Posted by stalfosknight 10/28/2025
Sadly, I'm including their TVs in this. I have one today, displaying the output of an Apple TV and not directly connected to the Internet because hah, no way, but I'll be shopping around when it comes time to replace it.
Pity. They make nice stuff. Not nice enough that I'm willing to tolerate their anti-customer shenanigans, but otherwise decent quality.
However, when you see the viral videos of "dream fridges" from the 1950s, it's important to remember that adjusted for inflation they would be something like $10k today. Of course they also last 10x as long, but you can still find fridges in that price range today with a similar value proposition. The question is whether or not you're willing to pay that upfront. I think we've all been so conditioned to accept that appliances go obsolete that it doesn't seem possible for a fridge like that to ever pay for itself.
It's the boots theory at work.
The rich person buys a $3500 pair of boots that comes with surveillance, useless AI, and bricks itself on the next firmware update.
The poor person buys a pair of boots, that are... boots.
• The rich person's remodeller (or the developer of the house they buy) buys a commercial-kitchen prep fridge for the house's kitchen. This is a big, powerful, durable, repairable, no-frills, utilitarian fridge, that could be viewed as attractive or ugly depending on your opinion on brutalism. The rich person never sees this fridge. It's kept in the butler's pantry and only their private chef ever touches it.
• The rich person's interior designer then buys an elegant/classy half-sized in-wall glass-door fridge to live in the kitchen itself. This is intended for the rich person's household staff to keep constantly stocked with snacks and drinks for the rich person to grab. (Also, if the rich person thinks they want to cook one day, the staff will prep the exact ingredients needed in advance, keeping them in the butler's pantry until called for, but will then stage any "must stay cold" ingredients here.) This fridge is generally a piece of shit, made with huge markups by companies that make fancy-house furniture. But it sure is pretty! If (when) it fails, the staff can temporarily revert to just serving the role of that fridge, running to the butler's-pantry fridge or other cold-storage area (maybe a walk-in!) when the rich person wants something. (Also compare/contrast: in-wall wine cooler.)
• The rich person's household staff might respond to the rich person's request for more convenient access to snacks/drinks in certain areas of the house by buying + keeping stocked one or more minifridges. There'll certainly be one in the house's bar. (There's always a bar.) These are sturdy commercial-grade bricks, built by the same companies that build the ones that go into hotels; but these companies serve rich people just as often as they serve hotels, so they tend to have an up-market marque that makes the fridge look fancy while reusing the well-engineered core.
I appreciated the kernel of truth: industrial fridges will not come with adware in the foreseeable future. Buy industrial.
You can buy:
• a big ugly powerful repairable/durable industrial one (like a server);
• an average-sized, somewhat-fancy (because high-trim), repairable/durable commercial one (like a workstation);
• or an average-sized fancy "aesthetic" one, made by a design company rather than an appliance company, that isn't repairable or durable (like one of those bespoke "sleeper desk PCs.")
The same goes for most things you can spend a lot of money on. A sound system, a vacuum cleaner, a car, etc. In each of these cases, "premium" has these same three distinct meanings. None of which involve showing you ads. But all of which have their own trade-offs. And all of which are usually quite a bit more expensive (each for their own reasons) than the highest-trim product sold directly to the average consumer by what you'd think of as a "consumer brand."
Oh also, for vacuums at least, shop vacs are apparently the way to go. And for audio, DIY beats the pants off anything commercial (unless you don’t mind spending thousands of dollars more).
- consumer kitchen mops break in 1-2 years. Get the commercial one for 2x and it lasts
- my bike is locked to an 25mm thick toughened steel industrial eye-bolt (set into concrete) which cost < $10. A consumer item intended for that purpose costs ~$70
What you actually pay is a large multiple of that covering the taxes, shipping, sales channel, marketing, etc.
