Why is there no user-facing firmware update/recovery feature, so that at least tech-savvy users can resolve the issue themselves? Or a reset feature that reverts to the factory firmware located on a separate, read-only chip?
Ah yes, it's to prevent people downgrading or running "unauthorized" firmware when they inevitably start adding user-hostile "features".
I have a new "smart home" with a couple of GE convection ovens that are Internet-connected. In the 2+ years that I've owned them, I've never used the Internet control features. The ONE feature that might make Internet connectivity useful would be setting the clock. Unfortunately, the clocks cannot be set or updated via the Internet. WORTHLESS!
This is what is wrong with IoT, the one obvious feature that would end the annoying song and dance of updating daylight savings time on appliance displays, isn't even a offered. Do these old school appliance companies do a shred of user research?
I hate to have to change the time of the oven twice a year. It annoys me :P
I have a nice, cheap, small alarm clock by my bed which gets the current time over air (some sort of radio signal, probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_clock ) => works great, in the past it maybe needed up to 30 minutes or so to do an initial update of its time after a change of batteries, but then it always worked perfectly.
Why aren't more appliances using that? Shouldn't even an oven, maybe having a small antenna embedded in its front, be able to get that signal?
Whirlpool refrigerators are designed so that the light inside fails after a year, requiring replacing a >$100 power controller board. If you let your thing connect to the internet, it will be able to dispense with actually burning out a part, and can just stop working under program control.
>Whirlpool refrigerators are designed so that the light inside fails after a year, requiring replacing a >$100 power controller board.
I’ve run into several microwave controllers with a similar misfeature. All used the same controller board despite being different makes and models. The part that controlled the light was a plug-in board on the controller and a short in the light socket could blow a diode on it. Bad design since burnt out incandescent bulbs often fail with a short. The plug-in replacement cost ~$8, but nobody seems to stock it, only The whole controller board at ~$175.
> but it required folks to be stationary too long to sync time.
I don't understand this constraint as it was possible to buy wristwatches that could do this back in the early 1990s and probably earlier (that was when I saw one for the first time).
A model number search reveals that it can be controlled by Google voice commands and there is an app which presumably does something.
It is a high end (costs 12x what I paid for my last microwave) with browning elements. If that is the device you cook with you are probably wanting more out a microwave than a single big red button that says “+30 seconds” on the front. Programming your defrost, cook, and browning cycle is probably nicer on an app.
Gives them opportunity to force some kind of MRR on you. Newspaper subscription for fridge mounted screen, recipes subscription for ovens, sky is the limit.
Obviously this is a good example of what can go wrong with it, but there is a real benefit to updating software in an appliance, just as there is in say, a gaming console. It used to be that when a console or appliance was shipped, that was it. If there were bugs, there were bugs. Couldn't be helped. Now bugs can be fixed.
I have a few Bosch appliances internet-connected. Getting a push notification when the fridge/freezer door is open is nice if you're not near enough to hear the unit beeping. And when a timer elapses on the cooktop I get a push - again, nice if I'm not within earshot.
I would never ever dare to preheat remotely (and having an open Internet connection that has the potential to allow that would be a nightmare for me).
My current owen actually forces me to at least open once the hatch before allowing it to be switched on (I guess that it's to force me to check if anything was previously left inside).
Agreed, the only useful connected functions I can imagine are "isOvenOn?" and "turnOvenOff" but even then I would be nervous about relying on either...
My wife and I both work from home and a lot of times have meetings up until 5. It would be nice to be able to start the oven so I could get my kids food into a preheated oven right at 5.
Hot Pockets are aerodynamically designed to be delivered directly to the mouth for most destructive effect. Short (napalm like cheese), medium (gaseous effect), and long term (myocardial infarction) impacts are improved at higher ordinance deliver rates.
It's probably more about cost savings than anything else. Why add a USB port and the associated functionality required to do manual updates when it's got a fantastic remote update capability?
To be fair, if we're talking about cost savings, it would be a lot cheaper if they didn't bother with paying devs to push firmware updates to a fucking microwave that should just work on it's own.
It doesn't need extra hardware. Most routers have some rudimentary TFTP boot mode that can be accessed by powering it up while holding a certain button. The device already has Wi-Fi, so the same mechanism can be used - if powered up in recovery mode, it'll scan for a specific SSID and then TFTP boot from a specific IP on there.
Eh, I think you're being uncharitable. My 80 year old mother could definitely figure out how to hold down a button while turning the thing off and on. We've been living with some version of that reality for decades.
