It’s really quite impressive how much this press release turns me off from every buying any white goods from Samsung at any point in the future. It’s a vortex of “no”.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 .
Samsung is forever dead to me. A couple years ago I was working with a customer, showing them something on my phone. In the middle of the interaction, actively using my phone, Samsung forced it to reboot for an update I never agreed to.
..and fucking bricked my phone. Right there on the spot in the middle of a sale.
Plus the whole Tizen situation on the Gear watches was incredibly disappointing. I paid all kinds of money for a nice watch that had zero utility outside of Samsung's tiny, tiny walled garden and their very few, very broken apps. I'll never not be mad about it.
You absolutely do not want these smart tvs connected to the internet. Do it once maybe to update firmware. Then use them as a dumb tv and put an apple TV in front of it.
All tvs from all manufacturers have microphones and they do listen an sell info.
Everyone things Facebook is listening but it really is your tv.
I've got an LG C2 and you can't disable the Bluetooth, so anyone can try to connect to it. No service menu options too. I've not yet found out if cutting the WiFi/Bluetooth antennas is the only option.
> You absolutely do not want these smart tvs connected to the internet.
You can refuse to give them a direct WiFi connection, but just wait until they start using IOT mesh networks like Amazon Sidewalk as a fallback channel (assuming some aren't quietly doing that already).
Bought one, and I have regrets... Every time I turn it on and start watching something, after about 10 minutes a nag screen modal pops up for me to activate AI voice features. At first I entered the wizard and hit cancel. But that's not good enough, It will just keep showing up until you hit accept and activate it. I have since then deleted the Bixby account. We'll see how long it takes until it starts nagging me again.
Also random features require you to be logged in to a Samsung account on the TV. Like picture-in-picture for instance.
I'm considering refunding it, but it has absolutely brilliant picture quality though.
I get that, but at some point you're installing it in your house with non-color corrected lighting and viewing it during the daytime with your terrible human eyes. I get why 200-300 lumens of peak brightness can make a difference, but does 2-3% of color correctness really matter to people as they watch their low bitrate netflix stream?
Maybe we'd all be better off if we calmed down a bit on chasing the specs, and focused on something else for a while.
That's really disappointing; I have zero interest in allowing a device like that on my network, or in spending that much on hardware for a single proprietary service that could go away or change its terms, or in having a service that only works with one device rather than many services that all work on the same device (e.g. Android TV).
Sigh. Where's the video equivalent of music stores for "just let me buy a high-quality DRM-free download I actually own" already?
I imagine it won't be long before the TVs come with eSIMs to connect directly to Tmobile/Verizon/ATT, and maybe add some cameras in the borders to track eye movement.
Then the advertisers could buy more accurate information to improve product placement in movies/tv shows.
The sci-fi version could be a TV that can recognize what kind of things are in the room or clues for the viewer's socioeconomic status and emotional state to bring up content (or even change it in real time) to maximize resonance with the viewer.
The cost is probably still too do prohibitive to do so.
I worked with IoT devices, generally the cost per GB of data is around dollar per GB. I doubt you would make that back in advertisements.
Also, there is cost per SIM so you wouldn't want situation where SIM is active if you don't need it which is why alot of IoT devices have you setup with a phone because they turn SIM on when you sign up for their plan. If consumer never puts TV on Wi-Fi network or cooperates with the phone, then you would have keep each SIM active and turn it off when it checks in via Wi-Fi. My guess is cost is not worth it if you get 98% cooperation. Write off 2% and call it a day.
The cheaper play (which could be implemented today, likely with few HW changes) would be to just use BLE or another 2.4GHz proprietary protocol to broadcast your usage data (maybe encrypted with a vendor key - let's be generous) to another TV or refrigerator in your area that is already internet-connected.
This doesn't make the overall product better, though. People get so tunnel visioned on one narrow feature being the best and use that to justify purchasing a product that is overall hostile to them. This is why these practices never die.
In 2030, it will be "Well, the TV sends a 24/7 video of my living room to Samsung, plays a 5 minute ad every 10 minutes of content, displays in 480i unless I pay a $100/mo subscription, and it will kill my pets, but hey, it has the best display in the world, so I'm thinking about buying it."
I hope their OLED is better than their QLED because the latter has white splotches all over the screen from backlight bleeding through. I would throw it in the bin if I felt more strongly about it.
