These sound useful but hard. Putting a tablet on the front sounds easy but adds no value. Guess which one they picked? Apparently people will still buy.
Maybe some fridges have cameras with object detection and can tell you what % your milk remains, but this one does not do any of that.
Features that are smart listed on the product page[1]:
Family Hub™ 21.5”: Family Hub™ keeps your family connected from anywhere; search recipes, share pictures, stream music, access YouTube and control your smart devices all from your the fridge* (*A WiFi connection and Samsung account required)
SmartThings Energy: SmartThings lets you monitor and manage your smart refrigerator's power usage; get energy saving tips and alerts to help lower your electric bill all from your phone.
Now Brief: The Now Brief provides a daily overview of information including the weather, your schedule and latest health data on your Family Hub ™screen, when it's not in use; customize your Now Brief dashboard using your favorite apps and widgets to get a quick glance of what's relevant to you.
Extremely uncompelling stuff. Now add in that it is probably beaming your usage habits for your ad profile, always listening for voice commands, and apparently will break into freezing mode, and I cannot imagine why anyone would even consider this. If they were giving them out for free or paying people to put in their house, their existence would make sense tp me. Now I've learned that n>1 people paid multiple thousands of dollars for this and I assume it is not the only model out there.
I'm not sure how any of that is actionable. I already know how to make my fridge more efficient - but if I knew how to get my kids to close the door instead of leaving it open while the pour their milk (on the other side of the kitchen) I'd do that.
I get mail from my utility that I use more electric than average. However that doesn't give me anything actionable to do about it. I don't need another nag about things I can't do anything about.
You’re only losing cold air, which has very little mass compared to what you’re actually storing in your fridge. The energy cost to re-chill the air in the unoccupied volume of your fridge can’t be that significant, I’d imagine.
It’s be an interesting experiment to put a temperature probe in something like a block of cheese, let it cool to the ambient fridge temperature, then open the fridge door for a few minutes and see if the temperature of the cheese even measurably changes over the next few hours or whatever amount of time.
I’m still on the fence about closing the door for a short task like pouring milk. My understanding from the physics of opening the door, you’re mostly already replacing all the air in the fridge with air from outside the fridge. So convection already did its job of robbing your fridge of cold. Closing the door to open it again a minute later just gives you a second convection inducing action for air that might have been trapped the first time.
I would love to see someone at the level of technology connections do a breakdown of the physics here, and where the likely crossover point point is for different kinds of fridges. My current (probably illformed) belief from the suction and imagined resulting air exchange of all the fridges I’ve lived with is that leaving the fridge open on the order of seconds is better than opening-closing-opening-closing in terms of cold loss.
"In theory but the benefit would be pretty negligible i think. Let's say for argument that most food is water and your fridge is 25% food and 75% air. The specific heat of air is 1 kJ/kgK, specific heat of water is 4.2 kJ/kgK. But also the density of air is 1.2kg/m3 and the density of water 1000kg/m3. Assume 1 m3 volume. So that would be 250kg food and 0.9 kg air. To change temp by 1C would take .9kJ for the air and 1050kJ for the food. So the air in a fridge holds a fraction of a percent of the total thermal mass of the contents. Whether or not that air changes temperature by a few degrees won't change things much at all. You would spend far more on balloons that you would save on energy."
The air exchanges in seconds, yes (as evidenced by the post-door-closing suction), but the air doesn't stop flowing through the fridge as soon as the air changes once, and the air enters warm and leaves cold, so (by conservation) heat is being robbed from internal surfaces. So you're still losing more heat by leaving the door open longer.
Door open --> Door close --> Suction --> No further heat loss afterwards
Here's a tip to save some electricity on the fridge: unplug all the smart stuff.
A fridge only uses a couple kWh a day and there's not much to optimize other than "keep the door closed" and "don't overfill it".
Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.
> Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.
Fundamentally due to product lifecycle expectations, I wouldn't even want that!
I hope a fridge will last 10+ years.
Unfortunately any SaaS/cloud-connected piece of hardware is going to have some combo of firmware/OS/security/app update deprecation well before 10 years is up. The last people I expect to maintain software that long is the maker of a fridge.
CalDAV has been a standard for nearly 20 years. This feature could be done in a way that doesn't require to to talk to their servers, you could just put in the URL for whatever calendar you already have.
Good thing it's still very easy to buy simple fridges that come with none of that crap. (Oh, cool, another huge Android tablet that's several versions behind latest and is a cracked door for red team agents to hack my house with and adtech to slurp up all of my refrigeration habits. I'LL BUY TWO!)
I can see why customers might want something like this though. We have a Skylight calendar in our house. It's just a big ass calendar. The software and service that Skylight provides makes it a VERY GOOD big ass calendar, but I can see some people thinking "i use my fridge all the time; why not just have a self-updating calendar there?". (Magnetic calendars on fridges are very popular.)
But, no, Samsung and LG literally sell this concept as doomscrolling as a service. So dumb. They look super tacky also. EVERY ultra high end fridge is literally two solid doors or designed to disappear behind closet doors. Nobody's staring at their fridge while pulling out their eggs and bacon for breakfast lol
So you spend 11k on a smart fridge, have a nanny, but maniacally control the temperature depending on contents, possible weather scenarios and and if you are vacation. Makes sense. Maybe that is why I'm still poor, imagine all the money I've wasted never once adjusting my fridge temp remotely (or even manually) in the last 14 years.
