Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.
Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.
Why even design a fridge to stop cooling via an electronic switch? How is that in any way a desirable function? I don’t care what you put in the firmware, there should not be a physical switch that can turn off the cooling via software. That’s what the plug is for.
Because people want to set the fridge temperature precisely to 6C, and not turn a century old tech of a mechanical thermostat located inside it to an arbitrary setting between “off” and “three”.
And if you want to be able to do that, an electronic switch is literally the only way: you now have a computer that is responsible of doing “if current_temp > set_temp then compressor = on”. When that computer stops working, so does the fridge.
Not an issue if that’s the only thing that computer does. Probably an issue if it’s complicated enough to support Xbox live streaming so you can play Doom on it.
They could absolutely seperate the controls of the fridge to a nice physical dial that is an accurate thermostat and keep it separate from all the smart functions.
I can’t think of any reason for needing to remotely change the temperature
You don’t even need separate controls. Just have the compressor and temperature controlled by a simple microcontroller which gets commands from the touch screen. Thus if the touch screen crashes the microcontroller keeps the food cold.
That of course requires adding a microcontroller rather than just putting a couple of relays attached to the touch screen…