cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/71343068
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.
lmao. this happened like two days before one of korea’s major holidays.
And this is why the only Samsung products I have are RAM and SSDs.
And the SSDs are backed up daily.
Samsung should not have gotten into appliances. They seem to be singularly terrible in that field. No-one else comes even close to their level of incompetence.
I just mentioned elsewhere in this post that I had to buy a new washer/dryer set. Guess what brand I was getting rid of? They came with the house and I was on my 5th or 6th repair of the fucking dryer before I said fuck this, we are selling these before they become paperweights and getting something made by a competent appliance company.
I have a PhD in IoT technology uses (mostly medical/clinical monitoring applications). My appliances do not have firmware to update. Don’t buy that shit, it’s stupid.
We recently had to buy a new washer/dryer. Every single set we looked at had wifi connectivity as a feature, so we did end up buying a set with that, but they will never see the light of my WAN.
You’d be surprised what kinds of things have firmware (although maybe not, if you work in IoT). A normal dumb fridge, a normal dumb dishwasher, most ovens, and definitely microwaves will have firmware. Even if they have no interface to update it. In some cases, the firmware was written using a chip programmer before the chip was soldered in. But there’s still firmware. Any appliance with a clock will have it, because otherwise, you have to implement a clock in a CPLD or discrete logic gates or something. A microcontroller is just cheaper.
Right, but that’s not firmware to update, which I interpreted as the differentiating factor.
Why the fuck would a fridge need to be ‘smart’?
Like what’s the reasoning?
“Convenience”
it could judge you when you throw away those vegetables you never processed
I can’t play Orcs Must Die Unleashed because they turned off support even thought it was a perfectly good single player, AND NOW I CAN’T EVEN HAVE A FRIDGE THAT’S TWO YEARS OLD?!
A boring dystopia.
