| Their high-end phones have such dark patterns that I will flat-out not buy Samsung anything. Even if you pay [€$]1000+ for one of their Smart Phones, you can look forward to: * Uninstallable cruft, as if they were a telcom and you were on a contract and had not just handed over a grand * ...like a confusingly-similar-looking competitor to Google Contacts that will upload your info to their servers * GDPR? LOL * A hard button on the side of your phone located just below the "volume down" button, easy to press accidentally, that is hard-coded and unconfigurable, that will launch their AI assistant Bixby. Don't want to use Bixby? Tough shit. Nothing you can do about it. * Constant badgering by the phone's native notification to sign up for "Samsung Members", a social media platform. No, you can't turn that off. * Other, similar bullshit. 3nm? These are such sketchy practices I cannot imagine it won't affect, say, their high-end TVs (they would totally monitor your house and show you advertisements). Seriously, avoid that company. No, paying for their high-end options will not insulate you from their nonsense. |
My Galaxy Buds Plus are pretty good and have unparalleled battery life - but you can’t use the companion app on Android because it won’t work unless you give it access to your contacts.
My Samsung TV is quite snappy and, besides my model being a special edition that doesn’t come with Bluetooth and them not specifying it anywhere, it’s actually pretty alright. Cold-boots quickly, has a snappy UI, theoretically comes with all the smart features you want ... but it’s full of ads the moment you enable internet access, plus you know the spying allegations. I guess I’ll still have to figure out proper firewall rules.
I’m going to guess that their other appliances are similar. Pretty good hardware, pretty good software underpinnings, just severely held back by some anti-consumer software decisions.