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Samsung confirms its $1,800+ fridges will start showing you ads
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- Title
- Ads on your smart fridge? Samsung confirms pilot program in the US
- Published
- Sep 18 2025
- Word count
- 546 words
Going to attempt to never own a fridge, for one, that costs that much, but secondly, never one with a screen on it for as long as I live, and certainly not any Samsung products in general. Hopefully the same with any/all appliances. Most smart stuff can stay the f far away from me, or honestly, anything with screens or touchscreens at all that don't need them (dishwashers, dryers, washers, fridges, microwaves, toasters, cars, etc...)
In the early-mid days of SSDs they had some solid efforts, but outside of that, no interest in the brand at all
The problem comes when there are no choices without screens. Then you end up forced to either spend an astronomical sum for something ad free because it’s meant for industrial type applications. Sort of like smart TVs.
I bought a new fridge almost 4 years ago and there were plenty of options without screens, including mine which is a higher end model. Have things really changed that much in such a short period of time?
I think their meaning is that the problem will come if/when that happens. Same issue as when you want a TV without “smart” features, like they mentioned, or a (newer/higher end) car without a touchscreen.
Will it happen with fridges? I’m somewhat doubtful - I think enough people just see the ones with screens as weird or tacky, and enough people buy the basic commodity models anyway where adding a screen wouldn’t be cost effective, that the manufacturers won’t be able to push it too far on this one.
But there are enough examples of an entire market making a decision seemingly simultaneously and leaving the user with no other options that I’m never going to be 100% confident on that…
Nothing a hammer can't fix.
It's not like a fridge has ever required controls to function properly
Only problem is if basic fridge settings can only be adjusted through the display.
I was mucking about with a relative's fridge a couple years ago - a nice model but no display screen. It had certain fridge settings that required the app to set up; no manual option. Insane.
Sometimes the settings are also hidden. We have a nice Samsung washer/dryer set that plays a whole freaking song loudly every time a cycle ends and there is nothing in the settings menu to turn it off. But last week I discovered that pressing the settings option for 5 seconds brings up a secret menu where I could turn off all sounds. Now I can enjoy glorious silence again in my house, but why the hell was it buried??
holy shit. I have been listening to that dumb song for NINE YEARS. but no longer!
I just found out I could turn the jingle off too. The dryer has like 12 buttons that can be long pressed, short pressed, cycled through etc. There are plenty of input options. And yet turning off the jingle requires you to hold two buttons for precisely 3 seconds and isn't explained anywhere but the manual (wasn't readily available as it's a rental unit). Whyyyyy
John Samsung's nephew worked hard on that jingle, and by God you are going to hear it and enjoy it!
I have turned off the sounds on one machine but not the other. I don't remember which one. I don't know how to turn the other one off. I think it switches on some days which one plays the full song
or just never connect it to the internet, like with smart TVs
I’m sure it’ll show a giant CONNECT ME! button and light up your kitchen 24 hours straight until you give in…
That trick is gonna stop working with BLE meshes. It'll just trickle data via your cellphone when in range.
My washer is the only smart device I love. And that's because machine learning makes a lot of sense on a washer/dryer combo. If only to keep it from self destructing on an unbalanced load.
A lot of smart device hell could be solved with right to repair laws that mandate unlockable bootloaders and public documentation, enabling easy malicious interoperability. Spread the word.
I'm skeptical Apple would let my iPhone do that without giving me controls over it.
Beauty of BLE mesh is that it'll only take one device that is connected. Doesn't matter if you own it.
Amazon Sidewalk is only the beginning. Just need a neighbor with an Echo.
And everyone has a lot more faith in Apple than they should. As they capture more and more of the market with a locked-down ecosystem, it becomes trvially easy to deploy something like this buried deep in a ToS with an opt-out button buried deep in a menu somewhere.
I'll start selling aftermarket doors without screens.
If you add a TV lobotomy service you can have my money.
My logo will be the FLCL robot in black and white, re-enacting that scene in Pi.
Yeah and I'm sure we'll get there eventually. Hopefully it will be long enough that I'll never have to experience it.
That’s not even an expensive fridge though? But I hear you, I’m never buying an appliance that shows me ads. That’s just crazy.
This very much depends on what you're used to. I'm used to a no-frills (no water dispenser, etc) fridge, and you can buy 30 cu. ft. basic/standard models for like $700 at Home Depot. There is absolutely no way I'd be spending $1800 on a fridge. Maybe it's normal for larger homes and kitchens and what not, but I've never, and my family has never, had a ton of money or spent that money on appliances so any of those massive $1200+ fridges are very much unnecessary "luxury" items to me.
