Thread

Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges

323 points · 336 comments · nonfamous

9cb14c1ec0 · 1790257028 · focus · HN ↗
Meanwhile, my non-smart fridge continues to run just fine. Why do we need smart fridges? That was always a bad idea.
1. Legend2440 · 1790258111 · focus · HN ↗
  The trouble is that 'smart fridges' turn out to be just a regular fridge with an android tablet on the front. Which is useless.
  I would love a fridge with a camera inside and a smart enough AI to tell me (1. what's in the fridge (2. how long it's been there and (3. what I've eaten from it. Some companies have tried making this kind of fridge, but AFAIK they don't work very well.
  1. crisnoble · 1790258992 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe some fridges have cameras with object detection and can tell you what % your milk remains, but this one does not do any of that.
    Features that are smart listed on the product page[1]:
    Family Hub™ 21.5”: Family Hub™ keeps your family connected from anywhere; search recipes, share pictures, stream music, access YouTube and control your smart devices all from your the fridge* (*A WiFi connection and Samsung account required)
    SmartThings Energy: SmartThings lets you monitor and manage your smart refrigerator's power usage; get energy saving tips and alerts to help lower your electric bill all from your phone.
    Now Brief: The Now Brief provides a daily overview of information including the weather, your schedule and latest health data on your Family Hub ™screen, when it's not in use; customize your Now Brief dashboard using your favorite apps and widgets to get a quick glance of what's relevant to you.
    <a href="https://www.lowes.com/pd/Samsung-30-cu-ft-Smart-French-Door-Refrigerator-with-Dual-Ice-Maker-Stainless-Steel-ENERGY-STAR/5014610033" rel="nofollow">https://www.lowes.com/pd/Samsung-30-cu-ft-Smart-French-Door-...
    Extremely uncompelling stuff. Now add in that it is probably beaming your usage habits for your ad profile, always listening for voice commands, and apparently will break into freezing mode, and I cannot imagine why anyone would even consider this. If they were giving them out for free or paying people to put in their house, their existence would make sense tp me. Now I've learned that n>1 people paid multiple thousands of dollars for this and I assume it is not the only model out there.
    bluGill · 1790260201 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not sure how any of that is actionable. I already know how to make my fridge more efficient - but if I knew how to get my kids to close the door instead of leaving it open while the pour their milk (on the other side of the kitchen) I'd do that.
    I get mail from my utility that I use more electric than average. However that doesn't give me anything actionable to do about it. I don't need another nag about things I can't do anything about.
    crisnoble · 1790260316 · focus · HN ↗
    its not
    nkrisc · 1790268300 · focus · HN ↗
    You’re only losing cold air, which has very little mass compared to what you’re actually storing in your fridge. The energy cost to re-chill the air in the unoccupied volume of your fridge can’t be that significant, I’d imagine.
    It’s be an interesting experiment to put a temperature probe in something like a block of cheese, let it cool to the ambient fridge temperature, then open the fridge door for a few minutes and see if the temperature of the cheese even measurably changes over the next few hours or whatever amount of time.
    milesvp · 1790269554 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m still on the fence about closing the door for a short task like pouring milk. My understanding from the physics of opening the door, you’re mostly already replacing all the air in the fridge with air from outside the fridge. So convection already did its job of robbing your fridge of cold. Closing the door to open it again a minute later just gives you a second convection inducing action for air that might have been trapped the first time.
    I would love to see someone at the level of technology connections do a breakdown of the physics here, and where the likely crossover point point is for different kinds of fridges. My current (probably illformed) belief from the suction and imagined resulting air exchange of all the fridges I’ve lived with is that leaving the fridge open on the order of seconds is better than opening-closing-opening-closing in terms of cold loss.
    Eisenstein · 1790300508 · focus · HN ↗
    "In theory but the benefit would be pretty negligible i think. Let's say for argument that most food is water and your fridge is 25% food and 75% air. The specific heat of air is 1 kJ/kgK, specific heat of water is 4.2 kJ/kgK. But also the density of air is 1.2kg/m3 and the density of water 1000kg/m3. Assume 1 m3 volume. So that would be 250kg food and 0.9 kg air. To change temp by 1C would take .9kJ for the air and 1050kJ for the food. So the air in a fridge holds a fraction of a percent of the total thermal mass of the contents. Whether or not that air changes temperature by a few degrees won't change things much at all. You would spend far more on balloons that you would save on energy."
    * <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/1618mku/would_it_be_a_benefit_to_fill_the_empty_space_in/jxqvq58/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/1618mku/would...
    schiffern · 1790335740 · focus · HN ↗
    The air exchanges in seconds, yes (as evidenced by the post-door-closing suction), but the air doesn't stop flowing through the fridge as soon as the air changes once, and the air enters warm and leaves cold, so (by conservation) heat is being robbed from internal surfaces. So you're still losing more heat by leaving the door open longer.
    Door open --> Door close --> Suction --> No further heat loss afterwards
    Door open --> Continuous heat leak
    vel0city · 1790266989 · focus · HN ↗
    > get energy saving tips
    Here's a tip to save some electricity on the fridge: unplug all the smart stuff.
    A fridge only uses a couple kWh a day and there's not much to optimize other than "keep the door closed" and "don't overfill it".
    Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.
    steveBK123 · 1790284331 · focus · HN ↗
    > Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.
    Fundamentally due to product lifecycle expectations, I wouldn't even want that!
    I hope a fridge will last 10+ years.
    Unfortunately any SaaS/cloud-connected piece of hardware is going to have some combo of firmware/OS/security/app update deprecation well before 10 years is up. The last people I expect to maintain software that long is the maker of a fridge.
    vel0city · 1790285757 · focus · HN ↗
    CalDAV has been a standard for nearly 20 years. This feature could be done in a way that doesn't require to to talk to their servers, you could just put in the URL for whatever calendar you already have.
    imglorp · 1790268298 · focus · HN ↗
    A simple tablet holder on the fridge door would do this way better.
    nunez · 1790277080 · focus · HN ↗
    Good thing it's still very easy to buy simple fridges that come with none of that crap. (Oh, cool, another huge Android tablet that's several versions behind latest and is a cracked door for red team agents to hack my house with and adtech to slurp up all of my refrigeration habits. I'LL BUY TWO!)
    I can see why customers might want something like this though. We have a Skylight calendar in our house. It's just a big ass calendar. The software and service that Skylight provides makes it a VERY GOOD big ass calendar, but I can see some people thinking "i use my fridge all the time; why not just have a self-updating calendar there?". (Magnetic calendars on fridges are very popular.)
    But, no, Samsung and LG literally sell this concept as doomscrolling as a service. So dumb. They look super tacky also. EVERY ultra high end fridge is literally two solid doors or designed to disappear behind closet doors. Nobody's staring at their fridge while pulling out their eggs and bacon for breakfast lol
    fhn · 1790299626 · focus · HN ↗
    so these cameras can see thru milk cartons? Impressive

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