You, the poor person, spend $150 on crappy Nike athletic footware, that isn't sized to fit, will fall apart in 6 months (3 if you're using them for actual athletics), but are unfashionable in 3 weeks (but you'll buy them for your middle school children anyway). And you'll think you're rich doing it. Never mind that the cost was $4.75 (up x2 what it was pre-Covid) in Bangladesh, plus $0.30 shipping across the Pacific. The sweatshop worker got a cut of $0.04 for the pair.
The analogy doesn't work though, because people nowdays are paradoxically even stupider than they were in Victorian times.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/modern-appliances...
So US$3500 is 12 times the cost of a poor-person fridge (excluding used fridges and "oh, I just go over to my mom's house") and ⅓ the cost of your rich-person fridge, which puts it much closer to the latter.
But I wouldn't be surprised if Wolfgang Puck or Gordon Ramsay has a custom walk-in fridge that cost a lot more than US$10k.
But said rich person has at least one more fridge: a relatively-small, usually very elegant (in-wall, glass-door) fridge, located in the [badly designed for cooking, but pretty] "kitchen" that adjoins the butler's pantry [= nearest, usually secondary, real kitchen].
They use this "kitchen" to whimsically prepare avocado toast when hosting "guests" (e.g. people from Architectural Digest); or when vlogging / hosting their reality TV show about all the cooking they love doing. (At any other time, e.g. when hosting actual guests, if they want to make use of this kitchen [rather than simply speaking in their lounge until dinner is served in their separated dining room], it won't be by cooking there themselves, but rather by sitting around the kitchen island or the [probably open] secondary dining arrangement nearby, watching their private chef cook there, while they or their assistants try desperately to cover for how gimped their workflow is by having to use the faux-kitchen.)
And of course, even if the rich person does some whimsical/performative hobby cooking, the staff will have prepped and mise-en-placed anything they'll need from the butler's pantry onto the (huge) kitchen island in advance. (Like a cooking show!) So even then, they won't be needing the "kitchen" fridge. With the extreme edge-case exception of needing something to stay cool until the very moment it's needed; or needing to repeatedly chill it (think "making croissant dough", though I doubt a rich person would ever try.)
Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know, but the regular old very wealthy (the sort you don't know who they are, and I think they prefer it that way) live what you would probably consider mostly very pedestrian lives. More trips? Yes. Multiple homes in nice places? Yes. A couple of nice cars and a (reasonably sized) boat? Usually. Chartered flights? Absolutely. An army of staff and never doing even basic shit themselves? Nope and no on the doing basically nothing unless they're really geriatric (and then can you blame them anyways).
Yeah, if you're "rich" as in "retired", your life is usually pretty mundane. Most such people don't even live in any kind of mansion these days†, but rather just in very nice homes that are perfectly-sized and perfectly-cozy for them and what they like to do — with some verrrry long driveways, if they're in the right part of the country for that.
† (Mansions as a concept evolved from palaces; both exist mostly to provide enough rooms to host guests when some other rich person decides to pilgrimage themselves and everyone they know over to your place to stay for three months — in turn because that was really the only good way to visit someone with full amenities, back before air travel. Nobody needs to do that these days. Any modern mansion exists either as a status symbol, or because the owner likes hosting parties [or imagines they might one day host a party, but never actually does]. Mansions are especially useful, in the modern day, for people who throw fundraiser galas, like politicians.)
> Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know,
I don't think it's SV people doing this. (The SV entrepreneurial "grindset" is a form of protestant work-ethic mindset; most tech millionaires find it hard to allow themselves to have staff. They might have a lot of people on retainer — lawyers, personal trainers, private-practice doctors, etc — but they would find the idea of paying the full salary for the exclusive use of even a maid to be a bit strange, instead preferring to just "hire a service" for that. Right up until they have a security scare, that is... but I digress.)
Rather, the personal-staff (private chef, limo driver, landscaper, several maids, etc) setup is, these days, something for the busy rich — think "runs ten businesses because they don't know how to stop", or "has an infinite queue of people needing them to make a decision about something" [politician, chaebol owner], or "thrives on fame, and so can't stand to turn down packing their schedule with ever-bigger gigs" [celebrity actors]. You find it in LA and in DC, not in SF.
