolerances so they break less and keep on chugging.
The new stuff has tighter tolerances and is made to reduce cost. These powers combined make them shit.
The worst part is that in a lot of cases paying more won't actually get you out of the trash. They just strap smart garbage to the cheap shit. You have to pay 5 to 10 times the amount for an actual decent appliance (ie one that's just good at doing what it is supposed to do) and even then it's a gamble.
- Yeah we had to replace our piece of shit Samsung fridge this year and after doing days of research it turns out pretty much all fridges are pieces of shit these days.
- IDGAF about energy efficency when entire datacenters are dedicated to making uncanny valley porn from stolen data.

Eye movement trackers will only count the ads you actually watch.

New gig economy side hustle arises, ad-watcher. I'll come into your home and watch all your unskippable ads for $35 an hour plus tip
- Won't work if they have a serialization scheme, which all these manufacturers are doing these days, uniquely mapping the person to their fridge (its 2050 remember, everyone is neuro-chipped uniquely identified when interfacing with everything).
  Additional members who can use the fridge $20/month, but you can map 3 members for $50/month (WOW best value!), and if multiple people watch the ad simultaneously, they can pool their ad time towards the countdown!
The required brain chip app monitors attentional neural networks while stimulating the image centers to display ads. Common side effects are nausea, vomiting, over throwing the state, and vertigo.
- You also need to purchase a minimum of 60% of what the ads promote otherwise you clearly didn't pay attention and your fridge will stay locked or starts heating instead of cooling.

Yes. Haha. Funny joke.

...at least until it's no longer just a joke.

I am not paying a single subscription and I am not about to not start.

My fridge filter looks like a subscription. $50 every 6 months. It’s getting ridiculous
- What does it filter? Why do you need a filter in your fridge?
- Most have a bypass option - some it is a cheap piece of plastic that is a dummy filter that goes in the filter slot, others have an automatic filter bypass when the filter is removed. Might look into that if you aren't worried about the water being filtered (or prefer to filter it yourself before or after the fridge).
Hell yeah!

I think there was a Black Mirror episode like this.

Did all these companies watch Black Mirror and say “great idea”?

Silicon Valley. Gilfoyle hacks Jian Yang's fridge.
We'll be drinking our pee on Twitch to be able to afford to pay for our ice dispensor.
Ah yes, the good old Torment Nexus approach.

Why are we waiting 25 years for technology we have today? We shoud as a tip screen while we're at it.

Ooh yes a tip screen pops up every time before allowing you access to the fridge then when you select the tip (because there's no 'no thanks' option) it then asks you if you'd like to round up to the nearest $5 for charity.

Eye tracking integration means that each second of diverted attention adds another ad to the queue

Brawndo's got what plants crave!

2050?? Lmao. More like 2026...

I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t let you get bread and butter. You and Frank planning to update your pi-hole.

2030

Okay Ubik

Don't give them ideas.

oops this is the unopened one, here we go again

You can make your own fridge. Search icy ball.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn_JllcXk9I

Angle grinder goes brrr

They already have the key functions of their smart fridges tied to the tablet shoved in the door. I've seen multiple instances of Samsung Family Hub fridges stop cooling and the fix was a factory reset of the tablet as it was unresponsive. Absolutely fucking deplorable imo. But also means if you make an "aggressive alteration", the fridge probably gets bricked and you are left with an expensive and smelly cabinet.

This assumes that the people of the world will submit to the capitalists, and won't push back against this bullshit.

I wouldn't bet on that happening

I feel about this like I feel about Stellantis customers. If you are too lazy to research your spending, stop whining.

Even regular new fridges are crap now. I bought an Amana fridge in 2008 or so, and by 2021 all the drawers had broken, and the jazz board part had to be replaced twice.

At first I read that as Amazon fridge and I was wondering.. well, I was wondering many things..

Mine has no ads, no sub. 🤷‍♂️