Samsung's Smart Fridges Bricked by Firmware Update, Ruining Chuseok Food
Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges
A firmware update for Samsung's Bespoke AI refrigerators caused many units to lose power and stop cooling, forcing owners to throw out spoiled food just before the Chuseok holiday. Hundreds of complaints have been filed in Korea, and Samsung has halted the update while promising emergency repairs.
Customers only trusted Samsung Electronics and made an official update, but it is so absurd and embarrassing that they can't even use refrigeration and refrigeration functions before the Chuseok.
- 100percentjake
Samsung smart appliances in general seem to occupy a similar place in the market to vehicles like the Chevy Traverse or Nissan Altima, where people with technical knowledge in that area know them to be absolute horrific maintenance and repair liabilities and yet the consumer base places them second to God.
Obviously the review of a brand-new device or vehicle with 100 miles on it is going to have a disconnect from the realities of 60k miles of rocky ownership but I remain baffled when people buy a 7 year old used V6 Traverse, a vehicle extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure, and if I question their decision I get a "the reviews were good!". It seems like journalistic malpractice to not retroactively update reviews with a warning when critical widespread shortcomings are found later in a products life.
- steveBK123
This is the perfect story of 2020s era tech.
Just total engineering incompetence of forced updates with new features for no reason that degrade core workflows and introduce needless instability.
- 9cb14c1ec0
Meanwhile, my non-smart fridge continues to run just fine. Why do we need smart fridges? That was always a bad idea.
- tacomagick
Why is the fridge's cooling system is one with the smart features? They should be kept completely separate
- Scubabear68
This is my fear on the car side, as smart features start leaking from isolated areas in automobiles into the larger CAN bus....
- rkuska
Gilfoyle's take on Smart Fridges:
> This thing is addressing problems that don't exist. It's solutionism at its worst.
- ethin
If there's one thing to point to as an example of why we should make "smart fridges" and similar appliances not worth developing, it's things like this. Way way too easy for the company to just publish an update that breaks something like this. Imagine if you have a smart oven which gets an update and starts a very bad electrical fire because the company was stupid and decided it was a really smart idea to make an Oven that can connect to the internet. Wouldn't even surprise me if that's already happened.
- zaphar
I've given up on not buying "smart $thing". It seems nearly impossible in many cases. However I absolutely refuse to connect them to my wifi which mostly makes them "dumb" for me.
- kfoley
For anyone looking to disconnect their Samsung appliances from the web while keeping local control through Home Assistant, there's LocalThings[0].
I found it after learning that Samsung is planning to start charging $5 a month for API access but another benefit is reducing the risk of something like this.
- zkmon
Need #1: we need a fridge.
Need #2: we need it to be smart
Need #3: we need it connected to internet
Need #4: we need it to be controlled by the seller.
Excessive needs bring you excessive pain.