These groups "have people" because they literally wouldn't be able to fit self-care into their schedule without "people."
I think I've only been in one hectomillionaire's kitchen, though it can be hard to tell, and the only resemblance to your description is that he had a large household staff. But it wasn't his main house, and I don't know if you consider someone who isn't even a billionaire to be "truly rich".
They're pretty conventional.
1. He doesn't film these walk-throughs himself. Real-estate agents film walk-throughs of these places to try to get them sold (it's well worth it for the commission they'll make), post them publically, and then he reviews those videos.
2. The homes in the walk-throughs are always vacant; there are no actual rich people involved to worry about their privacy. (They do almost look lived-in, yes, but that's all stuff that comes with the house. Not even staged; a lot of it is "design flourishes" added by the developer to match the architectural style.)
> Most of these mansions do not cost even US$100M and so probably do not belong to truly rich people.
When this guy records a review, it's to point out the flaws in a property's architecture + developer-furnished interior design. (Because that's the professional service he offers to his clients: inspecting properties for design flaws that lower the place's perceived resale value. His videos are a demonstration of that service.)
Thus, due to needing something worth spending 10 minutes talking about, the mansions he bothers to cover are always the ones that are badly designed.
My understanding is that these mansions exist in markets, and are built at scales, such that they actually should cost a lot more than they do. But their bad design has caused them to sit on the market for a long time; and that means the seller often gets desperate and lowers the price. (This isn't speculation; he often covers the market offer-price + resale-price history of a property as well.)
That being said, they still have all the features a truly-rich-person mansion should have. That stuff repeats over and over; you recognize it like MVC in software. These places are just the architectural equivalent of spaghetti code, putting things in inconvenient arrangements (I recall a recent review of a property where you had to walk down three hallways and cross two great rooms to get from the dining room to the nearest bathroom), stacking things so that rooms you'll spend a lot of time in don't have a great view (another property built into a hill made two bedrooms sub-grade with window wells, rather than just putting the bedrooms on the other side under the living room, where they'd get a panoramic picturesque view), and so on.
It used to be industrial powerhouse families. Today, it is more likely to be a hedge fund manager.
In _principle_ the truly rich person would be better off with a really expensive fridge. Except the chances that it performs better or lasts longer are tiny. So for 4x-10x the price, you have no improvement. The only way to improve your outcome is to spend enough time doing research such that you can figure out if _any_ refrigerators aren't pieces of crap. A for-real rich person has more money than time, so this isn't worth it either. Yes, they might settle on the first fridge that's available and looks nice -- and this _could_ be a premium fridge -- but they really don't get any benefit from a premium fridge either. ie, there's nothing to really push them from a $2k fridge to a $5k fridge unless it's just something like capacity.
In other words, poor-to-middle class should NEVER buy a premium fridge -- but only because the market is terrible and "premium" _usually_ does not mean "more reliable." (if premium meant "much more reliable" then they should buy premium when they can afford it, as it would cost less over time due to longevity.) However, a rich person also accrues almost no benefit from a premium fridge, as the real cost to them is research time and not money.
So, who are these products for? Probably middle class people who want to _appear_ rich.
However, probably the major cost of fridge failures is not replacement but the destruction of the fridge contents. A friend of mine recently lost their freezerful of food. Apparently after a power outage the freezer forgot whether it should be a freezer or a regular fridge and defaulted to "neither". This is an example of a "premium" feature making the freezer worse.
Manufacturers which are aiming at being dirt cheap and selling lots of products, have low margins and simply cannot afford too many replacements / warranty repairs. High margin products don't care, they could make you three in that price and still be ok.
The "luxury" appliances can be double that and are still shit.
I wish more content like this existed. It’s the only type of review that is worth paying attention to.
Long story short if you live in an energy market like california the energy savings of the sub zero will likely offsets its additions cost over the lifetime of the unit.
[0] Excluding anywhere I lived for less than a couple months, like the middle of the Pacific or an exceptionally rough road trip through Wyoming.