I wonder if that percentage of tech-savvy "elderly" is going up over time. I know I remember hearing that about anything computer related 20 years ago, but many of the people in the upper age ranges now lived with computers for a majority of their life.
My grandma is not tech savvy, but can follow directions pretty well. My spouse's grandma is tech savvy to a certain level and manages her own computer and photo library. I know either of them would likely be able to hold down a button and follow some set of directions to join a wifi and upload a file.
So is the percentage of router users... and yet those debug modes are there because they cost nothing and can be useful in "oh shit" moments like these.
As a consumer I want a button which I can press for 10 seconds to reset the device to how it came out of the box. That should include any firmware updates because remote bricking happens all the time.
>Or more likely because that costs money to implement
Kinda like how paying devs to push firmware updates to a damn microwave costs a lot more money than making a microwave that just works and doesn't need OTA updates?
I'm starting a kitchen upgrade, and the number of "connected" kitchen appliances is astonishing. I don't need my faucet to have Alexa, I don't want to read news on my refrigerator, and I don't want an app for my oven. I'm not aware of any companies keeping servers running for a product that matches the life expectancy of a kitchen appliance, nor do I want an AWS outage to keep me from making nachos.
Now that you're actually in the process of upgrading, I suggest you take advantage of the fact that you're an actually-paying customer to slightly influence the retailer(s) you buy from.
"Can you show me only the non-smart appliances, please? Oh, you don't have any? Are you sure, can you ask the manager? Alright, I'm not interested in anything, have a nice day."
Sure, it doesn't mean very much on your own, but neither does voting - the value is in collective action. If everyone who specifically doesn't want a smart appliance, smart car, or smart TV makes a big deal about it, then manufacturers and retailers will start to notice.
It has been increasingly difficult to do that, probably because a lot of these "smart" appliances sells for more and thus have more "vote".
Last time I went to buy a refrigerator, there maybe only one or two that were freed of the extra features that I did not want, compared to the 30 or so that were on display. And TVs without wifi were nonexistent.
I mean, sure, it's increasingly hard to buy a non-smart appliance, but the value of making your preference known should be obvious.
Even if a regulatory solution is ideal (which I'm leaning toward), corrupt politicians will make it very difficult to get that regulation enacted, which means that "voting with your wallet" and making a big deal about it are both still necessary in the meantime, and will provide some benefit if done en-masse.
I wouldn't buy one. Especially at that price point. But I admit that a faucet which could reliably do things like "dispense 6 ounces of water" is kind of a neat idea. But I wouldn't want it tied to Amazon or anything like that. It'd need to be self-contained, with it's own computer, speaker, mic, voice analysis, no internet connection required, and a reliable failure mode that never interferes with the handle working. In other words, something which will never exist.
>He had found a Nutri-Alexa machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Commercial induction is pretty solid in a home. Microwaves too if you have a spare 220v hanging around in your kitchen. Mostly just because of the better controls as you mentioned though. A non-commercial appliance with a free spinning knob would be about as good.
Other than that though, and I have a lot of professional cooking experience, I wouldn't. They're generally uninsulated, made of just sheets of stainless steel. Touching them can burn you, they can have sharp edges and corners that can badly cut.
Their safety assumes frequent and thorough cleaning regimes. Where a residential system will have safer failure modes if not maintained correctly, a commercial one may just become a grease fire instead.
Also the dimensions and their dynamics just are often not good for the kinds of cooking you do at home. It takes an hour to heat a full-size uninsulated commercial stove's oven to baking temp. Commercial gear is generally built around that assumption: that you will turn it on once, every single day, and run it for 12-18 hours straight. That completely changes the design, efficiency, and maintenance constraints in ways that may not work at home.
I used to want a big two-basic stainless commercial sink with sprayer. I stayed in an airbnb with that once, and it turns out it takes several gallons of water to fill that even a few inches, a minimal amount to wash dishes. A restaurant's water line can do that in seconds, it can take minutes on a home one, depending.
There are definitely specific, individual pieces where the commercial versions are easily adapted to home use and superior. There are many more cases where they aren't. A blanket "buy commercial" is not good advice imo.
This. When my Cuisinart food processor bowl broke for the 2nd time, I went and got a RobotCoupe professional model. The cheese grater attachment I got for it says that you shouldn't run it for longer than 4 hours! at a time. Once you start going commercial, you will not look back. Pay more (if you buy new), work forever and if they do break, there are people/places you can get them serviced.
