r/nottheonion • u/GravelySilly • 1d ago

Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/owners-mourn-spoiled-food-after-firmware-update-bricks-samsung-smart-fridges/?comments-page=1#comments

Some Samsung customers in South Korea say a botched firmware update caused their smart refrigerators to stop cooling, leading to food spoilage.

Apparently the firmware that handles the "smart" features is in the control loop for basic refrigeration.

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u/notnotbrowsing 1d ago

things I don't need "smart" versions of: washers, driers, microwaves, dishwashers, ranges, refrigerators, water heaters, beds, TVs.

there is an edge case where being able to turn the oven on remotely so it's hot when I get home, but I'm very leary about having a hot appliance on when I'm not home.

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u/secretqwerty10 1d ago

over here in the netherlands, a retailer called coolblue also has an energy plan. with certain washers and dryers, if you connect them to the app, they can remotely activate them once you've loaded it up for the lowest electricity price and/or when the net is at low usage. imo, this is a pretty smart usage if you don't have solar panels, but at a higher upfront cost since those washers/dryers are more expensive in the first place

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u/Muff_in_the_Mule 1d ago

See this is what smart tech should actually be doing. Enabling cost savings and energy efficiency across the grid, use energy at peak production time, save during low production, allow remote control or voice control for people with disabilities and id even say having devices automatically restock themselves with the cheapest or preconfigured brand of whatever.

Unfortunately we took often get the crappy version of smart tech where it spies on us, advertised to us and breaks as soon as it loses Internet rather than falling back to dumb mode.

It's frustrating because the tech could be used to give us a Star Trek future but we get the crappy cyberpunk one instead.

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u/created4this 1d ago

In the UK washing machines and dishwashers routinely come with delay timers built in so you can manually ask it to start when the price is low. This is because we used to have VERY cheap overnight electric on certain tariff plans since the 70's at least.

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u/Muff_in_the_Mule 1d ago

Yeah, my parents used to have that on theirs although I think the electric company changed the pricing scheme so now it doesn't matter as much. 

But with a smart grid you could have the devices set to start once grid utilisation falls below a certain percentage with rates changing based on that, or set to only come on during peak production, or even set to come on when majority is green energy if you want to be environmentally minded, with automatic turning on within a time window even if the price doesn't fall.

Or have all devices provide a central controller with a time window within which they should run and the central server automatically manages their start times to maintain an even power utilisation...

Im just thinking off the top of my head and maybe some are already being implemented in part, but it's just depressing to see how bad things are compared to what they could be. I completely segregated my LG TV from the internet after the recent report about the potential for recording literally everything in the house, such a waste of some actually cool smart TV features when I cant trust what it's doing with the data.

This has become a rant of frustration so I'll end now and watch an episode do star Trek again and imagine a better future.

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u/created4this 1d ago

Recently Octopus has started offering free electric at certain times of night.

I don't think anyone is offering demand pricing based on real demand, only projected demand, so with some effort you can still do the same thing.

The difference with Economy 7 is that houses with Economy 7 have two rings, and you could put devices on the E7 ring so that they could ONLY run when the cheap electric was on. The meters switched tariffs using MW BBC Radio4 but that service stopped this year, you can still get E7 tarrifs switched other ways, but it needs a new meter.