I just want normal buttons and dials back. Not time-based capacitance buttons that take 5.02 seconds to activate, not 5.0 seconds; nor free-spinning encoder wheels that mandate you give it a jiggle before the washer does anything, even if it's already on the setting you want.
I want kachunk-a-chunk back first. Then we can decide if it needs smarts.
The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive.
They're more expensive (and more failure-prone) than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.
But one cool part about things like motorized kerchunk-a-wheels is that, upon failure, a motivated person on Gilligan's Island can often mend them back into service with a screwdriver and a sharp rock.
But these are [often] thousand dollar appliances. "Capacitive buttons are cheaper" shouldn't be a factor.
It's hard to understand why companies can't build things to last, use real buttons, provide parts for servicing at cost, add local APIs for anything "smart", forgo any secondary income streams (eg screens showing ads), and still make a profit.
It's not just the buttons themselves (in a capacitive-vs-mechanical sense) -- it's also warranty services.
When the electronicals are bottled up behind a sheet of glass or Perspex or whatever, then: They tend to last longer because their operating environment becomes less hazardous to them.
Exact hourly rates vary too much to write about specifics, but whatever they are: Sending a tech out to look at a thing costs real money (in the ballpark of hundreds of dollars, not dozens) that really bites into profit margin of any individual unit sale.
It bites into the margin even if the root problem is that the owner's roommate's friend pissed into the control panel with a head full of acid. They'll still be paying someone to physically go out and make that determination.
So if mush-buttons generate fewer service calls than push-buttons do, then: It's a big advantage to a manufacturer.
So... I think it's quite easy to understand how we got to where we are: Fewer moving parts + better environmental isolation for those parts = less after-sale risk.
(I don't necessarily like it, but there's lots of other things in the world that make good financial sense at the manufacturing level that I'm also not fond of. I can accept this reality without also pretending that it can't make sense for someone, somewhere.
Good answers? Speed Queen, for one, still makes good washers with real knobs and real buttons, for the consumer who favors these features.
Just add a smart plug or current monitoring and an iteration of Home Assistant or whatever running on a sleepy little Raspberry Pi or a VM/container or something to detect and notify soon after the wash is done. End-of-cycle detection is really all that is ever needed for smarts anyway. And that may sound convoluted, but these are smarts that you control yourself and are about as open-source as anyone may wish them to be.
(I don't want an appliance that I hope to last for 20 years or more to be connected to any networks at all: "Wake up, babe; new rootkit just dropped and our clothes washer is fucked" isn't a meme that I want to live through, even if it does have a nice API running on a stack that was last updated in [checks calendar] 2005.))
> End-of-cycle detection is really all that is ever needed for smarts anyway
To me that would be the least interesting part about a smart washing machine. Like when I start it, I can already see when it's going to be done. The part I'm really interested in is preloading and autostart it at a given time. Guess it's usecase related what one considers "needed for smarts"
> It's hard to understand why companies can't build things to last, use real buttons, provide parts for servicing at cost, add local APIs for anything "smart", forgo any secondary income streams (eg screens showing ads), and still make a profit.
It isn't that hard to understand. They can. They just choose not to, because success isn't defined by profits anymore. It's now defined by profit growth. The only ethical way to achieve that is to capture more market through relentless innovation and diversification. But that's impractical in a large corporation due to creeping inefficiency - it's a negative feedback loop. So they try the alternatives like:
a. seek rent on products they've already sold, even if there's no reason for it to be under a subscription (eg: heated car seats),
b. deliberately shortening the life of products (planned obsolescence), so that the consumer is forced to upgrade frequently
c. kill the concept of repair and reuse, forcing the consumer to spend even more frequently
d. sell your attention or data to interested third parties (ads)
e. gatekeep advanced or sometimes even basic access to your devices behind a paywall
f. and more.
Remember how HP's CEO said that those customers who don't take their subscription services are 'bad investments'? That's their attitude towards consumers now. We're no longer their esteemed customers. We're just cash cows for them to squeeze ever more tightly for our every last penny and drops of blood.
To summarize all the above in two words - 'insatiable greed'. But what worries me is how far they'll take it. What next? Washing machines that will hold your clothes hostage until you wire them a service fee? Lock you out of your home amenities like AC and power supply if they think yourey a racist? (This has happened already.) Robotic vacuum cleaners that follow you around and record you to recommend the number of contraceptives you should stock at home? Or mandatory heated toilet seats that will test your body wastes so that medical insurance companies can decide your premium?
