Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zrobotics 218 days ago
Just putting this out there: 4 months ago a friend's Samsung fridge (6 months old at the time, 2500USD price) failed due to a refrigerant leak. They had to spend 20 hours total on online chat and phone calls to get their warranty claim, and it took several weeks.

So you absolutely don't want any Samsung appliances, even the non 'smart' ones.

5 comments

Every single Samsung appliance we had failed in sad ways. Stove knobs cracked and fell off. Fridge condensation mitigation failed leading to flooding. Fridge icemaker doesnt defrost properly and gets stuck. The worst thing is, these are not primary functions of the appliance - but as a result the whole thing gets tossed when replaced. (We inherited them from previous owners, was not by choice).
As someone who has now owned multiple Samsung fridges, I commiserate.

In my market Samsung has driven away all the service techs. We managed to find one, and he said he only works on Samsung because it’s a captive market now. He complained that Samsung micromanages field services to a degree that they’re killing the service ecosystem for their appliances.

We had him try to fix an issue with a dryer. On his way out he looked at the fridge and said “has the ice maker stopped working yet?” It actually had stopped working a year earlier. We didn’t get it fixed then because Samsung didn’t have anyone to send, and there were no third parties we could find (even unauthorized).

We’ve been replacing all our appliances with other brands.

Edit: PS - depending on the model of fridge, the ice maker infrastructure (typically near the filter) eventually start pooling water and might freeze in inconvenient places. Watch out for that. YMMV.

This is what amazes me. I swore off Samsung because of their unreliability: smartphones, TVs, refrigerators are terrible despite demanding a premium price over other cheaper players that offer better quality. Instead of investing time and effort in making their products better they’re doing the exact opposite. No one has ever said “the fridge is going to show me ads now? Better throw away my old one and get this bad boy on launch day”. Just make your products better people.
Samsungs smartphones are unreliable?
Last month, my old phone decided to die, and I bought a Samsung. Hardware is fine so far, but software ...

Recent rant in a similar thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740274

New rant:

As I said, the phone restarted itself to upgrade and disabled the notifications until I loged in again. I could have missed some important stuff, but I notice it before it caused a problem.

So I went to the configuration and disable automatic upgrades.

Now I get a notification that ask me to restart to upgrade, and say that if I accept it will be restarted automatically next time. (And it's very easy to press that button by mistake.)

And there is an annoying that each week tells me if I used the phone 5 minuthe more than the previous week, and is magical and impossible to turn off.

I've owned 2 Samsung smartphones and both have had issues the same hardware issue. In the older phone it was a known issue so the repair was only $20, but with the new phone I think it'd be a couple hundred more
They learned with apple
Apple's had a few bad streaks with their butterfly keyboards in terms of unreliability, and they're certainly not built for repairability, but that's a far cry from Samsung's appliances that are always looking for an excuse to detonate.
I’ve never had apple hardware have unreliability though
My m2 max flew too close to the sun with its design. It's a amazing laptop. Drives 4 monitors with ease. Rarely turns on the fan. But the USB ports keep frying if they take power because this thing is a beast. The right one goes first. Then the front left then the back left eventually. Problem is I just can't always power it from that back left one depending on which dock I plug into. I try and run off the maglock. Been in for depot replace of board 2x now. After second repair right USB died in 2 hours after it was pulling power off of that port and not the dock or mag.

Still a great computer but $7500 for something that kills itself 3 times in 3.5 years sucks. Luckily it's a company computer and they're giving me a m4 max

That is an expensive fridge too. We just bought a new Miele fridge. Very high quality materials, an awesome fridge in every way. It was an expensive one, 1400 euros.

So in US you pay a thousand more for a fridge that shows advertisement?

We had a Samsung dishwasher before. It was about 500 euros and started leaking water after five years. Now we have an expensive Miele which was about thousand euros. Seems that they don't share the same issue.

I had a similar experience after I got a stove and microwave from Samsung. It was such a shitshow they ended up giving me the microwave for free, but with the hours I spent dealing with support it basically came out to the equivalent of minimum wage .
I learned that lesson the hard way already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44489161 . Samsung: not even once.