This is basically my general attitude. Seems like it is solving a problem that doesn’t really exist. Or indicative of a culture that dedicates energy and technology to achieve increasingly miniscule benefits. Not to mention, paying money so people can accumulate even MORE info about your habits and preferences…
I always think it somehow - wrong - when I see an apparently able-boded adult who is not wrangling kids and does not have their hands full - push a button to close their trunk/tailgate. But I sure appreciate the fob pushbutton to unlock my car’s doors!
Funny how in various situations we each draw lines as to how much effort and energy we wish to apply to accomplish various things.
I want a fridge with one of those vacuum tube thingies like they have at the bank. Get it hooked up to the store and all I have to do is press a button and whatever I want shoots through the tube and into my fridge.
Sort of. American eggs are washed, and should be refrigerated after washing. They don’t “require” it, but eggs are bacterial culture mediaum, (and chickens are salmonela carriers) and if the gunk is washed off, eggs “should” be refrigerated.
If you are getting unwashed eggs, just in the cupboard.
I was thinking more along the lines of hackers scaring the crap out of someone opening the fridge door by getting the cam to say “ZUUL”,* or controlling a fridge computer in order to raise the temperature to 78 degrees between 2 and 5 a.m., so the homeowner develops a nasty case of food poisoning.
*inspired by a notorious case involving a security hole in a baby cam.
Getting back to the refrigerator with the built-in WiFi camera that allows you to see, from the store, what’s in it, imagine you’re a product designer at a major appliance manufacturer. Refrigerators are, essentially, mature products. There’s no breakthrough that you can make so that your products are half the size of the competitors, or twice as efficient. The customer who walks into an appliance showroom will find that the various brands of refrigerators are roughly similar in size, energy efficiency and door placement.
So what do you, as the product designer, do to distinguish your products? Aha, you think. All of your customers have smartphones with them, so you’ll design a way that they can see the contents of their refrigerators from home. Or you think, I’ll design a refrigerator with a blackboard or whiteboard covering on the front, so the customer can write his/her shopping list right there. Or his kids can decorate the fridge as they like.
It’s not an easy thing to try to develop a product that’s substantially different from the competitors when the market is mature.
There is no useful application for rfid in a bloody fridge!
RFID should be in your garbage can. Because I keep my eggs in a box, and no amount of fridge cams and rfid will determine if that box is empty. But if I throw the box out it is gonna be empty.
The fridge should get data about electrical pricing, switch on when power is free and leave the shopping list to the garbage can.
When I’m rich I’m going to get a fridge with a built-in soft-serve dispenser. For some reason they don’t sell those on a domestic basis, either they’re huge heavy commercial products or the home ones you can get aren’t attached to a freezer.
I have no interest in icemakers or iced coffee or internet connectivity or even a soda fountain. Soft serve, please.
A friend of mine has a wifi-enabled kettle (“kettle”, for the uninitiated, being a countertop appliance which rapidly boils water by means of an electric heating element, and which is very handy for making a quick cup of tea).
This strikes me as pointless. Even if the kettle already has enough water in it, what’s the point of turning it on remotely when you will have to physically go to it once it boils? And kettles are quite quick too - most of the time I turn on the kettle and by the time I’ve gotten a mug and tea set up it’s already boiled.
I guess I wonder how much effort should be aimed at such things. If the mature market means that the product as generally designed meets consumers’ needs/wants, then put you effort into making it more efficient, or designing completely different alternatives.
I sure hope there aren’t a bunch of paper clip designers out there trying to improve upon that design… I know - maybe install mini tracking devices so no clip is ever lost! :rolleyes:
This is part of the reasoning behind the “color scheme cycle” for major kitchen appliances. Harvest Gold is in! No it’s out. Beige is in! No, it’s out. Stainless steel is in! No, it’s out. Etc.
In addition to encouraging people to unnecessarily replace their appliances due to color, brands compete to be the leader in the next iteration. If you think that hot pink fridges are about to take off and you start producing them just when they take off, you win.
One of my rules of thumb: The latest and greatest add-on to an appliance is the first thing to break down. E.g., front door dispensers don’t last long. These IoT things won’t last long at all. So, if you want to waste money, this is for you.
Here is a review by Consumer Reports of the new refrigerator. No one has mentioned that it also has an LCD screen on the front so you can watch TV, run a few apps, etc. It is not a full-featured Android/iPad, so you can’t go to the app store and download stuff.
Consumer Reports suggests you’d be better off getting a regular tablet and taping it onto your refrigerator.
As for the camera inside, it wouldn’t do me any good unless it was a X-Ray camera. Ever notice how TV refrigerators only have like two or three items per shelf, neatly stacked, and orderly arranged? Consumer Reports says that even items stored in the door shelves will block the camera and that the camera can’t see the far corners.
But in any case, I don’t think that the point of this product is actually to sell very many camera-equipped refrigerators. It’s true that they can’t actually improve much on the basic refrigerator design. But they can improve on consumer perceptions of their brand.
I think that they are trying to give their brand a high-tech aura in consumers’ minds. You might go shopping and see a regular Samsung refrigerator and think to yourself, “Isn’t this the brand that puts cutting-edge technology in their refrigerators?” even if there is no actual difference.