IMO the more complicated they are, the harder they are to repair, and the more things they have that can break, and I don't trust overly expensive, over complicated stuff to seem to last a long time these days either
It will always be basic stuff for me, even if I have to go with "used" models, just so they can continue to be repairable and built well.
To me it is, our current fridge which is a Bosch fridge freezer combo cost us around 800 euros which is roughly 941 usd. For around 1800 usd you are looking at the upper limit of what you can even spend on these type of fridges.
To be fair, these are not the double door American style fridges. I also took a look at those, but also there you are only looking at these inflated prices if you insist on things like an ice and/or water dispenser. Without those, the price range is very similar. As a tangibly related PSA, dispensers while neat also make your fridge much less efficient and are often the first thing to break.
The other source of price inflation seems to be displays with information. Which, in my opinion, is very much a gimmick. Also with Samsung specifically, you know that if it has a screen they will pull shit like this at some point.
I'm interested in your comment about efficiency - why would an ice dispenser make the fridge less efficient? My (aggressively un-engineer-y) thinking is that the dispenser must be cold to be dispensing ice, so it shouldn't be a problem of a gap in insulation, but I'm either wrong or missing something, I imagine.
The spot in the door where the ice comes out is a big uninsulated rectangle with just a little plastic flap blocking airflow. That spot makes a big difference.
Thanks, that's good to know. I'd heard that it's a part that often breaks, and I'm lucky enough to live in a place where constant ice availability isn't a massive benefit, so I'd always just dismissed fridges with one out of hand. Good to know I've also been shaving a bit off of my bills too!
What if you can easily turn off the ads? Then you get what's basically a free discount, thanks to all the other people who don't/can't turn off the ads.
I know this is like suggesting a "low-asbestos house", but this is rational for some buyers, and has basically already happened with smart TVs -and now all smart TVs have ads by default.
I'm skeptical that it's a discount, really: they're already charging what the market will bear, and if they thought they could increase the price then they would, so it presumably wouldn't (couldn't) go up if the ad revenue suddenly disappeared - meaning that it hasn't gone down as the result of the ad revenue being there either. But I guess that's a 30 second view of something bounded by business psychology, consumer psychology, game theory, information asymmetry, and good old incompetence too, so who knows what the real contribution to the pricing equation there is.
I will say that for me personally, I absolutely would forego the hypothetical discount to support ad free products. I don't want to live in a world of pervasive advertising, I don't want my peers to be continually advertised to, and I don't want my choices in the market to be influenced by their appeal to marketers as much or more than their appeal to end users. I think the negative externalities are much larger than the value of the cash discount, even if 100% of it were passed back to the customer. But I also acknowledge that I'm a tech industry person making tech industry money, so that's easier for me to say than most.
I could only see this being a discount if the there is a choice between that exact same model without basicaly any adversial internet enabled functionality or a complete breakdown of the price.
As it is there is no transparency, only unilateraly adjusting the sw remotely for a single party benefit.
My Sony smart TV has no ads. Granted it is a few years old at this point. Has things changed for them?
General case Sony TVs tend to be notably better than average on this (partly because they use Android TV/Google TV, which is based on an actual widely used OS rather than the proprietary junk most other manufacturers use) and Samsung tend to be notably worse than average.
It’s been a few years since I was working with smart TV stuff specifically, but from a quick glance that assumption still seems to hold, so I’d expect Sony to be fine. It also differs pretty widely by region even within a given brand, for legal and commercial reasons.
I should also be fair and say that I don’t use any of the smart features on my TV, so there could be ads elsewhere that I don’t see. But unlike my old Samsung TV I can open up the settings menu and input picker without seeing any ads.
Screens can be useful. It has a nice intuitive interface to view and modify settings, and it can enable other kinds of tasks like putting reminders on them. I see the appeal.
But if we're going to be paying 4 figures and these companies still feel a need to shove ads in my face, I'll just stick to the old stuff. A fridge isn't exactly something I'm swapping out every few years.
What settings do you need on your fridge? My "dumb" fridge lets me change the temperature from cold to colder, and has some knobs that ostensibly control the humidity in the drawers, but other than that, I can't think of any more settings I need or want.
And yeah, a calendar and reminders and such might be nice, but it would be much better for that to be a standalone device so that you're not tied into the Samsung ecosystem, and so that you have much more control over it.
I keep thinking that in an ideal world, I would actually not want a standalone device, I'd want to be tied into the ecosystem. If there was a company or institution that wasn't evil, and that just worked like how I buy A4 paper without caring what brand it is, or whether it's compatible with my printer's ink/toner (because it just is).