Looking up the fridges myself, a Sub-Zero BI-42UFD/O is rated at 693kWh yearly, and a Frigidaire FG4H2272UF is rated at 671. There's no difference.
A commercial dishwasher will cut right through amounts of food that a normal residential dishwasher wouldn't touch (pre-wash is more for efficiency and to keep crap from piling up in the bottom tray of the dishwasher) and it will actually be ever so slightly less harsh on whatever goes in it (plastics are the problem mostly) because while it washes and rinses way hotter it doesn't have a stupid heating element that runs to dry things.
It will also use fucktons more water and more power and make more noise.
My last guess is more frequent cycles, meaning hotter water already at the spigot / dishwasher outlet, similar to the consumer recommendation to run the hot water for a minute prior to starting the dishwasher?
Plastics / tupperware were actually what I had in mind lol
This in contrast to the consumer unit at home which heats the interior of the dishwasher for 45 minutes or so after it has done its washing cycle to dry things while still inside the dishwasher.
If they're talking about the water being hotter, but not a "stupid heating element that runs to dry", then it sounds like they mean the hot air.
I don't know for dishwashers, commercial printers are expected to be serviced by the maker or affiliated business and getting parts as a mere peasant can be pretty complex. Surely rich people can just throw money at a contractor, but that's not what we're talking about I think (otherwise having a new one delivered everytime would also just work)
While I'm a computer farmer for my day job, I can repair a vast amount of different devices as long as they don't take specialised equipment like vacuum pumps. And while I don't consider myself a rich person, between my wife and I we're in the higher income brackets in the US, I still service as much of my own stuff as possible. And in general commercial stuff is in the same price ranges as the higher end consumer stuff.
I've had two boards die on appliances this year. Fortunately, warranty coverage paid for the parts. So now I have a practically new refrigerator and furnace. At least until they fail again in 3-5 years.
Ready example is my aunt: a very good and expensive Miele washing machine, that was made to last as things were before. But now 10 years have elapsed and modern washers come with bigger drums, much lower noises, optimized water and electricity usages, and more effective washing patterns.
But she's stuck with her old and trusty one, because she feels that it's working "like new". And she's not wrong, it works well, so it became a sort of a "golden cuff" so to speak (not knowing any better metaphor). So good and expensive, that now getting rid of it for a new one feels like a waste of money for not much gain.
My friend has a microwave from the late 70s. The time/power are set by turning knobs - no fiddling with a bunch of buttons and modes - the turntable is metal so it can't break. The only thing I would consider missing is a popcorn mode, not a big deal.
Edit: Another great example is toasters. Toasters have not gotten better in my lifetime and older toasters are probably more reliable than what I could buy today.
There isn't much gain. That's the point! She's got a device that's nice to use, repairable, is well-designed, and isn't serving her ads. She's fine! Really. If she wants a new washer, Miele washing machines hold value and can be resold.
She probably doesn't think about it, which is the real gift. She's free to think about literally anything else! I have an extension to the Vimes boot theory, where you don't even notice your boots when they're working like they're supposed to. Most of us aren't enlightened enough to notice and appreciate that our feet are dry. This reduced cognitive overhead increases capacity for creativity and play, which further amplifies the life outcomes of people buying cardboard-soled boots vs leather boots.
It's still a terrific car. Comfortable, well made, fast enough for all practical situations. Unusally low mileage for its age. An engine that's sought after in the tuner community. But, it's unsellable. I'm stuck with it, whether I like it or not.
The good news is that I like it. The funny news is that I took a new job that will move me to the Bay, and whatever my new employer is paying to move my car out there is definitely more than my car is worth.
Definitely keep the old dishwasher till it dies.
(The bosch is quiet and cleans well, fwiw. The magic heat free drying minerals are nice. It’s a shame they’ll be in a landfill in a few years.)
Think John Deere tractors as well as adware refrigerators.
The problem is that there might be problems with the equipment or problems caused by the installer.
