Author: Kim du Toit

Via Insty, this little gem:

Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update
bricks Samsung smart fridges

Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”

There are numerous reports on Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.

“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote.

Of course, Samsung says that this only affected Korea — like it could never happen anywhere else.  Uh huh.

Here’s where all this technology — in appliances, cars, whatever — cocks things up.  What has happened is that “must-have” has been largely replaced by “nice to have”, and in the nature of the human condition, a lot of “nice to have” things have become “must-have”.  Let’s use fridges as an example.

Must have:  maintain a constant temperature that cools or freezes foods.  This is the sine qua non of any refrigerator.

Nice to have:  a means whereby one may control the temperature (initially, by a manual dial inside / outside the refrigerator), and by extension, a means of notifying the customer when the fridge stops working — e.g. the little light inside doesn’t turn on when the door is opened.

So when the above “nice to have” slowly transforms away from the manual / visual of the fridge itself into “you can now check your fridge’s condition on your phone” (to give but one example), all sorts of failure points are introduced into the process.  And that’s the simplest one I can think of;  but of course it doesn’t stop there, does it?

Anyway, I can see that at some point you will no longer be able to get a simple fridge like the one your Mom had in her kitchen.  Oh no:  you’ll only be able to get one that tells you the time, sets variable temperatures inside the fridge by drawer, tells you when the icemaker level drops below a certain point, and so on and so on.  All very nice to know, but nowhere close to being “must-have”.  (It will also cost three times the amount that a basic fridge used to, and will yield five times the profit to the manufacturer, which is your answer right there.)

And when the upgrades come along (why?), and the whole thing falls over, you’ll be left in the same predicament as the hapless Korean restaurateurs.

I can dream, can’t I?