Not OP, and not making any recommendations, but even something mainstream like webstaurantstore.com carries a fair amount of commercial cooking equipment. Enough to give you some ideas, at least.
Odds are there are a few restaurant supply stores around you. Most independent of any chain. They tend to be open the the public only 'working hours'. Find one that wants to serve you
Not necessarily. Some might be, but generally there's demand for smaller appliances in commercial kitchens too. For example, think of the now ubiquitous food trucks -- they don't have a ton of room for the fridge or freezer, but still need one.
If anything, the consumer grade stuff tends to all be made roughly the same, and in many cases is just someone slapping their brand on an OEM appliance.
It's the same horseshit with smart thermostats. I expect a thermostat to last ten years minimum, if not twenty or thirty. How many times do these companies have to fuck their customers before people stop buying them? The very instant you become more profitable to abandon than to support everything you bought will stop working. If it can happen to Revolv customers it can happen to you.
I recently bought a thirty year old home complete with its contents whose owner was an old man. The newest thing in it was an air conditioner from 2007. Know what? Every single thing is in perfect working order. AC, fridge, stereo, dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, thermostat. The list goes on and on. Everything from electric can openers to garage door openers works like it was brand new. If Google can't match that standard it can get stuffed.
Thermostat companies are too busy selling remote administration connections to power companies to allow them to control your thermostat to care about what you, the end user, wants.
Dont worry, by 2035 or manufacturers will buy laws requiring all appliances to last only 5 years at most. It will be like the right to read, but for physical artifacts.
Agreed. The only one I want "connected" is my washer/dryer, and for that I only want the damn thing to be able to remind me it's done!
Things like that is where I wish local-only home automation had become more prevalent. Imagine if your washer or dishwasher could send a "completion reminder" to your home assistant to push to you. No need for a dozen different apps and C&C servers, just a local MQTT or SNMP like message to the on-prem hub or listener.
This time it bricked. Next time it could just as easily turn on high and not shut off until the power is removed.
EDIT for disbelievers: The software update meant for an oven successfully installed on a microwave, and bricked the microwave because it was writing instructions to the wrong addresses. Why believe the software would never accidentally write to the 'heating element relay' bit in an oven?
I have a dozen or more devices that can burn down my house (or kill me in other interesting ways) connected to the internet because I am confident in the precautions taken by the engineers who designed them and mitigating the “hacker” threat model is mostly already addressed by precautions already taken to mitigate failing (“rogue”) controller boards present in their non-internet connected counterparts through 30+ years of iteration.
Specifically my laser printer has a thermal bypass switch, my smartphone(s) have charge controllers integrated into the batteries, my water heater has a pressure release valve, my oven is literally designed to withstand max heat for an indefinite period of time, my garage door is a death trap in four different ways (but has redundant safeguards for all of those), my kettle has has a thermocouple that trips when it boils dry etc. etc.
From a micro-morts perspective, adding “electricity” to an object makes it significantly more dangerous than adding “internet”. Ie going from a hand grinder to an electric grinder. But the utility is worth the trade off.
The issue is that hardware interlocks might at some point be replaced with software interlocks, if they haven't already. See the Therac-25 incident for a concrete example.
Once a hardware interlock safeguard requirement is put in place by a regulatory body it’s rarely removed. See British fused sockets for instance.
My threat model allows me to be completely cavalier with a dishwasher. I would be considerably more serious with safety concerns were I to put a chemo machine in my garage. My suspicion is that people who haven’t shipped home appliances connected to mains are not aware of how much of the engineering effort goes into making these machines safe relatively to how little it does for adjacent categories and are mis-indexing risk over bigger issues like vendor lock in as with the Sonos upgrade fiasco a few years back.
My experience is with making a few consumer electronics products and running through the UL/CE gauntlet. In those cases, the ‘materiel’ required to make sure you don’t shock your users to death is a bigger lift than what happens if one of nine I/O lines are held high or low or fuzzed in interesting ways when there are secondary layers of fusing built in.
From what I recall your background was in industrial machines and I concede the point that if sent an inappropriate signal, disaster would ensue. I don’t connect my CNC machines to my network but I meant to scope this discussion to home goods which are meant to have a lot of protections built in - specifically against the “user” - which compared to “internet” or “electricity” will always trump unpredictableness :-)
That's a fair point, users tend to find interesting and novel ways to apply for Darwin awards with disconcerting ease. They also excel in coming up with reasons why all those fancy lock-outs don't apply to them. Tape, pens, kitchenware, anything will do to get that gear to run with the door open...
