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/

76•nonfamous•1h ago

Comments

9cb14c1ec0•36m ago

Meanwhile, my non-smart fridge continues to run just fine. Why do we need smart fridges? That was always a bad idea.

Finnucane•30m ago

But your non-smart fridge doesn't support surveillance capitalism or a subscription model! How will investors keep making money on you if you think you can just decide for yourself when you need to shop for food?

weli•28m ago

I see reasons to have smart features in a fridge. Reminding you what food is going to be bad soon. Letting you know a list of recipes you can do with what food you have. Hell even being able to see and set timers without having to take my phone out. What I cannot fathom is the fact that the module running those smart features is not separated and modular enough so that basic functions like refrigerating are not dependent on an entire Android stack running.

natnatenathan•22m ago

I cannot relate to this. The past 15 years have made me so tired of connected devices (and subscriptions) that simple products feel like a relief. Side note, I bought a great, magnetic timer for my daughter that we keep on the fridge for just a few dollars.

jcoder•17m ago

> Reminding you what food is going to be bad soon. Letting you know a list of recipes you can do with what food you have

I feel like this is what people say a smart fridge _could_ be good for, but can they even do that? From what I understand the most sophisticated ones can tell you if some specific items are in your fridge, and otherwise they just do basic shit like display photos and tell the weather.

Legend2440•17m ago

Right now, no. The technology just isn't there yet.

herrherrmann•9m ago

… and makers don’t have an incentive to even deliver such features, because people are already buying them?

At least I wouldn’t know what’s stopping them from building actually-useful features, tech-wise. Or was it just always a bad idea because fridge placement is random and items are often hard to find/detect?

Legend2440•7m ago

I don't think many people are buying them tbh.

The technological issue is that computer vision is hard, even after the last five years of AI progress.

Legend2440•18m ago

The trouble is that 'smart fridges' turn out to be just a regular fridge with an android tablet on the front. Which is useless.

I would love a fridge with a camera inside and a smart enough AI to tell me (1. what's in the fridge (2. how long it's been there and (3. what I've eaten from it. Some companies have tried making this kind of fridge, but AFAIK they don't work very well.

anentropic•17m ago

Why not just open the door and have a look in the fridge?

Legend2440•16m ago

...while I'm at the grocery store on my way home from work?

juvvel•14m ago

1. Look in fridge before work 2. Add any missing items to shopping list 3. Reference said list on the way home from work

dotancohen•7m ago

1. When you finish the milk, voice record "buy milk" on the phone.

2. At supermarket, listen to voice recordings.

I'm actually working on a pet project to transcribe my 20 years of voice recordings and organise them, then sync them between the phone and desktop. Maybe in the coming weeks I'll know that I needed milk in October 2008.

mingus88•5m ago

pbkompasz•18m ago

We don't need this anti-innovation mindset.

deciduously•11m ago

I genuinely cant tell if this is sarcastic. Im all for innovation where its productive, but some things already just work.

jjulius•10m ago

There's innovation [nods head] and innovation [shakes head].[0] We've seen what kind of "innovation" "smart" fridges have been.

[0]https://youtu.be/OvUr00GPcIo?is=zSoGzA6fV49JTSpV

herrherrmann•10m ago

I think it’s at least equally important to be sceptical of bad ideas, in order to let good ideas win. From a consumer perspective, smart fridges are usually bad.

ModernMech•15m ago

You think smart fridges are bad, my wife bought this $300 "smart toothbrush" that I'm just like... facepalm. All it does is connect to an app and reminds you to brush your teeth or something. It's so dumb I'm just waiting for it to break.

someonebaggy•15m ago

Because the fridge company can make more money by displaying ads on your fridge, and consumers can save more money by buying the fridge with the ads and taping cardboard in front.

apercu•11m ago

Have any data that the savings are passed on to the consumer? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't see any modern, late-stage capitalism companies doing anything that actually benefits the consumer.

someothherguyy•6m ago

any instances of this in the wild? it seems like fridges are pretty cheap anyway and ones with smart features are more expensive? i don't think this a tv-like scenario.