A few years ago, we ended up replacing a Sub-Zero fridge (27 years old) with another one because the repair bills were mounting. Because of the way the previous owner did the kitchen, using any other kind of fridge other than the 2' deep, 7' high kind would have involved remodeling. It wasn't quite $10k but it was close.
At our new house, we had a repairman fix the ice maker in our current fridge. It's 17 years old and could have come off the floor at Best Buy or Home Depot (NOT a Sub-Zero, in other words) but he recommended keeping it until it failed because the quality of current appliances is not as good.
Our water heater is going to need to be replaced because it's 17 years old and showing signs that it's getting too old. I want a heat pump water heater because the gas water heater is the only gas-powered appliance we have. Trying to assess reviews of heat pump water heaters and of the local plumbing companies is not fun.
What kind of fridge issues are you having? I just buy a $1000 Miele/Liebherr and it's fine for 10+ years. 0 repairs.
Does anyone have examples of consumer fridges like this?
Miele still has a good reputation, and you’ll pay for it. https://www.mieleusa.com/category/1022129/refrigerators-and-...
Eh, I've got a very reasonably priced Haier fridge that I've had no issues with at all. Maybe I'm just lucky, and it definitely helps that there's no built in ice maker or water dispenser (those things seem to break first) but it's lived longer than the refrigerators that the rest of my family have.
What kind of monkey designs something like that. It's obsolescence by design.
I will never buy another Samsung product.
Our Samsung fridge’s manual says it’ll automatically and silently mesh network with any Samsung TVs in range, use AI and hidden cameras to recognize what’s in the fridge and when we use it, then have the TV inject targeted ads into programming based on its findings.
We’ll never purchase another Samsung product.
Otherwise I might have considered them but steered well clear, and am very happy with the decision a decade later. Went Bosch for the washer and Electrolux for the fridge, had zero issues.
Also, I'm wondering if any other manufacturer would make the crank and the drum from the same material. Wouldn't it be like $100 extra to make a stainless steel spider?
like in Wild Wild West?
It's the last LG TV we will ever buy.
Um, have you needed to change anything for your LG TVs to not display ads?
Asking because modern LG TVs seem to display ads too. :(
Saying that because I was recently looking for a TV, and considered LG, but many people seem to be having regrets now due to ads being shown.
But why is that? HN told me that ads were just reserved for people who refused to “pay for the product”. By inference we must conclude that for-pay products shall not have ads on sheer principle. Where’s that smug scolding at now?
Love how whenever “YouTube doesn’t block sponsor ads natively even on premium” they shut up. Ads are a disgrace and should be removed everywhere.
Enough people don't care, don't notice, or in the worst case, even when they do, if the companies band together and don't give people a choice, eventually they will cave and thats what i predict will happen here
In the future i suspect most people's homes will have ads, except for nerds who will have rooted their devices. and hopefully their moms.
Not cheap either!
[^1]: https://pfy.ch/programming/disable-samsung-game-bar.html
I was fiercely loyal to them for a lot of years after that experience.
Unfortunately all of my relatives love their phones.
I've been replacing with mid-range LG on advice of the local repair company and been happy so far. Quirky and very few features but seems well built.
Can't wait to replace the massive refrigerator and swap the gas range for inductive. Fridge is slowly going (cracked and leaking ice maker, condensation problem with deli drawer).
I now know how my mom could justify the ridiculous expense of a Subzero refrigerator (around $6k back in 2000). That thing has only needed a couple of tune ups and no parts replacements in 20 years.
The speed queen washer that came with the house failed. The 30 year old lid switch literally fell apart. $10 on amazon next day. Took me 10 minutes and youtube to take the machine apart. It's meant to be serviced and I'm handy. I don't get engineers who won't try and fix their appliances. It's like a free weekend day entertainment for me.
What is the advantage of an inductive stove? Will they even work in the US? I think in Europe they work with 360 V if I remember right.
I realized two things:
1. You can cook nearly everything with a ricecooker. Just throw everything inside. Yes, even the minced meat on top.
2. An airfrier is better and faster than a shitty oven.
I tried to find something close and make custom gearing but it ended up being cheaper to get a new dryer.