My oven is Internet connected. It can't be turned on remotely unless I press a button on the oven itself, and even then it'll only allow it once.
The WiFi functionality is also such total garbage that it'll only stay connected for a few days, and requires physically unplugging and re-plugging the power to the oven to get it to reconnect.
> It can't be turned on remotely unless I press a button on the oven itself, and even then it'll only allow it once.
I'm not sure I'd be willing to believe a manufacturer on this. This feature is probably implemented in software, rather than hardware - simply because it's cheaper.
The idea of any of these home appliances being internet connected really blows my mind.
How did software engineering get to the point where this kind of low quality update is shipped "too often" for serious circumstances like a physical oven? Like it's hardly notable news anymore for something like this to happen. It's frequent.
I worry that agile is largely responsible, and has mutated into a pipeline for garbage, though I don't have any evidence to confirm that suspicion.
I don't think that the problem is unique to software engineering - manufacturers have been skimping on engineering quality for centuries. I believe that the problem is worse with software because (a) it's harder to judge quality for software than for physical goods and (b) most consumers seem to have been brainwashed into having much lower standards for software than for hardware.
I don't think "Agile" is responsible, but it is a supporting character here for sure. Let me give a little history from my perspective.
I got involved in that movement before the word "Agile" existed; I was really interested in the ideas coming from the Extreme Programming folks and had tried them out on a small project in 2000. All of the people I met early on really wanted to do software well; the question was how to do it well and responsively. Unit and acceptance tests were just part of the process [1], and Kent Beck also wrote Test Driven Development By Example [2] around then. So in my view there was strong early interest in quality.
But this was all happening during the rise of the internet, which changed people's expectations for software delivery. Previously, releasing every 18 months was seen as reasonable. Suddenly the web was changing people's expectations. (Although not as fast as you'd think; a consultant pal told me in 2004 that Weight Watchers still had an annual release cycle for their website.) Executives and managers were under pressure to deliver faster.
As I wrote about elsewhere [3], that created a need for Agile that was filled not by the humanistic culture and quality-oriented practices of my end of the Agile world, but by consultants and certification programs watering down the material until executives could slap some new labels on their same old bullshit and call it Agile.
It turns out that bullshit long predates Agile. If you go back to Royce's original 1970 paper on Waterfall [4], one of his big points is that it doesn't work. Why, then, did it become the predominant way to organize software projects? Because it feels good to managers. For most of the project, it gives them a feeling of control and competence. That feeling is false, as it just delays all of the real-world feedback until near the nominal end. But they can perform confidence and competence to their boss, which is vital in managerialist [5] organizations.
So I totally agree with you that Agile on average has mutated into a garbage pipeline. And that happened through a whole industry that produced manager-friendly process theater that threw out a quality focus and most of the Agile values, while using the Agile labels. But I think the real responsibility lies in our management culture and values, which both precedes Agile and whose harm extends well beyond it.
> Why, then, did it become the predominant way to organize software projects? Because it feels good to managers. For most of the project, it gives them a feeling of control and competence. That feeling is false, as it just delays all of the real-world feedback until near the nominal end. But they can perform confidence and competence to their boss, which is vital in managerialist [5] organizations.
Waterfall is not just "feels good" - it decouples their evaluation from their performance.
Until the end, everything is good because there's no measurement to show otherwise. At the end, measurements that show things have gone wrong merely prove that some past manager failed.
The only way to fail is to be a manager throughout the whole project, and management rotations guarantee that that never happens.
It's not just software. The scheduled manager tenure at at least one of the largest semiconductor companies is one year shorter than the design->ship cycle.
Oh, for sure. I think that's an important component in why it feels good to managers. It's like the "baby driver" toy, the fake steering wheel and console you can give to toddlers. They get to turn the wheel and press the buttons and feel very important.
And I'd add that at the end of the waterfall cycle, metrics often (and incorrectly) show that the workers failed. After all, they said they were 95% done just a bit ago, and now they're suddenly not done. It's very easy to shift blame to them.
As contrast, a lot of the effective Agile techniques don't actually fix problems; they just shorten the feedback loops so problems surface sooner. That's part of why fake Agile won out; managers didn't adopt any of the bits that would make them feel uncomfortable or expose the very real problems with how they run things.
> It can't be turned on remotely unless I press a button on the oven itself, and even then it'll only allow it once.
That it's possible at all suggests that the oven is only one bad firmware update away from turning itself on when you don't intend it.