It really is absurd that we have a bunch of different ecosystems, all of which we expect to fuck us over, and the best idea everyone has is "try to go without ecosystems by eschewing technology/’smart’ devices as much as possible".
My big fantasy is that everyone remembers that The Government Can Do Stuff, and we make a publicly-funded company whose goal is to just make functional devices that work, and provide nifty features without trying to devour your soul.
I've used my government's web pages. They're horrific (some of them still want me to somehow use Internet Explorer and run Java Applets, just some real abandonware-level stuff). I get where you're coming from, I'd like it, but it feels like a fantasy.
It can be done - gov.uk is excellent - but for every gov.uk we seem to have at least five Horizon ITs and NPfITs, so who knows how we're meant to get it done without that dice roll.
That's fair, though I think there are still some problems, even in the idealistic world you describe.
A built-in computer means that when your fridge dies, you're throwing out a fully functional computer and monitor, because it's built into the fridge. It's pretty wasteful. And yeah, you can probably rip it out and have an functional computer (with exposed wires and circuit boards), but most people aren't going to do that. Especially not the type of person who is buying these fridges in the first place.
What's the difference between built-in electronics, and a built-in computer? Obviously, a fridge is an electric device so inevitably must have electronics of some sort. "A built-in computer", interpreted literally, means it has a microchip, but honestly microchips are so damn cheap and reliable that they're commonly used nowadays just to remove a few copper wires from the wiring plan of the electronics- in other words, the difference is fuzzy at best, and realistically no longer exists.
But, when people say "a built in computer" nowadays, they tend to basically mean 'smart functionality' - which will usually run on one of those existing cost-saving microchips (presumably beefed up slightly, and including a few extra components like the WiFi). The thing is, the computing power for e.g. [remote-controlling your kettle] is basically a $1 chip vs a $2 chip. It's not going to make a difference whether the electronics are worth salvaging.
Seriously, I've looked into making a literal desktop computer from a microchip, and the answer is kind of really dumb: the keyboard is more expensive than the chip. It's not a "fully functional computer", if only because the definition of "fully functional" ought to be that someone would actually use the thing.
Interpreting your comment charitably though, I think your implicit argument is that microchips ought to be recycled because they're very expensive to produce, environmentally speaking. And while that's a problem, I think trying to address it at the fridge side is bad, because fundamentally it's a market problem - if the chips aren't properly priced, then the solution is to properly price the chips, not bemoan that people don't value the underpriced thing. Of course they'll undervalue the underpriced thing!
Not much, like you said. But there is also a touchscreen monitor, which isn't just a $2 off the shelf component.
Largely though, my complaint is just that I don't like the trend of smashing two completely unrelated things together, making them dependent on each other, more expensive, and worse than if they were just separate. My fridge doesn't need to show me my calendar.
I excluded the touchscreen monitor because I don't know enough about fridge monitors, but I'm guessing those things are the fairly small type of monitor and not a proper desktop sized one - at which point the same argument applies that nobody really wants to re-use the screen, for the same reason laptops are 13" and not 8".
If the fridge screen was physically modular in that it was basically just a slot with a purpose-built iPad that had a wired plug to talk with the fridge's chip, would that be any different to a literal iPad stapled to the fridge door? Half the point of integrating the functionality into the fridge is that the module slots and sockets are expensive, and nobody wants to pay for the extra expense - so companies make cheap shit that's integrated because it's cheap, and coincidentally also shoddy/unreliable because it's cheap. For instance, touchscreens are often used because they're a single screen with a single wire, which nowadays is cheaper than having a bunch of custom knobs/buttons with labels. This might not be the case for fridges, but it's why cars have been moving to touchscreens.
I've never seen a fridge that has a calendar, AIUI they add stuff like internal cameras that let you check what's in the fridge without opening it and letting the cold out - a really cool energy-efficiency measure, if the manufacturing energy of the electronics is low enough. Although, having a calendar interface on the fridge honestly makes perfect sense to me, because it's an attempt to skip the 'pull out tiny screen from pocket and futz around with finding the app' problem. Food is inherently time-sensitive, and deciding how to schedule your time re:food generally involves going to the fridge and checking inventory already. In a sense, moving various app functionality to an appliance's screen would be an attempt to appliance-ize phone apps.
"Need" is a strong word. I still have a 15 year old dumb fridge who's fanciest feature is a crisper drawer and 2 dials to control temperature. A dedicated icebox for meat would be nice, but that's more of a hardware issue.
The software dream fridge wouldn't be that much.
And this can all be offline, because I see no need to check in for any of these features. I don't even particularly care for any kind of phone compatibility (that just opens the door for updates, and thus more phoning home).
I’m kind of not buying the need for these features.