That you can control temperature changes better than with a ceramic hob, on par with methane stoves.
> I think in Europe they work with 360 V
No, normal 230V (or 220V)
1. Better air quality. You don't have combustion byproducts in the kitchen.
2. More efficient than both gas and conventional electric stoves.
3. Faster to heat than gas/conventional electric (due to the efficiency improvement)
4. Easier to clean (except for glass top stoves).
I've yet to own a full-on induction stove, but I do regularly use the 120V induction hot plates in my kitchen. In fact, I use them more than the gas stove that came with my house. I'm eagerly awaiting the day that I have a full induction stove.
But even the portable ones are preferable to gas imo.
Never heard of this. I though 360 with 3 phases.
> For example, in countries with nominal 230 V power, the line voltage is 400 V and the phase voltage is 230 V. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-phase_electric_power
In the counter integrated induction simply gets connected with all three phases, which are available in-house anyways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...
Thank you so much for sharing this. I learned something new today!
Almost every electrical network is 3 phase distribution, the matter under debate is if you bring every phase to each house, or if a phase reaches every third house.
Anecdotally I have never seen an electrical panel without three phases, but when I went looking it was like trying to find a source for the fact the sky is blue.
Honestly just browning 4 chicken thighs at once is too much for 240v. (My gas range couldn't do any better!)
They exist. But mostly they are not three phase.
We have that particular model because it was literally the only induction cooktop on the market that would fit the existing hole in our stone worktop.
Quite a lot of them can be wired either one, two or three-phase when you look into their installation instructions, it's just that not that many houses have three-phase power and not many people are willing to pay to get that upgraded just for the hob.
Inductive tends to be much more efficient than gas (which is what I have) and vastly more efficient than straight electric.
Re: washing machines, I tentatively put forward LG. I bought one (and matching dryer) in the early 2010s, and it lasted 7 years before needing me to replace some balancing parts. It lasted years after that. Hoping for the same on this next move in a few days (yes, I move a lot).
The garage fridge was in the house (as the kitchen one) when they moved in. The chest freezer in the basement moved with them in '77.
They have had at least three kitchen fridges in the time since the fridge got moved to the garage. I've lost track of the number of dishwashers. The current one was out of service for a few months, partially due to wifi/firmware issues. The super expensive oven clock doesn't work anymore, since it broke after the last time it was fixed for an $800 callout.
I'm not a fan of vendor lock in, but their decision to retroactively remove functionality that I was depending on led me to never buy another Samsung product since.
I control what devices in my house connect to the internet.
The shield also has a HA integration.
There's no need to risk an update that puts ads on the TV.
That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open? Amongst other various dark patterns?
Your statement here kind of characterizes it as user error, but the manufacturers are absolutely hostile actors here.
Not yet. Wouldn't be surprising, but most of the time the problem is "person holding the remote wants it to work, connects it to wifi when it offers, doesn't know that they shouldn't".
Enough people connect their TV/smart devices willingly to the internet that there is no need for adversarial approaches like this (which are not trivial to set up - they'd need to maintain per-country partnerships with Wi-Fi hotspot providers, pay them and hope the ROI is worth it).
Similar FUD is being spread around HDMI's Ethernet channel; a way to carry network data over an HDMI cable. I have basically never seen it in the wild on any consumer device, but even if it were, it would still require the other device to cooperate and act as a switch/router to share its connection to the TV. Yet despite that every time smart TVs and privacy comes up someone mentions this.
No one in my family has an issue with it, use a years and years old integrated wireless mouse/touchpad and happy days, everything works as you'd expect, you can use it as a regular PC (surprisingly handy sometimes) and I can adblock the crap out of everything/use unhook to decrappify YT.
I happened to have an "old" Thinkpad (T470P, 7700HQ w/ 32GB RAM and the nvidia GPU) I wasn't using so it's left on all the time, runs the TV and serves movies over HTTP for family to watch via VLC (VLC will happily "stream" over HTTP)
One of those easy to do things where I'll never go back :).