Conceivably such a limitation could be built into the hardware; e.g. with a button that works like a circuit breaker. Set to break after the oven starts once and requiring the user to manually reset it. But the odds of it actually being implemented in this way, rather than pure software, is virtually nil.
I agree with you. But it's just the oven, so the risk is just wasting some gas and heating my house up a little until I notice. The cooktop burners can't be operated remotely, so there's no risk of unintended open flames.
Also, because of the crappy WiFi it's almost never connected anyway.
Your modern oven probably has an electronically controlled ignition instead of a pilot light. What would stop the oven from opening the gas valves without igniting, potentially creating a high-risk situation if there are any issues with the seal?
Imagine an attack on the electric grid that works by startíng a large number of high-power appliances (ovens, EVs, ACs/heat pumps, etc) at max power at the exact same time.
This is actually a big potential for a smart grid - turning on or off demand from things like fridges and ovens in response to the grid frequency changing.
If the grid is very slightly over 50hz it means demand exceeds supply and vice versa.
By automatically switching off the pump on thousands of fridges for a few seconds, networks would require less generation capacity on standby - saving $$$ and CO2.
Of course, like you say, this would leave potential for this to be used in reverse to destabilise an entire grid.
> If the grid is very slightly over 50hz it means demand exceeds supply and vice versa.
Not to be too pedantic, but it's actually the opposite. Frequency drops as demand goes up, which requires more supply to compensate. This is because the generators physically spin more slowly as they are put under more load.
Just wait until these long range, low power mesh networks are the norm. Then they'll be networked and auto updating (and spying!) without your knowledge or consent!
Yeah if it doesn't have a hard off internet/bluetooth switch I don't want it. I don't want some hacker-ish kid next door pwning it in 5 years when the manufacturer no longer updates, I don't want to have to load security updates on my toaster. I just want to push the thingy and then the thing happens. All my kitchen appliances are 15 years old, 5 years old when I bought the house.
I found an oven that had all the features I wanted... and internet. After verifying it did not require internet I bought it and it will never be connected. Who connects something that could burn your house down to the internet?!
Electrolux are a horrible company. They seem to have borged a whole load of other brands, which all have now descended to Electrolux's abysmal standards.
- They don't support their own products; the warranty is served by a third-party
- Their products are built to a price-point, and fail just after the warranty is up
- Spare parts are expensive
- They apparently have neither an email address or phone number
The water heater in my AEG dishwasher failed three times in six months. Each time I had to wait a month for the repair man to arrive, declare that my water-heater had failed, and come back two weeks later to fit the part.
I don't understand why market forces haven't bankrupted them.
> I don't understand why market forces haven't bankrupted them.
I think the short answer is that companies spend many hundreds of billions each year manipulating the market. Instead of going to all the hard work of building a trusted brand, you can just buy one people have a vague familiarity with, spend a bunch on marketing, and ship cheap garbage until the brand value has been reduced to zero.
But why are they making machines out of parts they know are defective? Why are they not incentivised to fix the design? For example, a washing-machine electronic control panel with a defective circuit design, which meant that a certain diode was overloaded, and would reliably burn out a short while out of warranty.
Electronic control panels for white goods are incredibly expensive. Come to that, if you started from scratch to build (e.g.) a washing machine from manufacturer's parts, you'd have to sell your house. If the parts really cost that much, it's a wonder they can sell their own version so cheaply.
I think you're implying a unity to them, a coherence, that just doesn't exist. I think the more salient question would be something much longer involving the incentives of a half-dozen different people at a company that is mainly optimized for the wealth and ego of various high-status actors. The long-term incentives for effective operations are there, but they're blunted by managerialist priorities and overwhelmed by the short-term incentives for producing cash ASAP.
That isn't limited to Electrolux in my experience, it may be fairly common. Samsung, for example, has exactly the same arms-length third party warranty support pattern. Wait a while, get a tech to come see what part needs to be replaced, wait some more, tech comes back to actually do the work. Meanwhile your appliance is out of service. Pretty soon it starts to look preferable to just discard the appliance and buy a new one even if that means spending a thousand bucks. Perhaps this is all by design.
Oh, and in case it needed to be said -- I strongly, strongly recommend avoiding Samsung for appliances. They are awful. The part of Samsung that does monitors and smartphones seems pretty great, but their appliance division makes abysmal stuff.
Yeah and they are very much subpar, same as Whirlpool cca 12 years ago also sold through Ikea. Bought some kitchen appliances when buying Ikea kitchens (twice), all had some minor or not so minor issues.
