• lifeinlarkhall@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    I don’t understand “smart fridges”. There’s an ad I keep seeing about one that is just… stupid. It’s like the guy goes to the fridge door and instead of opening the door a little screen shows him what’s inside. Wow, so useful? I could maybe get it if it showed someone out shopping and they couldn’t remember if they had milk so they could check their smart fridge but I still think it’s dumb. Lol. Not every appliance needs to be “smart”.

    • halcyoncmdr@piefed.social
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      11 hours ago

      I could maybe get it if it showed someone out shopping and they couldn’t remember if they had milk so they could check their smart fridge

      That’s one reason. They can also track what you put in and take out to track the age of things for food safety. Notifying you of things that have been in there too long, or that you need to replace.

      Since many people no longer use film cameras, they replace the old need to use a magnet to put a photo on the fridge. Instead able to just show a never ending slideshow of everything.

      Replacing the old whiteboard or notepad for messages to the household.

      Able to search and walk you through recipes on the screen itself, even notifying whether you have the ingredients on hand. to make something.

      Letting you play and control music while cooking, or even making/receiving phone calls or even video calls on some models.

      They are by no means necessary, but neither is your smartphone. 20 years ago a very tiny percentage of people had Internet on their phones. 30 years ago, few people had cell phones at all. Yet not having a smartphone nowadays is basically impossible while living in modern society, it is possible but nearly no one does it. All of it is about increased convenience.

    • Farid@startrek.website
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      11 hours ago

      If I could ask my fridge whether I still had a produce when I’m in a grocery store, I would do it all the time. Stop complaining about features that are actually trivial to implement that could benefit people. The only problem is that the companies piggyback on them for enshitification.

        • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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          25 minutes ago

          For that use case a picture would be good enough tbh. Still not going to buy a smart fridge because it sounds stupid to me, but it’s gotta cost less than 20 bucks per fridge at scale for the hardware to do it, so it’s pretty trivial.

        • Farid@startrek.website
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          1 hour ago

          I wasn’t implying that my use case was trivial, but general smart fridge features, like having a camera inside, an LCD panel on the outside, and having and esp32 or some other SoC to drive them are trivial. But manufacturers use those to spy and force ads on the consumer, which is why the association with them is negative.