> When showing that the user has switched to HDMI input, show the full screen information: "HDMI1, brought to you by _____ [insert advertiser here]. Best experienced with Monster HDMI cables. Gold plated for the digital clarity."
(Sorry, I just had to. In fact, thoug, I would be furious if my tv injected ads onto my source material)
[1] https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/133623#issueco...
Hopefully you don't have a neighbor like me. I keep an open wifi channel. So far the only customer has been the neighbors samsung tv phoning home. I felt bad about that and blocked it. But wow are they aggressive trying to get that telemetry out.
Do they? I've never owned a Samsung phone, in large part because I was always turned off by reports that they liked to skin Android in annoying/lame ways. I have a Samsung fridge/freezer (old and not-smart), but the in-door ice maker has a design flaw that causes condensation to drip, freeze, and clog it, so we've given up on it and just make our own ice with regular old-school trays in the freezer.
I'm not going to say they make crap, but their stuff is... okay, I guess.
It was hackable, rootable, and it ran aftermarket ROMs like a dream.
It was the Galaxy S5, and it was released just over a decade ago.
Things have been headed downhill ever since.
I saw someone else’s Samsung TV with ads on the input select menu…
That was enough to pre-ban myself from any future Samsung appliance.
https://ncph.org/history-at-work/rethinking-the-refrigerator...
Anything sold as "GE" is just re-badged somebody else's crap, mostly Haier.
Of course I am no longer inclined to purchase Samsung products based on this new info. I honestly think that if a company pushes an update that makes its product worse, they should be obligated to refund you 100% of the original purchase price.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y54QbkCtFE4
I have an LG fridge. I like it. I think the linear compressor tech is cool, even if their implementation is potentially flawed. I don't expect this thing to last a decade.
I think washing machines and dryers, maybe dishwashers, are still designed and manufactured in the US.
It's Google TV, and I don't mind ads for content on the home screen. I use a bunch of streaming services, I might want to watch whatever's up there, that's not entirely incongruous. Then about a year after purchase we started getting ads for L'Oreal shampoo and other products. Nope.
Sony acted confused when I sent a support ticket, and eventually said "Oh, that's because it's Google TV, nothing we can do about it". I replied saying perhaps they had given too much control over their tv experience to a third party. I was able to activate "App Only Mode" to make them go away, but you lose a bunch of the features and have to disable it to get to the play store if you want to install anything else.
Pisses me off. I paid a couple of thousand dollars (AUD) for that tv, I shouldn't have advertising shoved in my face.
That's how I do it as well, and I hate that dumb TVs are getting increasingly more rare.
I know the day is coming where any new "Smart" TV will mandate you connect it to the internet to go through some initial setup process or require regular phone homes to function, and I'm not looking forward to it.
I don't want my TV to do anything except display whatever I have connected to it. It's job stops there.
I've heard that Netflix has added HDR10+ streams recently, but I haven't verified that myself.
Our cheaper LG works beautifully with the same inputs. The Samsung? Nope. Everything looks like the finale of Game of Thrones, even when you're looking at a soccer game played on a sunny day at noon on the equator.
That's not how HDR works. It expands the high range exclusively. So more like 0 to 1000 instead of 0 to 100.
It's true that you can't go below black, but SDR has extremely bad precision below 1 nit. HDR can accurately represent scenes at least 100x darker than SDR, in addition to bright spots at least 100x brighter. https://2.img-dpreview.com/files/p/TS940x940~forums/66687985...
I just don't see the problem, and don't see how connecting a different box to watch the same things is much better than just using the OS to do that. If they did have ads on it that would definitely be a problem though.
Imagine you're using a brand new maxed-out MacBook Pro, and someone hands you a 2013 HP laptop. The HP is... fine. It displays web pages, lets you load a word processor, and otherwise looks and acts like a laptop. If you hadn't ever used another computer, you probably wouldn't think anything of it.
BTW, I bet a Fire TV or various other options would be fine, too. I just don't have the personal experience to vouch for those. I'm not using this anecdote to shill Apple TV specifically, just to say that there are much better options than the built-in apps.