Whirlpool fridge had door isolation strip uneven resulting in some heat coming in, from Day 1. Induction stove had few flat touch buttons responding only to strong pressure, kind of randomly, also Day 1. Electrolux - dish washer is well below average in quality of cleaning, our 15 years old Bosch does much better job. Also Electrolux - stove hood, something broke inside after maybe a year, so it performs at maybe 20% of the basic speed. Faster modes don't work at all and it shutdowns itself after maybe 5 mins. This one is especially annoying since its built into the wall.
Fuck these trashy brands, I'll never ever buy anything else from them. Its Siemens, Bosch and Miele, but mainly Bosch which doesn't command Miele's high price and reliability/features are OK for us. I am not rich nor patient enough to waste so much time, money and energy on anything else.
> Its Siemens, Bosch and Miele, but mainly Bosch which doesn't command Miele's high price and reliability/features are OK for us.
From my experience, you can't go wrong with either of those - and, just in case you didn't know already, Siemens and Bosch are basically one - even operating under "BSH", Bosch/Siemens Home Appliances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSH_Hausger%C3%A4te
That also means that each company basically has their own version of each product - i.e. the same fridge with slightly different features (different tray combinations/heights/...) are available from both (varying model # of course) - and one may be even a little cheaper than the other...
With Bosch, I was told by the installer that the only reason for paying for top-of-the-range models was for additional features. The underlying machinery is the same in all models.
To my reasoning, more features means more things to fail, means less reliable. And I've always disliked feeping creaturitis - I always use the same settings on appliances. And I get to pay less if there are less features; so I win both ways. What's not to like?
I only recently became aware that their home appliances branch had been acquired by Electrolux somewhere in the 1990s. Brand awareness can be slow. AEG used to be a high quality brand for things like washing machines.
I know; that's why I bought an AEG dishwasher. I replaced it with a Bosch, which still seems to be a decent brand. I've since downsized my home, and the dishwasher is now me.
Love has ruined my body,
Washing has ruined my hands.
As a fellow Bosch dishwasher owner, I have to say they do seem to make a pretty decent appliance still. Not all of their appliances get the same acclaim, but for dishwashers the only real competition seems to be Miele (and they don't necessarily outperform in any short-term way, but have a reputation for just lasting 20 years instead of the usual 10).
I was really keen to get an Anova Precision Oven (countertop combi steam oven), but then found out that Anova is owned by Electrolux now. That kind of killed the deal for me.
My friend got a generator recently that wouldn't work unless connected to wifi, which he didn't have onsite because it was his cabin in the middle of nowhere. He had to call customer service which gave him a PIN to enter on the generator to bypass the requirement.
> "An employee manually entered a wrong number somewhere, causing an incorrect update. As a result, all combi microwaves of this type no longer work in the Benelux," says a spokesperson for the umbrella company Electrolux.
All????? They didn't roll out the release gradually? Holy hell.
>They didn't roll out the release gradually? Holy hell.
Have you looked at dev wages for appliances? That explains everything in short. Everything has to be done for the cheapest price in the shortest amount of time. Fractions of cents are cut in every directions when possible. So when you're operating dev teams on shoe string budgets under constant crunch, there's no talent nor resources for sane management, dev and testing practices. Kind of like the game dev industry, but worse.
And the sad part is, there are really great devs stuck in that shitty industry, as it takes a lot of skill to write code so efficient it fits in undersized ROM or write firmware that can replace HW components.
It really depends on the expected production numbers whether it makes sense to save on hardware. I have worked on expensive products of which only a few thousand were made, predictably because it was specialized stuff, and a lot of money was spent to make the software aceptably fast...
It's different for e.g. cars where it's typically millions, at least for the computing parts.
AEG consumer electronics are pure trash nowadays and have nothing to do with the OG AEG company. IIRC, it's a Chinese brand now who licensed the AEG brand name.
Are there still consumer white goods brands that aren't lowest-bidder Chinese crap? I've learned not to trust brand names anymore and just assume everything is crap and buy cheap stuff that I wouldn't mind replacing at the smallest problem.
Owned by Electrolux. So in Europe at at least Electrolux, zanussi and AEG will be roughly similar parts aimed at different market segments. My AEG oven from a year ago was still made in Germany so hopefully ok. They may well ajbe sold the branding rights in some cases though.
