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)
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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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.
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.
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.
Smart TV is just a dumb TV with an OS. Just factory reset it, refuse to give it WiFi, and it’ll basically function like a dumb TV. The longer boot time only happens after it loses power, otherwise it’s in a sleep mode.
Also, they spy on you, can be bricked by the manufacturer, can therefore be used to extort money from you after buying it (depending on your country's laws) and lock you into one ecosystem. The profit margin off of that is so high that "smart" TVs are always much cheaper than normal TVs, even with development costs and higher hardware costs. So you are the product.
And if you actually want to stream Netsucks or smth, plugging in your Laptop where you're already logged in is much more convenient than using a native app on the TV. And ofc you don't have to use some broken, outdated YouTube unshittifier that Google keeps breaking on there, you can just use piped/invidious in your Laptops/Mini-PCs browser. Also, not having any apps on a fucking TV means not requiring Network access, so no spying, updating etc. anyway.
More time to boot up than a fridge which is booted up all the time?
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.
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.
If the lowest setting freezes your food, turn it up.
Lettuce is the only food that can be simultaneously crisp and moist
What about onions?
You keep moist onions in your refrigerator?
Sometimes I only need half an onion, and the rest goes in the fridge
But you still don't want to keep it moist
You don't want onions to have that fresh juicy cronch?
You wanna drink a tall glass of onion juice?
It's about as appealing as a glass of lettuce juice, haha
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.
The one smart feature I could see useful on a fridge would be for it to send me some sort of notification if the door is left open. Perhaps it could also send a notification if the temperature inside gets too warm (or too cold) - which assuming the door is shut would probably mean the fridge is broken.
With that said, I'm perfectly happy with a dumb box that gets cold inside and has a simple electro-mechanical switch to turn the light on when the door is opened.
Or...
Beep if the door is open.
Regulate the temperature automatically.
No AI.
They could be in theory. But they are designed to bring a lot of terrible interface choices into the mix, so a basic screen where you just pick the input source and delegate the "smart" parts to something you control can end up being more comfortable.
A true smart fridge would be great.
An actual smart fridge would do things like scan everything you put in it, so you'd know that you had leftover lasagne from 4 days ago that was about to go bad. It would know its full contents, and where they were (like that you had some kimchi on the 4th shelf in the back), and when they were going to expire. And it would do it without you having to change how you used the fridge, like stopping to carefully scan everything you put in or took out. AFAIK some smart fridges do some of that, but not all.
I disagree. The one of the few smart thing i don't want in my house is a smart tv, because it's really just a subpar computer being build into a TV, and higher spec cost too much. I don't want to change a TV every 3 to 5 years because the computer part degraded and make using the TV impossible. I can use my PC for that.
And cars.
Indeedy.
Get a cold basement, or get some rare vintage fridge, or stop using anything that needs refrigeration is my plan.
And everyone needs a new fridge every 3-5 years now because they're all pieces of shit.
Unless there begins to exist a new business based around lobotomizing smart devices.
Unfortunately, even fixing a smart fridge without the manufacturer's consent is a crime punishable with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and possibly prison time.
Manufacturers will add "security features", then sue the new lobotomizer business for tampering with DRM
And so the lobotomizers cite right-to-repair laws
What are those? It takes years to make the smallest iota of progress with right to repair.
In the US, maybe
Of course. Europe is smarter than that.
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.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/US-refrigerator-energy-use-between-1947-2002-Mid-1950s-models-consumed-the-same_fig1_317751623
About 3,5 times more energy used in 1972 than 2002. That's quite a bit in my opinion.
Hm, that's indeed more than I was expecting.
Unfortunately, it is not. The "smart bits" are doing the job of a control board in a dumb fridge. If the tablet shits the bed, you won't get cooling until you factory reset it and get the tablet working again.
I've never had a fridge with a control board, it's usually just a compressor connected via a two-connection control thingy which prevents it from starting too often, and a relay that's controlled by a thermostat. If they managed to replace that with a control board... Why?
Just about every fridge sold (meant for residential use, in the US) in (at least) the last 10 years has a control board in it. The only exceptions are the really cheap and small top-mount fridges, and even then it is only the ones with physical knobs that might not have a control board. Anything with buttons or a display has a control board. Many appliances with knobs also have control boards (sorry to everyone buying laundry based on "it has knobs, I trust it more").
As for why - because they can. What are you gonna do, not own a fridge? Keep paying someone to fix an old one (or learn to fix it yourself)? Very few people will do that. Most people will bend over and pay.
Wow, fuck that. Thankfully fixing the electrics of an old fridge is really easy (as there are so few components and they are very simple); and I've never had issues with refrigerant leaking.