What's hard to to understand is how we allow them. How the market hasn't seen an opening; why someone else hasn't started making machines to fill these niches.
There are so many pro-consumer ideas (I've only listed a few) that a company could seize upon to market themselves. And unlike pocket consumer-electronics, there's little barrier to entry. You don't need to reinvent anything (quite the opposite).
There's the dampening effect of private equity and reputation arbitrage to consider. If you build a company around steadfast refusal to profitmaxx, potential acquirers who are willing to apply these techniques can financially engineer their way to offering you a very, very, very tempting price for it. Your personal convictions will need to be proof against extremely strong financial motivation; and if you have partners or creditors, they'll need to share the same tenacity.
It still does seem like it should be more visible, though. I'm not sure how many good examples there are, if any, of new companies growing to an appreciable size from explicit repudiation of these practices only to then eventually be acquired and gutted. Maybe people who think like this just don't start companies.
You're quite right there. I've wondered those myself. Here are some theories.
> What's hard to to understand is how we allow them.
I think that this has to do with two factors - motivation and organization. Ordinary people are not motivated enough to seek long term affordability and market health. They are easily tempted by anything convenient and cheap (in the short term). That's how big chains and big online shops were able to out-compete brick and mortar and mom and pop shops. Once the competition is gone, the big shops show their true colors and hold the market hostage to extract as much revenue as possible. BigCos can do this because they're motivated strongly by the promise of great profits to seek long term strategies like this (as delayed gratification). Meanwhile the consumers make short term gains and accumulate massive long term losses!
The second factor is organization. Consumers hardly ever organize to make a concerted effort to force the hand of big companies. For example, let's assume that someone is marketing a simple, good quality and long-lasting washing machine. The only catch is that it's pricier than the other 'smart washing machines' because of the lower scale of production. Assume that the people organized together and decided to buy only that washing machine or any other that competes with it on merits (but not the price). The new washing machine will eventually become cheaper and better because they can now increase the production capacity as profits roll in. Meanwhile, the other companies will be forced to make their offerings cheaper and remove any offending 'features' if they want to sell any of it. And when they do, it will restore the market competition and drive the market further in favor of the consumers. This is what we want.
However, what happens is exactly the opposite of the above. Someone introduces a smart washing machine into a market full of regular dumb washing machines. They make it cheaper by collaborating with other companies - like recording and selling user data to third parties. Since the consumers are not organized, a sizable portion of the population will start choosing it. That population doesn't have to be the majority. It needs to be just big enough for other manufacturers to notice the slump in their sales. Even if malpractice in the product is obvious, they'll choose to sacrifice their privacy for the short term savings with some justification like 'I don't have anything to hide'. What happens next is well known. Other companies notice the loss of sales and are forced to follow suite. At some point, even the consumers who were never willing to compromise will be left without any choice. This is a repeating story with a lot of products. But one where this is very egregiously obvious is the smart TV market.
Meanwhile, the big companies actually organize to drive the market in that direction - again motivated by profits. One well known example of this is the 'Geneva Cartel' where manufactures banded together to mandate planned obsolescence of electric bulbs. Another example is the US telecom industry. Those companies would have preferred to create a monopoly first and then do this. However due to the anti-monopoly laws, they're motivated to organize together as co-monopolies instead. To this end, even the billionaires that own these rival multinational giants maintain an exclusive and secretive social club where they conduct all these scheming. They behave exactly like those old royal families and modern crime syndicate families to protect their privileged position in society.
> How the market hasn't seen an opening; why someone else hasn't started making machines to fill these niches.
> There are so many pro-consumer ideas (I've only listed a few) that a company could seize upon to market themselves. And unlike pocket consumer-electronics, there's little barrier to entry. You don't need to reinvent anything (quite the opposite).
I think the above explanation answers these questions too. The final point is that the larger consumer community lacks the long-term strategic planning that involves sacrificing short term savings, and the ability to unite for a common cause. The much smaller business community uses these same skills effectively against the consumers to consolidate wealth as much as possible. This weakness of the consumer community is clearly evident even on HN. Despite being a technical community, a few here would rather argue that privacy is not important to them, than unite with everyone and use their weight to push the market in the opposite direction.