There is only one part in a refrigerator that will ever go wrong, for the most part; the compressor. It is the only mechanical part of the refrigerator and it is entirely responsible for pulling the heat out of the inside of the fridge. It doesn’t need servicing except in the case of mechanical failure and there is no need to have a sensor for that because you will quickly notice that it is not keeping things cold. Granted, manufacturers can and sometimes do program logic into their refrigerators to alert owners when it’s not reaching the temperature that it should be getting to.
The exterior surfaces used in most refrigerators are already basically whiteboards that you can use dry-erase markers for.
Temperature makes sense to adjust, but why humidity? Refrigerators are going to have very limited ability to hold on to moisture because of the low temperatures. Thats the main reason why you put you cooked food in containers before putting them in. The lighting might be nice to adjust but dimmable lighting just seems kind of extraneous to me.
Like I said, "need" is a strong word. My fridge is only a daily driver in terms of keeping cold food cold. Anything else is a bonus. But appliances are expensive, so if I'm committing to a new one I wouldn't mind looking for one with some extra features. Not at the cost of it serving ads, though.
crisper drawers. It helps keeps vegetables fresh just a little bit longer in their compartments.
If my fridge ever has any functions that require "settings" other than temperature knobs/dials, and at MOST, a button to dispense water or ice, I have purchased the wrong, and overcomplicated, fridge.
For settings, I feel this is still very much a gimmick. There is basically only temperature you need to set and show. Which can be done with simple buttons and a no frills segmented display.
For reminders and stuff, I see the appeal. But then I would never trust Samsung to deliver on that, given my experience with their software and products. I have had a few appliances of them over the years but in my experience they break down much faster than other brands (our cloths dryer) or Samsung finds creative ways to enshitify the software side of things. Certainly with appliances that I expect to own for a long time they simply do not have earned my trust.
So yeah, exactly that ;) Not to mention that for reminders and other stuff there are a variety of stand alone products out there you can use. Ranging from Android tablets to simple e-paper solutions.
Well, yes. I don't trust them either given the way they treat their TV line. It's almost as if that ad data is worth more than the dang $2500 I gave them for the TV.
But I can still dream of tech that respects its customer. Maybe one day we can get proper regulations (and ones that are enforced, not just paid off with a fine). The E-ink terminal is pretty neat. I might actually get that when my finances are crap (so hopefully next year... But who knows in these trying times?)
It kind of is. See, ads are only useful if they reach people with money. If Samsung sold a version without ads for a higher price, then the people with money would buy that thing and then Samsung wouldn't be able to sell ads.
lol, typo?
There is an article from years ago saying that Visio, an early adopter of invasive advertising being put into their TVs, made more money from advertising than they did from their actual TV sales.
(I really should have it bookmarked with how much I seem to bring it up, but it’s here: https://gizmodo.com/welp-vizio-now-makes-twice-as-much-from-advertising-as-1848034943)
Advertising is the devil and if we outlawed it the world would be a markedly better place.
To be honest, I avoid them as well. They are such a shady company owned by shady mobsters. I know they are not unique for doing creepy and annoying things with their products, but they have done so many blatantly inhumane things that I have written them off at this point.
You might not have a choice someday if the competition also has refrigerators with screens.
Sort of like most new cars having spyware built in.
It might like Amazon eInk readers, the price is much lower with advertising built in and you have to pay more to not get it.
At that point I would be buying old used stuff (like I would with cars too). I have no doubt things will worsen to the point that it will be unavoidable at some point in time. But I will make the best of the present, and do my best for my remaining days on Earth not to surrender to the nonsense
I think it is worth pointing out which screens will have the ads. I am not a user of this fridge, so not fully sure what exactly each of these themes are, but showing ads on the weather theme personally seems the most annoying. Seeing today's weather forecast on the fridge door as I am getting my breakfast in the morning seems convenient and would be the only thing I could see myself using a smart fridge for, but also I am not the target demographic of smart devices. Having an ad pop up there instead/alongside the weather would be a nuisance and make me toggle it off
Seems to be a pretty predictable course. Internet enabled appliance in a market where personal ownership of digital devices is for practical purposes fragile has(depending on the device) analytics and ads potential or in other words monetization potential.
We have seen it with tvs where it is practically impossible to buy just a panel or cars that come standard with infotainment and internet connectivity.
Standard end user can try to not buy in to these trends when they still have a choice which they seem unwilling to do in order to get temporary convenience. Or they plain do not care, I assume due to the negative externalities being minimally obscured.
Or we ( the US ) gets a legitimate government again someday that passes a law letting consumers opt out of those "features".
Well, I hope the stores selling them get burned to the ground often enough that they stop doing it.