in 2022 it revealed a scheme called “Evolving Appliances For You" that promised software upgrades to home appliances. The company offered the example of a family that moves to a different home, and different climate, and upgrades its clothes drier with routines suited to local conditions.

This is fucking hilarious. Nobody, and I really do mean nobody, actually wants a dryer that you need to pay a subscription fee for just in case one day you move house so it can try to reconfigure itself.

This and this article might be a little more concise.

It sounds like more ads for smart tvs, and a subscription service for extra features for smart appliances - like a chatbot for your fridge or dishwasher or something.

It doesn’t necessarily sound evil to me it just sounds completely retarded. I’m all about tech making life easier but it’s genuinely hard to imagine why I would want a smart dishwasher. I want a dumbass dishwasher who’s actions are solely determined by the 3 buttons on it.

It will be interesting to see how the market responds to this. It’s hard to imagine that really anyone will be seduced by the idea of a “smart” home with these sorts of intangible benefits.

I bought a $3k+ LG OLED. I intentionally never agreed to any TOS so that it would act as a dumb TV. I wanted it on the network so that I could control it through Home Assistant and Apple HomeKit so I put it in my IoT VLAN. Within a day it was trying to port scan my network! It is now fully isolated with no outgoing connections allowed.

A few years ago, services like Apple Music and Netflix made me drop piracy. A low fee on my credit card to get convenient access to all I wanted.

Now there are 5 different TV streaming services with atrocious pricing, and they’re making sharing harder. For songs, Apple Music keeps removing music I like, YouTube Music is flawed and I’d rather not listen to music ever again than use Spotify.

Oh but that’s not all - your weather app, social media platforms, a simple note taking app, Microsoft office, Adobe, everything is a subscription.

Got a new phone? Better pay for cloud services or it will literally start hammering you with notifications to get more storage everyday.

Guess what - I’m now back to zero subscriptions and a lot, and I do mean a lot, of pirated content on my Jellyfin server.

There’s only one way I’d be OK with “subscribing” to use a LG fridge: I don’t pay anything upfront and I don’t need to pay for any repairs. If I don’t even get to own it, then I shouldn’t be responsible for fixing it when it dies and spoils all my food after a year or two, nor should I need to pay for a new fridge when I give up on it after those repairs inevitably fail again. Same with their TVs when the cheap capacitors die early.

If I subscribe to rent your product, the onus is on you to make it reliable enough that it lasts until the subscription turns a profit.

Since that won’t be their business model, I’m better off buying a half decent brand and then flushing $1000 down the toilet. Fuck LG appliances. (And fuck Samsung appliances while we’re here.)

Home as a Service

This has triggered a Fight AND Flight response in my brain. I want to smash everything with a mallet then run to the mountains.
I hate “as a Service” so much!

I used to like LG products they were often really good quality and lasted a long time.

That’s pretty much over now, not touching new LG products anymore. That’s for sure!

I had an LG CRT and it was as old as me. Never died. It’s a real shame the planet is suffering because of greedy business practices. They put climate change on the consumer but more needs to be done to big corporations to punish this kind of behaviour.

This is why I like dumb products. The smarter they are the more they tac on this kind of crap to them.

this change will solidify that I will never buy an LG product if they all have that shit

FOAAS (Fuck off as a service)

Who asked for that?

This little tidbit is left out:

In order to use LG’s smart appliance features you must agree to allow the company to track your precise location 100% of the time via phone app.

I have 2 wifi enabled LG appliances, a refrigerator and a washer. A couple of the smart features are useful such as the end of cycle notification on the washer and a high temperature / door open warning on the fridge. Unfortunately those features don’t work very well and there can be very long delays between an event (such as an end of cycle) and the app notification.

So not only is LG’s implementation poorly done and not very functional, customers are expected to give up any semblance of privacy to even use them.

Fuck that. I disconnected my appliances from wifi and deleted the app.

Paying a monthly charge for the extremely limited smart features on appliances is nuts, even if you didn’t have to allow LG to constantly track your whereabouts. I hope the general public is smart enough to make LG’s subscription service a complete failure.

where are those ukrainian crackers that made custom flash for john deere tractors, we’re gonna need them

Commenting from an LG phone (last one produced) next to an LG tv. Will never purchase another one of their products in my life, even before this article.