The above situation is not a lost cause though. People have united together to achieve much harder goals. What's needed is a solid motivation. And in this situation, that motivation can come from the awareness of the class war and the exploitation they're subjected to under it. That needs a lot of public campaigns. It needn't start big outright. It can start with token signs of protest and gradually build up mass and momentum from there as the people take notice. We already have such a campaign in progress right now - the clippy propic campaign that Louis Rossmann kicked off. We need more people to take similar initiatives.
> "Capacitive buttons are cheaper" shouldn't be a factor.
"Capacitive buttons" are implemented and tested together with the software.
Real buttons need a PCB and maybe some wires and connectors which must be assembled, tested, reliability tested (aging, vibrations).
It _is_ more expensive.
> [...] more failure-prone than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.
No, they're not. And even if they were, they're repairable. I can even drill a new hole, mount an industrial 5cm push-button and wire it where the original button was connected. Can't do that with a touchscreen.
They're not expensive, they're inefficient in terms of water use. Which means they are a non-starter for national retail in the US because there are a few desert states that have captured federal regulation which mandate ever decreasing water use because that's what those desert states want.
Some poor schmuck in "basically Vietnam" climate part of Arkanas has to go to work and fix waste plumbing that's full of deposits from low flow urinals, get home, throw his clothes in a washer that won't clean them because it's trying to sense the bare minimum water it can use (which is too little for anyone who does work outside an office) and then shower under a POS low flow shower head, all so some jerks in the desert can feel like they're saving the planet.
State water situations are diverse. This is a textbook example of something that should not be regulated federally.
I don’t buy the “more failure-prone” thing if “failure” is defined correctly. Here’s my comparison:
1. Assorted old appliances I have experience with. I have washer and dryer buttons (possibly the last LG model that had them, purchased quite deliberately) working flawlessly after quite a few years, and I have experience with some high-end old dishwashers that had absolutely perfect button performance for about 20 years.
I can compare this to new high end dishwashers where turning the thing on requires triggering a capacitive power button that is very very hard to trigger deliberately even with completely dry fingers. I’ve seen two different related models of this unit with the same problem - they are effectively “failed” almost immediately. Never mind that these dishwashers react to anyone leaning gently against them.
So my score is: near 0% failure rate for mechanical buttons and near 100% for capacitive sensors.
(Even the really nice capacitive sensors on nice phones and watches don’t work well under kitchen conditions, so I’m not sure this problem is fully solvable even with more expensive capacitive buttons.)
>> I just want normal buttons and dials back. Not time-based capacitance buttons that take 5.02 seconds to activate, not 5.0 seconds; nor free-spinning encoder wheels that mandate you give it a jiggle before the washer does anything, even if it's already on the setting you want.
> The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive.
> They're more expensive (and more failure-prone) than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.
Capacitance buttons also failure-prone because they literally don't work half the time. The GP was also describing other failures with the modern style controls.
I'm tired of this gaslighting: "kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons" work and are more reliable. I have literal first hand experience with them working reliably for decades. I also have literal first hand experience with capacitance buttons, etc. constantly not working from day one.
The only bit of truth to your argument is they may be more expensive. But I'll take [slightly] more expensive and working over not working any day.
And if you disagree with me, I'll sell you an empty box as a dishwasher. It won't work, but it'll be less expensive!
It is with immense displeasure that I find that my playful descriptions have been interpreted as "gaslighting" by someone on the internet who suffers from selection bias.
If your intent is to demonstrate that there is nothing here that can be discussed, then: Congratulations. You've accomplished that.
My grandma lost her vision when she was young. Even before capacitive buttons, buttons were very hard to find by touch. It has been an issue for more then a decade.
Off topic, but a lifehack for those who have visually impaired loved ones: we use glass paint contour paste on the center of buttons.
It's basically used in glass paintings to stop paint sliding from the glass, so it can make a good noticeable bump or line.
But – it only works on hard surfaces and if the buttons themselves are not very sensitive.
If you can lightly brush the button while you are "looking" for bumps, then it works.
My former cook top was solely driven by capacitance buttons - which became entirely inaccessible the moment there was an overflow, leading to more overflows and a situation that rapidly got out of hand.
The first step in an emergency is switch off the cook top - luckily the breaker switch was nearby.
Do people really want them, or is that what is offered and do most people just buy whatever they see in a store or on the first page of a retailer online?
