Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.
Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.
Why even design a fridge to stop cooling via an electronic switch? How is that in any way a desirable function? I don’t care what you put in the firmware, there should not be a physical switch that can turn off the cooling via software. That’s what the plug is for.
Because people want to set the fridge temperature precisely to 6C, and not turn a century old tech of a mechanical thermostat located inside it to an arbitrary setting between “off” and “three”.
And if you want to be able to do that, an electronic switch is literally the only way: you now have a computer that is responsible of doing “if current_temp > set_temp then compressor = on”. When that computer stops working, so does the fridge.
Not an issue if that’s the only thing that computer does. Probably an issue if it’s complicated enough to support Xbox live streaming so you can play Doom on it.
They could absolutely seperate the controls of the fridge to a nice physical dial that is an accurate thermostat and keep it separate from all the smart functions.
I can’t think of any reason for needing to remotely change the temperature
The reason is that companies when they make “smart” products throw everything and the kitchen sink into it in order to justify the higher price of that version of their product - their remote control app needs to look like it does lots of things so that it feels like it’s actually worth it, hence it’s filled with needless crap just to make it look feature-rich.
It’s a business and marketing reason rather than a technical or user requirements reason.
OK, following scenario: you forgot to drink the verification can for your heater, but you’re on vacation. So the house gets cold and your goldfish are about to die of cold.
You dial in your Smart Fish Feeder™ to increase their rations, so that they can build up some fat. But then they’re unhealthy, and your Smart Fish Feeder™ dropped its Wifi connection anyway.
Instead you dial in your Smart Fridge™ and lower its temperature, so that it functions as a space heater now. Your fish are safe now.
But now your Smart Lock™ opens for safety reasons, as it misinterprets the sudden rise in temperature as a house fire.
When you come home your goldfish left to buy some cigarettes but never came home.
So, a very crucial feature, I’d say.
You don’t even need separate controls. Just have the compressor and temperature controlled by a simple microcontroller which gets commands from the touch screen. Thus if the touch screen crashes the microcontroller keeps the food cold.
That of course requires adding a microcontroller rather than just putting a couple of relays attached to the touch screen…
It doesn’t matter.
If they vibe code their software, even the most stupidly stable parts of the code that once made nobody should touch, ever, like say the part that decides when to turn on the compressor to reach the desired temperature, can be changed by the code generator everytime they decide to add a totally unrelated feature, and end up with bugs, possibly the stupidest shit imaginable of the “nobody would ever make this mistake” kind.
If they can push fresh firmware into it externally, they can fuck up ANYTHING at ANY TIME. It’s the ability of replacing the code in it at any time that’s the problem - if firmware can be updated by the manufactures at any time your food and your health (if you end up eating food that spoiled without you noticing) has a constantly active risk vector which is linked to the quality of the software development process of that manufacturer.
If shit isn’t exposed to the Net, shit doesn’t need firmware updates for security reasons and if a user wants to update the firmware to get some new feature then they will do it willingly in their own time, knowing that the firmware was updated and thus much more likely to notice things not working properly (and much less likely to keep on doing firmware updates in the future if the software development process of the device maker is shit and their firmware updates keep fucking up their devices).
The fridge itself only activates the compressor when it determines it needs it (typically based on a termostat and the temperature you chose for it) so in a digital fridge that would part of its software since the “desired temperature” setting is itself from some kind of digital input rather than a hardware knob, and in a “Smart” Fridge it makes sense that value can also come from the outside (likely a smart phone app).
I mean, setting the desired temperature ss a stupid near-zero-value feature (how often are you away from the fridge and actually need to change that setting), but designers of smart shit throw all kinds of meaningless crap into it in order to justify the higher price for “smarts” - feature-wise those things are a mile wide and an inch deep.
So it makes sense that a firmware update for the fridge would include the whole code, including the part that just decides when to activate the compressor and hence that even such basic functionality can be hit by a such a bug, even if only indirectly - in a properly managed code base, it’s perfectly possibly that the code that activates the compressor itself based on the temperature setting is stable as fuck and never gets updated but the code upstream that sets the target temp from commands sent from a smartphone has been changed and is setting a stupid value, whilst if the thing is vibe coded all bets are off and even the most stable “there have been no feature changes here in 2 decades” areas of the code which only an idiot would touch can very well be changed by the code generator and now have bugs.
If you have a microprocessor, you might as well use it to control the thermostat so the user can use software controls instead of a dial