I said it above but I will say it again, if your fridge has a door open sensor it should have a close the door function. This is especially true if you spent $11k on it.
I think you misunderstand the built-in luxury appliance market a little bit. They are meant to be permanent appliances that are easy to repair and replace parts for, and they are built to higher quality standards (depending on the brand, of course, but Sub-Zero has a good quality reputation and builds their appliances in Wisconsin).
Because they are designed to be installed for decades, they also evolve at a slower pace than typical consumer appliances. If something breaks 15 years down the line, the manufacturer either still makes the same part or makes a compatible replacement. They are sold under the assumption that they are installed long-term.
Sub-Zero explicitly markets their refrigerators as being designed to last at least 25 years.
They have fewer features than Samsung feature checkbox fridges on purpose.
An automatic door close function would also be potentially dangerous with a built-in custom panel refrigerator like mine. My fridge has more pinch points than a normal fridge because the cabinetry is designed to be seamless.
A temperature control is a dead-simple and basic smart function that’s easy to implement. Automatic door closing would be a complicated mechanical mechanism prone to failure.
I will also note that I didn’t choose this fridge to be a snob, I chose it because my home already came with a custom panel refrigerator that needed to be replaced (a garbage piece of shit from Viking that wasn’t worth repairing, side note, I hate that company even more than Samsung). If I replaced my refrigerator with a normal one I would have had to do additional carpentry work on my house to avoid the area looking gutted so to speak, and I would also devalue my home since luxury built-in custom panel appliances are features that show up on real estate listings and they are a “luxury” indicator to buyers.
Honestly baffled by this. You load the dishwasher and then go sit down on your phone, open an app, and turn it on? And that will be preferable to clicking start as you close the door?
No, I don't turn it on with the app, and it wouldn't be preferable to do that.
I'm happy to tell you why I like it to save you guessing again: I like knowing when the wash is done via a notification, and also to get status updates when things like salt are low.
For the dishwasher, I don't have such a need. But for the washing machine, I find it helpful to get a notification when it's done. I usually close the bathroom door while it runs, so I don't hear when it's done and will often forget about it.
Dishes can sit in the dishwasher after it's done for however long it takes me to remember to unload them, but leaving damp clothes in a closed box is something I'd rather avoid.
Personally I just set a timer. Having a wifi connection to have your appliance use an api to ping your app which has to be signed in introduces quite a lot of failure modes.
If you can convince Chat GPT to stop putting icons next to every single thing, it would be loads better. 1940s cubist style seems sort of there, then bam a tiny cake icon next to the word cakes and drinks. Why? Each of these posters, including the original would be so much better without these tiny stupid icons. No one at the Bauhaus ever made a poster with tiny icons! Chat GPT just cannot drop the icons. Like just have it read a graphic design history book. These secondary attempts might pass more people's AI aversion filter but they would all receive an F in a graphic design class.
No, aesthetics really don't come into play in graphic design classes. Students learn, and are expected to follow, the technical rules of design just like CS students learn general concepts of programming. You would probably fail your class if you decided to come up with a brand new data storage concept instead of using a database. Hierarchy of information, typographic consistency, grid structure, and information density.
Here in Bangalore, you can usually book directly from the Google Maps listing. Or sometimes click a link that will open in Swiggy/Zomato, and you just book from there.
At least in this city, reserving a table using the apps you already have on your phone is faster than using an LLM. Maybe these products are for people who know about the existence of Claude and ChatGPT but not Google Maps?
If I'm booking a restaurant I'll probably be discussing the date/time options with the people I'm going with, and I can't see how adding a chatbot to the mix is meant to help?
How is that a legit case? The providers will hang up. The bot will take a maybe and assume yes. Why on earth would you trust this task to an agent when the consequences of a "my mistake you are absolutely right to call that out" could be hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Did you know that there are many, many steps between "do you take this insurance" and then someone performing hundreds of thousands of dollars of procedures on you?
Did you know that just going to a hospital for an emergency without checking it was in network can run you a 100k bill even if they do nothing but MRI and monitoring performed for one night?
You’re going to hit your out-of-network out-of-pocket max well before that. Will still be a big bill, but if you’re dying you won’t have much of a choice.
You know, it's pretty funny that we currently live in a world where it's much safer to trust AI with medical diagnosis than it is to trust AI to find and schedule a doctor visit for a human medical diagnosis.
Not saying to trust AI medical diagnoses. But the difference in risk (chance of failure times cost of failure) is surprisingly large, and in the wrong direction.
This is why normal people saying they are using ChatGPT to "research" which X to buy makes me so sad. Even if it is not a sponsored answer (yet) it is using data it found on random websites that it trusts are telling the truth. It is the dumbest game of telephone where the start of the chain is made up marking mumbo jumbo or straight fake, and each successive layer somehow speaks with more confidence and the end user thinks that because these LLMs have "access to all data from all time" that it means their answer will be correct.
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