Because then you can replace a $50-100 box when it starts misbehaving (e.g. tracking and selling your information) or not getting upgrades anymore or getting slower, rather than replacing a $1000 TV.
If you upgrade your TV on the regular I guess you'd just buy a new one, but treating it as a dumb display guarantees you can keep using it as long as it physically works.
> "Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams."
(I've used em-dashes since before LLMs and I'm not fucking stopping now)
EDIT: s,',,
...it didn't go anywhere after that date. But I still have the anecdote.
https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/samsung-familyhub-refrige...
Good luck for anyone to claim this bounty if that's one of the requirements. Does the fridge have any exposed ports at all that the average person could access without removing anything from the fridge?
It's also not clear in the bounty, if I add funds to the campaign and it gets fully funded, does that mean that software/hack will be released publicly? Or only to "backers"? It's not clear what the donation goes to, besides for the person who makes the hack to claim.
FULU / Rossmann isn't handling the public release ... at all. They're worried that doing so would violate US law or at least cost a lot in court fees. They'd be super stoked if whoever made it released to to the public and absolutely not just to "backers".
While the fulu.org domain has been around for a long time, archive.org's oldest snapshot of bounties.fulu.org is from late last week.
This press release from Oct. 23rd agrees with archive.org's snapshot history: <https://fulu-foundation.ghost.io/repair-bounty-program/>.
Given the complexity of the tasks on offer, I'm unsurprised that zero of them have been completed in three days. Give those boffins some time, yeah?
I pay for Spotify and the app now shows paid suggestions (cough ads), to paying users. When you tap the ellipsis and choose "Not interested", it doesn't respond with "OK, we'll stop" but something like 'We'll show less of this'.
No, don't show less, I want you to not show it at all.
But I fear all such services will eventually succumb to this, given just how much more lucrative ads can be compared to subscriptions.
Might seem funny for some more senior readers, but as somebody who almost exclusively only listened to music through MP3s and streaming, I found the included artwork and other goodies in vinyl / CDs to be incredible. Who would have known that my favorite albums often had not just album covers, but lyrics sheets and entire booklets filled with interesting trivia and additional artwork?
I will say that they’re typically concerts related to the channel I am on, but there is no world in which I want to attend live music, and of course there’s no way to tell them that. so I have to tolerate getting interrupted periodically despite already paying them.
Unfortunately, the entire industry is racing toward this behavior. Recent LGs have also started slapping “AI” stickers on their products. I’ve been visiting Rossman’s Consumer Wiki[1] more often than I’d like before making a purchase.
(This was after direct exposure to their Tizen engineering team back in the early 2000s)
I stayed away from their phones, SmartTVs, everything.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/samsung-smart-tvs...
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-t...
I used to have the watch, and was interested enough in the OS to work toward making personal apps for it.
What alternative phone manufacturer would you recommend as well, if you don't mind.
It's okay to say no. After decades of being the computer tech in my family, I started saying no and have been a lot happier for it.
My cellphone decided to die last month. It was near retirement, but still working until it didn't. I bought a Samsung phone. First it asked twice if I wanted to share all my life with Google (using some dark patterns) and then it asked twice if I wanted to share all my life with Samsung (using more dark patterns). (After that, I installed WhatsApp, so I'm not sure I bothered.)
Next the phone offered to install the app from my carrier, TikTok and a ¿third? app-store. I didn't want them so in the screen with the offer I disabled the first and the other two were disabled by default. Anyway, I got TikTok and the other app for some reason! (I uninstalled them inmediately.)
I still get random notifications, like complaining that I'm using the phone too much. Or a notification that they upgraded something, restarted the phone and all apps notifications were disabled until I unlock it. (Lucky, I didn't miss any important urgent message.)
Not to mention a new notification to accept the new Samsung terms and conditions every two weeks.
I wouldn't call a "$1,899 to $3,499" fridge cheap.
(<https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2714117-mountain-dew-twitch-...>)