We keep pretending that everything that companies do is because consumers want it, but we ignore the part where companies do certain things because its better for them. Like a washing machine that uses 4 gig of data a day, or a washing machine that needs access to you photos????
Obviously they don't say it will spy on you. But "innovative design with AI app" with price tag €1000 is there along with old style €300 washer with knobs.
Many people rather buy new shiny thing than old style cheap item.
If you're talking about the motorised control wheel things that old washing machines used to have, they went away largely because they are failure prone, and their failure modes can be bad (for instance in some machines if they fail while the machine is filling, well, it will just go on filling forever). The microcontrollers in modern machines can fail, to, but generally are easier to make fail safe.
As has been said already those can fail nuclear disaster style so I have no interest in having those back. Give me an ethernet port and a wifi interface (ideally supporting at least wifi 6 but ideally wifi 7 so it's not polluting the airwaves causing interference. It should also be able to be disabled if I want to use ethernet only) that has a locked down web interface exposed on one port with some standardized interface (is rest still what all the cool kids are using?) that exposes all the machine functions and lets me configure access credentials. The apps are spyware garbage that I'm sure are fine for some people but with local polling I can integrate this stuff into my home assistant setup and do all I would ever want with it and block the machine's external access. All these commodity manufacturers of household goods are trying to lock us into their software walled gardens to rip us off more/sell our information to advertisers and governments and that needs to be aggressively stopped imo.
Most low end appliances have buttons and dials as the interface to the "will last long enough to not be available when it breaks" computer that the fancy touchscreen stuff uses.
My parent's new washing machine doesn't have a real indicator of position on the selector wheel. The wheel has a chrome-like band going around it. Somewhere in that band is a light-grey stripe. It's barely visible from the side even if you look very closely. It's completely invisible when simply looking at the machine from a normal perspective.
Who the hell approved that design?!
I have drawn a big black mark on the wheel with a sharpie.
my microwave oven has two knobs: how hot and how long. I paid an extra £50 to get a model of fridge without WiFi. sadly my washing machine is already at the free-spinning encoder stage - I don't hate it with a passion, but more of a low-enthusiasm.
I dread replacing anything that breaks in the next few years.
Why not buy the fridge that doesn't have wifi smarts to begin with?
If I want to monitor my fridge's temperature, I can buy a widget that does that for a dozen or so dollars and have that sensor talk to the home automation system of my choice. And when the fridge dies or otherwise gets replaced, I can move the sensor to the new fridge. (And when a new sensor comes out that I like better, I can spend another McDonald's Value Meal worth of money to use that instead.)
Besides: We here on HN should all have a certain amount of distrust for devices that self-report problems.
This distrust is part of the reason why ZFS doesn't trust hard drives to self-report issues and does its own checksums instead.
---
But that's a general rant. To answer your question more-directly, if somewhat-tangentially: One of the popular open-source-oriented YouTube dudes (Jeff Geerling?) recently bought a dishwasher that had functional modes that could not be accessed without a wifi connection to The Clown.
And that's... that's not good: In order to be able to use the functions that the thing natively includes, one must always allow it to call home to mother.
> Introduced in the early 2010s, the smart washing machine promised convenience and efficiency by allowing users to control and monitor their washing machine remotely. The connection to a Wi-Fi network allows the user to operate functions from a smartphone, download additional wash programs, and receive alerts when a load is complete.
Unless the thing will load and unload itself, all those "features" are stupid.
We really ought to have a special derisive name for buzzy features like those, that make absolutely no sense and are basically useless in the real world.
One feature I would like to have in a washing machine is a controlled start and an end signal so that I can automate a valve switching the water on and off.
For the rest I agree, the real deal will be a load/unload functionality :)
My washer/dryer has a microphone so it can hear the tones from LG support over the phone that tell it to play back its diagnostic code.
Kidding aside, the trust we put in the myriad of internet-connected devices with microphones in our spaces is mind-boggling. Even lightstrips and lightbulbs have microphones to sync with music, and often show up as open Bluetooth devices for setup each time the wall switch is turned on.
I bought a house and was pleased to find 0 smart anything in it. It's not even that I care about privacy, just don't want to deal with pointless tech problems like uh lightbulbs needing updates.
We already have this with the dryer function... It's too hot to allow you to open the door and accept the risk yourself, so I need you to wait 10 minutes for the machine too cool before I unlock the door.
