> (apparently they make left and right shoes in different countries now)

This feels like a joke about just in time inventory and globalization, but I'm worried that it might be true.

I'm not immune. I recently bought some New Balance shoes from Sheels, figuring I'd be getting reasonable quality footwear. Both sets had hole damn near worn through the soles and delamination in multiple locations after ~6 months of wearing them as an office worker who does no abnormal amount of walking or exercise in them. Come to find out their "non flagship" models are cheaply made garbage as opposed to the quintessential white leather model that costs, iirc, the upper $300 range and is made in America.

> if forced to choose blindly I'd pick Sony over WMFSENSY.

Only at the same price. If there's a big discount, I'm going to prefer the random letter jumble from China because it's probably a standard design that a lot of factories are producing because it works well enough.

The only reason I lean towards Sony all things being equal is because I know that Sony gets sued when things go wrong, and won't just drop the brand and close up shop like the random letter jumble.

Also I would prefer Sony if lead would be a problem somewhere in the thing I'm buying.

A more likely scenario is that display shoes of the same nominal size/model can be made in different factories, and when they are reboxed to be sold, they end up in a box from the wrong factory. Different factories make the same model but can have differences in processes so the shoes are noticeably different. Having left and right made in separate factories, much less countries, would be a total nightmare of inventory management.

Older brands have a motive to care for their reputation, because if people know *oldbrand* is bad. they will avoid *oldbrand* and it dies.

On the contrary, *insertanynonenglishnamebrand* (*newbrand*) doesn't need to have any care in the world. If the product is trash, they would replace the name next year, bonus points if they declare bankrupcy and don't pay their obligations.

This is fair. I should have been more explicit that my wonderment is how something that is gospel in the car guy/mechanic community has somehow completely avoided filtering into the greater consumer discussion with regards to catastrophic failure and reliability.

> This information is freely available if you google “[vehicle model] depreciation curve”.

That's just one of those secrets that you need to know, though. It's like knowing to ignore the unemployment rate (in the vast majority of cases) and instead to look at the prime-age employment rate. People rarely think of something like that without being told.

Sure but the infotainment/smart BS should be firewall off from the "keep the food cold" life safety part of the appliance.

Even Tesla which plays fast & loose with some things.. the car does not come to a halt if the infotainment/GPS/etc tablet reboots. It's VERY disconcerting as you have no speedometer, the car is eerily silent, etc.. but the car still drives.

Just sloppy, cheap, lazy engineering.

Maybe some fridges have cameras with object detection and can tell you what % your milk remains, but this one does not do any of that.

Features that are smart listed on the product page[1]:

Family Hub™ 21.5”: Family Hub™ keeps your family connected from anywhere; search recipes, share pictures, stream music, access YouTube and control your smart devices all from your the fridge* (*A WiFi connection and Samsung account required)

SmartThings Energy: SmartThings lets you monitor and manage your smart refrigerator's power usage; get energy saving tips and alerts to help lower your electric bill all from your phone.

Now Brief: The Now Brief provides a daily overview of information including the weather, your schedule and latest health data on your Family Hub ™screen, when it's not in use; customize your Now Brief dashboard using your favorite apps and widgets to get a quick glance of what's relevant to you.

https://www.lowes.com/pd/Samsung-30-cu-ft-Smart-French-Door-...

Extremely uncompelling stuff. Now add in that it is probably beaming your usage habits for your ad profile, always listening for voice commands, and apparently will break into freezing mode, and I cannot imagine why anyone would even consider this. If they were giving them out for free or paying people to put in their house, their existence would make sense tp me. Now I've learned that n>1 people paid multiple thousands of dollars for this and I assume it is not the only model out there.

> fridge with a camera inside

What they don't tell you: when the fridge door is closed the light turns off.

(yes HN this is a joke)

More seriously, in a previous job I did inventory/POS systems for pubs which would track the obvious things like "you got ten casks of beer delivered this morning and have sold 50 pints, at what point do you need to order more beer". It would genuinely be useful to have inventory tracking for fridges. At one point this would rely on barcodes, but machine vision should be good enough for now. The problem is, as with many smart things, it needs to be reliable and frictionless enough that it's better than just the Mark 1 Eyeball.

Also it's very difficult to trust if it might end up integrated into a purchase system. Does "you always have milk in the fridge" sound good? Yes. Is it going to be like "HP Instant Ink", a massive and slightly wasteful ripoff? Well, quite possibly.

Why not just open the door and have a look in the fridge?

