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?!