There's so much wrong about this, but please don't assume that an oven with internet connection is useless just because you have no use for it. Having food in there and turning it on so it's ready when you come home is convenient - I did this with an old oven and a HomeKit-enabled outlet. Now we have a new oven that has to much electronics for this to work (but not enough to remember the f**g time when unplugged).
So if I _would_ trust these internet connected devices (which I do not, because of stories like this and other user hostile behavior), I'd really like to use the features that would make possible.
>I wonder how many €0.01 per unit they saved by not having enough storage to keep the old firmware version while they loaded the new one?
You're maybe joking, but when I worked in automotive, they really worked hard to save 2mm in length of a thicker copper wiring inside the ECU to save maybe a cent. No joke.
Unless you're in the high margins league of Nvidia, Apple, etc, the rest of the HW industry is insanely price sensitive, so all these jokes on how cheap manufacturers are, are the reality on how the industry is staying afloat.
Reminds me of the documentary of how the wah-wah pedal was invented.
Apparently Warwick Electronics told one engineer to swap out an On/Off switch with a turn knob because these cost 0.25$ per piece instead of 1$. Which was huge savings in the 60s.
While experimenting, the engineer, who was also a guitarist, found that it sounds really cool to play while you turn the knob.
The director wanted to sell these knobs to jazz orchestras and big bands for the trumpeters, but the engineer was like "Hold on a second, I think we can put this in a pedal and make it a guitar thing".
You're underestimating the amount of consumers who value the "Wi-Fi enabled" feature sticker plastered on the box and marketing spec sheet of a product on display at Walmart.
Manufacturers go with whatever marketing tells them will sell and what consumers are buying.
Personal anecdote time: I was part of a team developing a HW product a few years back and one day our boss comes in fumigating:
Boss: "RGB! Management wants us to put damn RGB LEDs in our up-coming products."
Us: "But why, what for? Do they know it has zero usage in our products?"
Boss: "Doesn't matter to them. Sales guys said our competitors have RGB now and customers will not buy our products anymore since they see that the competition has one extra feature we don't have, so we gotta put that RGB in ASAP somehow."
Us: "Ok, and what shall our firmware do with the new RGB LEDs?"
Boss: "Don't know <shrugs>. Marketing is still trying to figure that one out, so we'll code the firmware before the product launch."
I rest my case. This whole consumer industry is absolutely mental.
And so, today everything needs to be internet connected, because it's another feature on a spec sheet that marketing/sales demands.
The update process finished successfully, very likely no one thought a downgrade would be needed in such a case. I wonder why they can't just roll out another, maybe that would also hit the legit steamovens
Had a Hotpoint friege freezer where the door handle broke due to the vacuum seal being too strong, engineer came out, replaced the door because you couldnt just replace the handle and then he plugged it into a device on the pretense of checking the electrical safety. Fast forward a few weeks the compressor would not start.
Hotpoint is part owned by Us company Whirlpool and Chinese company Haier.
Its my belief the fridge freezer firmware was updated using the mains cable much like thernet powerline adapters work. I still have the fridge freezer so will be tearing it down and inspecting the electrical components to prove this in good time.
"The kitchen of the future will only employ one man and one dog: the man’s job is to feed the dog, the dog’s job is to bite the man if he tries to touch anything”.
So your oven needs updates because it's connected to the internet. It needs internet so manufacrurers could sell your data to data brokers. Those data brokers need your data to sell it to advertisers. And advertisers need it to sell you personalized ads. Users need ads to convince themselves that they need cheap junk, like those wifi-equipped microwave ovens. And those ovens need updates because... Such is the cycle of misery that's called "advertising industry".
We had analog timers 50 years ago, so that the Sunday roast would be ready when you came home from church. This crap is unneeded, unnecessary complexity. To hell with it.
Hmmm, I've never considered pre-heating a microwave; I thought it wasn't necessary, because the food would be heated using - um - microwaves. I must have been missing a trick.
Mine connects, specifically to allow Alexa voice control. It actually comes in handy once and a while (or should I say, handless...)
The one appliance I have that has internet capability that I don't understand is my dishwasher. It has the ability to be remote started. I can't think of a single use case for this, since you need to load soap to use it, and it has a delay feature. It's a great dishwasher, and I bought it in spite of the silly internet option, which I've never enabled.