__MatrixMan__•6m ago

I'd love to text my fridge from the grocery store and ask it how much cheese is left. It's a good idea. It's just that these days, we're just not making the kind of company who can be trusted to implement it. Gotta fix that first.

tacomagick•32m ago

Why is the fridge's cooling system is one with the smart features? They should be kept completely separate

ta988•21m ago

or at the very least go back to safe default when the computer part fails which is (should be) design 101. designing failsafe systems was one of the first thing we learned in engineering class (that was a while ago but still)...

wat10000•9m ago

The "smart" side has access to the temperature sensor for whatever reason. Then somebody notices that they could remove a component and save three cents per unit if they drive the compressor in software.

saadn92•30m ago

Maybe not everything needs to be smart.

deadbabe•25m ago

Few things are truly smart.

ta988•20m ago

Decidedly not the ones who approved the design of those fridges...

Scubabear68•30m ago

This is my fear on the car side, as smart features start leaking from isolated areas in automobiles into the larger CAN bus....

qmr•19m ago

Why do you own such a vehicle then?

You must not fear it that much.

_aavaa_•18m ago

“Ahh, and yet to participate in society.”

This is a direction all manufacturers are going into, so there is little actual choice. And buying used is not a real solution; where do tomorrow’s used vehicles come from?

someonebaggy•14m ago

all cars made in the last 15 years do it

tobysmith568•11m ago

My car has two screens, one screen for things like showing the speed / the indicator lights and one screen for maps / music.

You can hard reset the latter one by holding down the home button for ten seconds, but while it turns back on the indicators don't function... even while driving

__sy__•24m ago

i know it's maybe an unpopular thing to say to OEMs, but i do think some should adopt an open firmware stack to prevent post-discontinuation bricking and flex that somehow in their marketing. I'd buy that, especially for a larger appliance.

silon42•9m ago

There's a name for when they don't: e-waste.

Razengan•21m ago

Fridges with spyware.

Idiots who still laugh at "conspiracy theorists" deserve this shit upon them heh

sixothree•21m ago

I had a samsung fridge. Every year it would spoil all of the food inside of it. The temperature reading on the outside would say 35 (1.5 c) but the food inside would be warm and spoiled.

It only happened when it was particularly cold outside. I eventually figured out that there is an external temperature sensor that causes the fridge to stop cooling below a certain external temperature. And that space in the kitchen was particularly cold in the back. But I could never read it below 55, so I think the sensor was faulty.

But the reading on the front is what really annoyed me. I had to keep a thermometer inside the fridge so that I didn't accidentally eat food that felt cool enough but was bad.

This happened every year. I eventually gave it away for free, with a warning to the person.

ryukoposting•18m ago

What a profoundly idiotic way to design a smart fridge. Shame on Samsung for designing their product in such a way that this was even possible.

Granted, I think the very concept of a smart fridge is a bad idea no matter how you execute on it... but they still managed to take a bad idea and execute on it badly. Amazing.

sitkack•8m ago

Funny that so many people in this thread are arguing that a bad idea should also be engineered well. It was already a bad idea, so no it won't be. They are a package deal.

rkuska•17m ago

Gilfoyle's take on Smart Fridges: > This thing is addressing problems that don't exist. It's solutionism at its worst.

mystifyingpoi•8m ago

Well, they saved Pied Piper in the end. So maybe it was worth it :P

robrain•14m ago

Yesterday I learnt that Samsung has a Royal Warrant in the UK.

TIL that they really shouldn’t.

nekusar•7m ago

"Smart" is stupid. It's primarily just a way to tie subscription shit and advertisements, and lock in DRM (and laws protecting DRM) on what used to be perfectly fine hardware.

"Smart" that I can back is simple sensor acquisition over open protocols. I would appreciate being able to MONITOR my fridge/freezer/stove/oven/washer/dryer. Changing shit over those connections is not needed, nor wanted.

100percentjake•5m ago

Samsung smart appliances in general seem to occupy a similar place in the market to vehicles like the Chevy Traverse or Nissan Altima, where people with technical knowledge in that area know them to be absolute horrific maintenance and repair liabilities and yet the consumer base places them second to God.

Obviously the review of a brand-new device or vehicle with 100 miles on it is going to have a disconnect from the realities of 60k miles of rocky ownership but I remain baffled when people buy a 7 year old used V6 Traverse, a vehicle extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure, and if I question their decision I get a "the reviews were good!". It seems like journalistic malpractice to not retroactively update reviews with a warning when critical widespread shortcomings are found later in a products life.

crtasm•3m ago

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815381 1 day ago | 270 comments

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