My idea of a smart fridge: a fridge with Zigbee Temp/Humidity sensor connected to my Home Assistant automation system that alerts me if things get out of whack.

My idea of a dumb fridge: a fridge that updates firmware, bricks itself, and lets all my food spoil.

This wouldn't work in today's environment because any engineering capacity won't be directed towards making the thing useful when Samsung or whoever can sell the inside of your fridge in return for "recommended products".

Those are undoubtedly useful features, I just question why they should need the cloud:

> - Reminders to change the ice/water filter get sent to my phone.

How do you deal with all your other maintenance tasks around the house? with other appliances? with your car? Why not use a central system, like a task/reminder app?

> - When we had a teenager living with us, getting remote notifications that the refrigerator door was left open probably saved us a few fridge-fulls of food.

I would understand a child leaving the door open but a teenager doing it that often is kind of wild? Regardless, wouldn't a reminder beep that starts when the door has been open for 5 minutes be better? Must everything be on your phone? It's not even actionable if you're not in the house, where you'd hear a local beep.

> The app also records when the filter was changed

The filters I buy come with little date stickers to put on it.

> Reminding you what food is going to be bad soon. Letting you know a list of recipes you can do with what food you have

I feel like this is what people say a smart fridge _could_ be good for, but can they even do that? From what I understand the most sophisticated ones can tell you if some specific items are in your fridge, and otherwise they just do basic shit like display photos and tell the weather.

All of those features just seem so gimmicky, and I could never imagine myself actually relying on them. If you are a functioning adult, these things are barely convenient, and the novelty wears off very quickly.

I will take a solidly engineered fridge with a good energy usage profile every single time over some overengineered wifi-connected piece of crap.

> Reminding you what food is going to be bad soon. Letting you know a list of recipes you can do with what food you have.

How? Are there cameras inside the fridge that check best before dates, and what food is in there? Having a fridge that is actively spying on what I eat seems even worse.

It's one of the tragedies of modern tech. We could make a time saving smart fridge but we end up with ads and data collection with a veneer of usefulness.

Why not just attach a tablet to your fridge? Then you can easily upgrade and replace it over time. Maybe the fridge maker could integrate some internal sensors and let a generic tablet interface with them, if you want to? No need for some integrated "smart" (dumb) feature that bricks the fridge and fails at doing the basic job a fridge is supposed to do!

any instances of this in the wild? it seems like fridges are pretty cheap anyway and ones with smart features are more expensive? i don't think this a tv-like scenario.

Have any data that the savings are passed on to the consumer? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't see any modern, late-stage capitalism companies doing anything that actually benefits the consumer.

Escalator manufacturers actually don't recommend having people use stationary escalators as stairs, as they're potentially in a problem state and may experience additional failure and become very unsafe.

If you have an option of regular stairs or stalled escalators, use the stairs.

“Sorry for the convenience!”

https://youtu.be/vrIw2i4WtA4?is=AWJK7ywVgImbVcTD

Right lol. How is there no default fallback?

Driving the compressor with software is not intrinsically a problem, but critical functions have to be isolated to a minimal safe kernel that will always run, like the kernel space/user space distinction. Smart features can read and send messages to the minimal kernel, but should not themselves be in the critical loop. Boggles the mind that this is not standard practice.

I also remember an incident where a rental car refused to start the engine because the driver made the mistake of parking it in an area without reception and it wouldn't start without phoning home to a server.

Having worked in software at a legacy car company (Mercedes specifically), I wouldn't actually be too worried about most of them either (note: in this regard specifically, I could certainly criticize plenty of other things). There's a lot of institutional discipline keeping the stability and operation of the driving stuff separate from the screen stuff.

A relative recently bought an electric Renault. When you open the door and sit in it you are greeted by an annoying voice assistant talking to you (can be disabled at least). It's also got sound effects for everything, but you cannot throttle its charging speed and the charging status shown in the app is often delayed by hours.

If you reboot infotainment in a Polestar 2, all HVAC stops working until the system is finished booting...

“Ahh, and yet to participate in society.”

This is a direction all manufacturers are going into, so there is little actual choice. And buying used is not a real solution; where do tomorrow’s used vehicles come from?

As others pointed out, your argument is a fallacy. Technically a "Tu Quoque", in practice this explains it better: https://iea.org.uk/yet-you-participate-in-society-in-defence...

A chunk of smart features are either legally mandated (eCall) or soft-required for "safety" (Euro NCAP lanekeeping etc).

all cars made in the last 15 years do it

Starting own car company is not a viable solution for a typical person.