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Not so smart owners.
Why would a fridge need firmware?
My current freezer/fridge is over 20 years old, and has never needed a firmware update.
Am I missing out? It keeps the food cold, which is all I want it to do.
But what if it kept your food cold sometimes and sold information on what you ate to advertisers? Wouldn’t that be worth the occasional spoilage of a week’s worth of groceries?
It might also sometimes crawl a bunch of web pages or code repositories on behalf of some AI company so the site operators can’t effectively block them. Surely that’s a benefit worth sacrificing some food for!
I would honestly rather just not own a fridge than put up with that.
I have done it before when living in a shared house because people stole stuff in the kitchen fridges. So I only kept food in my room and didn’t have a fridge in there.
I mean… maybe?
It keeps the food cold, which is all I want it to do.
You don’t want to do karaoke duets with your fridge?
Am I missing out? It keeps the food cold, which is all I want it to do.
You need to get with the times! You’re missing out on being presented with valuable products and services every time to go to your fridge! This doesn’t just help you, it also helps struggling appliance manufacturers like Samsung , who really need that advertising revenue to stay afloat in these tough times.
I’ll do it! I’ll do it for Samsung. After all they’ve done for me, it’s the least I can do!
Why, I remember when I bought a new Samsung laser printer and five years later they stopped making new toner cartridges for it. That’s gotta be be worth, somthin’, ain’t it?
Well, refrigerators have gotten significantly more energy efficient over the years (when compared apples-to-apples with models with similar features*). So you might be missing out on some electricity for using an older one. And since a fridge is an appliance that runs at all times, energy efficiency can be especially important – more important than most other appliances, which are only used occasionally.
*However, some older fridges can be more efficient than some newer fridges. Design and features play a role. Two door with the freezer on top is the most efficient design, however a lot of modern fridges tend toward multi-door designs with the freezer on the bottom, which is less efficient at keeping cold in, even if the compressor is more efficient at making it cold. Also, in-door ice makers are very bad for efficiency, and almost ubiquitous on modern fridges.
That said, though, you can still buy modern ‘dumb’ fridges with a simple, efficient design, no ‘smart’ features, and maybe even no ice maker in the door. That’s the best choice for energy efficiency. (After all, running the screen and the smart features also uses electricity.)
I don’t think any but the most expensive fridges had ice makers when we were looking for a new one a year or so ago. Is it more of an American feature? It seems so pointless. How much do you use ice to need it in your fridge door.
Ice makers are actively bad. They love to break and they take up a ton of space. Last fridge we bought, we vetoed any with one.
It is kind of an American thing … as is using lots of ice.
I only really use ice with rum and cola or gin and lemonade, what else do you use it for in America to need so much?
Some people put ice in every drink, even if it is already cold. Keeps it cold longer.
Though, lots of people have the attitude that everything needs to do everything with zero consideration for negatives. ‘I might need ice’, therefore, they buy the one with the ice maker.
That strongly depends on what time-frame you’re looking at. I only found this study which shows energy usage of refrigerators up to 2002. So unless your fridge is >30 years old, you probably won’t see that much of an efficiency gain.
Sadly I can’t find a source in English for this, but the German Umweltbundesamt published a study on replacing appliances last year. The study more or less states, that, within a 10 year time frame, it’s almost never worth it to replace a fridge from an ecological point of view. It might make economic sense, but that’s about it. Here’s a short blog post of the Umweltbundesamt about it with some infographics that may be a bit more language-agnostic.
Your fridge (without freezer) would have to use 240 kWh/year for it to make ecological sense to get a new one within the next 10 years. For a fridge-freezer combination it would have to be 340 kWh and for a freezer 430 kWh. From what I saw on this beautiful (also German, but it’s basically a huge table anyway) page it depends more on the type of fridge you have, not really the age. Side-by-side fridges seem to be especially bad.
it depends more on the type of fridge you have, not really the age. Side-by-side fridges seem to be especially bad.
I have a chest fridge (91 kWh/year) and chest freezer (142 kWh) for that reason, they use less power than the equivalent volume of upright fridge+freezer combination. (To preempt any dad jokes: I don’t store chests in them, and they don’t cost an arm and a leg).
Are the dumb fridges made today as reliable as the 20-year-old one? My gut says no. I suspect I’d need to replace it much sooner, like right after the warranty ends, killing whatever small gains I got from greater efficiency. It’s not like they don’t use electricity at all.
Let’s vibe code the thing that keeps our food edible. What could go wrong?
Yikes. Just fucking yikes.
I have a rare few devices that are “smart”. Automatic update is disabled if possible, and the “phone home” requests are blocked on the LAN.
They work just fine.
That’s a double-edged sword, though.
You may protect yourself from enshittifying updates, but then the lack of updates may make your smart devices into attack vectors for any hacker that wants access to your network. And not just the device alone – compromising the device might give them more access to the rest of your network as well.
If it doesn’t have internet access, how is it an attack vector?
Does it have wifi or bluetooth that can be connected to?
Sounds like aluminium sales are going to skyrocket if I am going to have to tinfoil wrap all my appliances.
My IoT are on a separate LAN. None are of any particular value…IOW no door locks or cameras, just TV and some light switches. Yes, it is possible to be hacked.
That’s a possibilty I’m willing to live with to avoid what is essentially allowing a manufacturer to do exactly what a hacker might do: brick my devices, spy on me, spy on my network, etc. The manufacturer can go even further with an update by paywalling formerly free services, holding my device hostage for money.
Seems there isn’t much difference these days.
