Posted by stalfosknight 10/28/2025
Smart is the consumer that is able to spot all this BS ideas that are putting in front of us and avoids it as much as it can.
The real problem is, there's not much on the market that respects the consumers in this regard. Ask for an SLA on a smart fridge functionality and you'll be met with a confusion and possibly a revelation there's nothing of a kind.
It's all ignored because most consumers don't ask questions about reliability, functionality, security and control - they don't think of those. And it's not a matter of technical or specialized knowledge, I'm sure even a caveman can understand "will this work tomorrow the exact same way it works today?" or "what happens to my fridge if you go out of business?" - it's a matter of awareness. People simply don't know yet how those new things can fail them.
Eventually people will learn about the issues, and start asking maker companies those questions. But it's all too new today.
Let me guess: now to operate a dishwasher I need to download and install a mobile app. And also regularly update the app and the firmware of the appliance, or maybe need a permanent internet connection to correctly operate. It' BS all the way down.
The only thing that companies are expecting from providing you a smart feature is to somehow monetize that on a regular basis and the easiest thing to do that is to either sell your data or locking you down to a fucking subscription.
Instead, please imagine your dishwasher has a standardized management and observation API that's exposed on a LAN and can be consumed by your local IoT management software (e.g. Home Assistant). Nothing here should have any WAN connectivity, except for a tightly firewalled channel for out-of-home user communications.
I run dishwasher overnight (YMMV) and I have forgot to turn the dishwasher on more than once before going to bed. It would be nice if it would be able to either start on a ping from a home hub's cron if it's loaded, has detergent and locked. Or if it's not in a good state, when the home hub would sense I'm about to start my night routine it could notify me that I forgot to do something about the dishes.
Or consider a smart washing machine. Home hub can observe its state and home automation can actually remind you that you forgot to move the wet clothes to the dryer. Or, well, if we're considering advanced robotics, it could summon a service bot with appropriate manipulators to do it for me.
Or a smart kitchen stove. If the hub senses I'm going out and the stove or oven are running, it should bug the hell out of me before I'm out of the driveway.
That's what I mean when I say "smart". Unobtrusive, helpful home automation, doing what I actually want from it, not doing anything I don't explicitly want, designed to be reliable, private and fault-tolerant.
Smart home should be about dwellers convenience and automatically meeting their expectations (as defined by dwellers themselves), not a data siphoning mess with constant risk of security breaches, that becomes dysfunctional if someone else's computer (cloud) fails.
I totally recognize almost nothing of the sort is currently offered on consumer market. You need to have skills and time, or hire someone with skills and time, to make a system like that. It's already possible today though. And I don't see any reason why the situation has to remain bad like this forever.
What's especially frustrating to me is that my appliances that should have a delay on them don't; specifically, my dryer and dishwasher should be able to delay until later in the evening when my electricity rates go down. Instead, I have to get them ready and press the button with my thumb like my parents did with their appliances 40 years ago.
But hey! These things can chew up gigabytes of bandwidth[0], so there's that.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/smarthome/comments/mn3p6c/lg_dryer_...
We have a frame TV also and it worked nice for the very narrow use case we had.
OT - This reminds me of the digital billboards on the highway that change before one has the chance to understand what it's advertising. I don't even have the chance to count the seconds before the ad changes much less see what it's advertising.
The level of absurdity here with respect to "miss[ing] out on other features" strains credulity.
I don't know why I would connect a fridge to the Internet at all. Maybe there is a use case where you can get a picture of the contents of your fridge on your phone when you are out and about? Like you're at the grocery store and can't remember if you need to pick up milk or not?
Is this a feature? It seems like making more parts to break.
Surely there's a better way to get independent cooling control. E.g. one compressor with valves to control which side(s) the coolant flows to?
I had to go to contortions with a tv from Samsung, but did manage to force all port 53 traffic to go via Pihole.
I believe this method may have been broken by Samsung/Google et al somehow though?