This is definitely on the horizon and future generations won’t even be aware of a time when you didn’t pay a subscription for every aspect of life. (TikTok screencap)
Smart fridges don’t even improve storing food.
I won’t buy a smart fridge until they can play Tetris with the food inside.
We’ve seen how this goes: Eventually if you need a new fridge, you won’t have a choice.
It’s just like smart TVs.
And cars.
Smart tvs aren’t as bad of a concept as smart fridges. A smart TV is better at being a TV than it otherwise would be, purely because it is smart. A fridge doesn’t have that. There is no way that a fridge can be better at being a fridge by being smart.
A smart TV is better at being a TV than it otherwise would be
I think that depends on what you want from your TV. If you just want it to have a video input to stream stuff from somewhere else, smart TVs are typically worse because they take more time to boot up.
There’s also a longevity mismatch. The streaming device goes obsolete much faster than the display. At worst, you’ve got a bunch of buttons snd icons for dead services or “your device is no longer supported” tutning your home theatre into a dead mall.
It’s sort of like when they used to make low-end TVs with VCRs and DVD players built in. Nobody was doing that on top of the line sets because you wanted to keep it for 10 years, and the DVD player would give out much sooner.
I think one brand tried to make a modular component to allow for smart upgrades, but without industry standards, it was a predestined dead end. Thry should have just out a slot in the cabinet sized to fit a Roku/Fire stick and let customers swap them every few years.
It’s all about marketing. “This smart fridge uses quantum AI technology to do neural scans of the contents of your fridge, allowing it to adjust the temperature and humidity perfectly for your food, making it crisp and moist!”
That fridge competes with a dumb fridge from a budget brand that costs 200 to 300 bucks. You can even get self-defrosting ones at that price point.
Unlike TVs, which need to display content, fridges can work just fine when they’re just a heat pump, a thermostat, a light bulb, and an insulated box (and optionally also a fan and a heating element). The biggest technical difference between a cheap fridge today and one from the 50s is in materials and using an LED bulb.
I mean, smart fridge COULD be scanning its contents and adjusting the cooling intensity based on that. My dumb fridge always freezes vegetables because even when set to lowest setting the cooling is too much.
But corpos would rathed stuff ads everywhere instead of making actually usefull upgrades.
I mean, smart fridge COULD be scanning its contents and adjusting the cooling intensity based on that.
Looks around at where product design is usually heading
I mean, a smart fridge COULD be scanning it’s contents and adjust the displayed ads and sold data about you based on that.
Yes, and use the contents it has scanned to sell to advertisers.
Lettuce is the only food that can be simultaneously crisp and moist
What about onions?
You keep moist onions in your refrigerator?
Nope. A TV’s sole job is to shit photons into my eyes. I have different appliances to tell it which photons those should be.
Indeedy.
Nah, fridges are simple enough that I guarantee it’s trivial to rip all the smart bits out and still have a functioning fridge. Or just buy and old one, my grandparents still have their fridge from like 1970s and it still works.
Sure it works, it also uses more electricity than the rest of the electrical devices in the house combined.
We’ve figured out how to do fridges a long time ago, there’s really not much to it: a well insulated box, radiators inside and outside, a pump, a metering device, and a thermostat. Sure, all components have been optimized a bit, but the power usage only went down by like half in the past 50 years, it’s not as bad as you’re describing.
But without a smart fridge, how am I supposed to play Doom in my kitchen?
Damn it, can’t get to my verification cans!
Why the heck are people buying these things in the first place?
Yes. Haha. Funny joke.
…at least until it’s no longer just a joke.
Eye tracking integration means that each second of diverted attention adds another ad to the queue
yeah with subscription there would only be 35 ads
Don’t give them ideas.
I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t let you get bread and butter. You and Frank planning to update your pi-hole.