This sounds like an awful idea. you'll have a kid somewhere mimic their parents, throw their plastic fruit in the oven, and tell alexa to cook it (starting a fire)
i could see having something in there ready to go, and waiting until the meat hits a certain temperature to turn it on. If the microwave and the thermometer can both make it to the same service that could be automated. Since so few people run on premiss home automation that would require internet access. It is way easier to connect to a phone if the device and app just know to connect to a spot on the internet. port forwarding and whatnot are a pain for some people. That said I suppose the real reason is the company is collecting marketing data.
Yeah I'm in a similar situation, I just use a match lol. Every now and then it will make a sad little "tick tick" as I turn the knob. Not sure what's wrong with it but it doesn't matter, we have mastered fire.
It's turning a $10 tshirt into a $1 one, but with a nfc tag so your movements can be tracked (a pretty much ready business idea, VCs must be starting a fight to fund it already).
It's installed into a cabinet, so there's no quick access for a visiting technician to get to the back panel, let alone the internals, in case they need to access a debug port to reflash it.
Any kind of Internet connectivity on an appliance is a strong anti-feature for me. I can't think of a single reason I would want it, and it seems like it would either be a privacy invasion or a source of headaches.
Unfortunately I think for the average customer this is a "blue crystals" feature, something they don't really need and probably don't use much but that makes the device feel new and cool. Mass market product development is governed by what the bulk of the market does, so we will probably see more "put a chip in it" trash.
The solution is unfortunately to go up market and pay more for luxury or commercial grade stuff. On the plus side it tends to last a lot longer, so if you factor in life span it may cost about the same.
The analog thermostat of my fridge broke, a replacement thermostat didn't work reliably.
So around two or three years ago I replaced it with an ESP2866, a relay and an ds18b20.
It worked great, except that the logic was outside the fridge on a home server, it was a a Python script which also logged the data into InfluxDB. The issue then was that sometimes when the server was down, the fridge stayed on or off.
Last week I started to reorganize my WiFi, which devices access which APs, and since then it had constant disconnects, so I decided to finally fix this issue.
It should at least be considered a drawback, so that the benefits it offers must outweigh it. For a microwave, the drawbacks is (obviously) greater than whatever benefit it can offer.
For a heat pump or something that can actually make good use of the internet (remote control, looking at electricity prices, planning with weather information) the cost/benefit analysis is different.
I'd hate to have an internet connected microwave but I'd love to have an internet connected heat pump (Or ideally a heat pump with a local REST api so I can just tell it myself)
I worry that there will be a day, similar to the problem we currently have with TVs, that it will be difficult (or even impossible) to buy non-smart kitchen appliances.
I still don't see the point of my fridge being connected to wifi, but I'll admit that I might just be a bit of a Luddite.
Software on appliances have on reason to exist: lock users from acessing advanced features without paying an extra price for it. Although even Stallman once said he doesn't care about what his oven is running[0], I think we all should.
I just went with the Breville Air Fryer Pro. It's a great toaster oven and doesn't connect to the network. Unfortunately even Breville's latest oven is now WiFi enabled.
I want to point out most cars made after 2004 or so have no physical connection between not just accelerator and engine but more importantly wheels and steering wheel.
So their usability is as good as the software written to control them and the motor/sensor windings, etc.
Not unlike the software controlling that microwave.
This is absolutely not true. Most cars have switched to electronic power steering (EPS) which uses a manual steering rack and linkage, but driven by an electric motor controlled by haptics to create more power when turning. Steering wheels are /always/ directly connected to the steering rack, in every single vehicle intended to be operated by a human.
Drive by wire systems replaced a mechanical throttle linkage with an electronic control, and the reason for this is because it's massively better in every aspect, using EFI vs a throttle body. There are some hybrid designs called TBI (Throttle Body Injected), which are meh. EFI controls fuel and air mixtures dynamically using servos and relays driven by the ECU in response to signals from the drive by wire system.
I still like the fact my car is full mechanical everything which seems to fail more "softly" than any replacement that relies on software. Toyota's electric accelerator and its spaghetti-code comes to mind.
Electric steering is power steering using electric motors instead of hydraulics. There is still a physical linkage and you can still steer the car with the power off.
On my 2014 Prius, the brakes use an electric pump to power the hydraulics. In normal operation, the computer handles the brakes, but there is a physical backup.
The throttle is completely by wire, because there is no more reliable way to run two electric motors and a gas engine together with an analog system.
To pointlessly add on to existing replies - the brake pedal is always mechanical (if somewhat less effective with the engine off or not working). And it'd be difficult to find a car whose brakes weren't able to stop full throttle.
Ah yes, it's to prevent people downgrading or running "unauthorized" firmware when they inevitably start adding user-hostile "features".