I have that with my washer. There's a catch on the door that won't open until it's CERTAIN spinning has stopped. Granted, that's a safety issue of sorts.
Of course it was the first part to fail. Of course you have to enter from behind to override it.
I am playing with home automation, and one of the reasons i’m only using zigbee devices is that they have no outside network access. I have two wifi thermostats that I bought before, and one of these days I’m going to have to set up a firewall of some kind to block them from outside access.
I'm sad I went for a WiFi based solution many years back (Tado). They say cloud costs are getting too high and are suddenly super aggressive in limiting API usage. Give me a fully working local API then, you twats.
I haven't found a good local-only or ZigBee based system that allows precise room control that controls the central heater efficiently based on demand. I could get a bunch of ZigBee radiator knobs, but then I'd have to do a lot of programming/automation to get a good system as a whole. I have to say that Tado does that brilliantly (that's why I chose them in the first place)
The wifi devices are cheaper IME, so I created a IOT VLAN that does not have internet access, nor access to my normal network unless it was initiated from the trusted side.
Ikea home automation is all zigbee, and that stuff is dirt cheap. But if you want something ikea doesn’t sell, like wall switches and thermostats, wifi stuff does tend to be a hair cheaper.
A vlan sounds like the way to go to quarantine devices.
They've been the current frontier for nearly a decade now! Mirai, back in 2016, famously was heavily composed of IP cameras, one of the earlier examples of what we now call IoT.
When our oven gave up the ghost last year, I bought one with WiFi connection.
Installed it, then discovered that the smartphone app that goes with it is horrid, borderline unusable; moreover, oven programs (pizza/cake etc.) are only available on the app.
Finally, when WiFi is on, the oven cannot be operated through its front panel.
We are left to using it in the most basic way, with its capacitive touch buttons, a downgrade from the previous oven…
Also, its interior lighting is on when door closed, but shuts off when we open the door.
Who designs such things?
Good routers show usage by device. I don't know, why the sibling answer is dead, but ubiquity routers seem to have this feature. Mikrotik and keenetic are other routers, that are capable of that. Maybe recent Fritzbox routers too.
That's surprising. The last time I ran a Fritzbox was in 2012 and I think it was capable of doing that. I think virtually all routers showed these kinds of statistics back then. I'm on OpenWRT the last five or so years, so I haven't kept up, has this changed?
On Fritzbox you need to enable it for each device individually. Good thing I saw this post, as I wanted to check out what some of my appliances are doing and enabled it for a few of them a month ago.
I have personally installed equipment that included non-optional, always-on cellular data connectivity that allowed it to be configured and monitored from The Clown.
And Amazon rather famously included cellular connectivity with their early Kindle e-ink book-reading devices -- back in '07.
Eh. If someone wants to waste money keeping up a data connection with my washing machine, I don't have much of an issue with it, as long as it doesn't have any microphones.
You can but they can constantly scan for any open connection that happens by and then dump cached data into it when one is found. Cell modems are becoming cheaper too, as is bulk cellular bandwidth, especially if buffered for periods of low utilization. In those cases, it might be less data since the connection is limited or the data harvester is paying. People with basement laundry rooms will have a built in advantage when dealing with this sort of thing.
One can still conduct deauth attacks fairly easily, or, if the device just picks the strongest open network signal, one can set up a dummy / honeypot WLAN right next to the appliance that has no internet connectivity, and as you note with the basement reference, faraday solutions can work well, too, not to mention simply removing or disabling the networking hardware.
This is also true for cars - it's often not terribly difficult to pull the fuse for the cellular modem provided you can procure a manual.
Counterpoint: Stallman was right.
Technology is a net benefit to society when users can control it, whereas stripping control from users (a la proprietary software) enables and promotes abusive, exploitative business practices like these.
Connecting your washing machine to the internet and then observing the outgoing traffic and knowing that it is obscenely high simply IS tech-savvy as compared to the average person.
On HN or similar circles, maybe not - but that isn't Newsweek's audience.
I thought that too, but experience had proven me otherwise. At a software firm, I have many colleagues who don't mind this at all. In fact, it's the opposite: I'm the one who is too paranoid about things like connecting a washing machine to the internet, or installing an app for everything.
I just want normal buttons and dials back. Not time-based capacitance buttons that take 5.02 seconds to activate, not 5.0 seconds; nor free-spinning encoder wheels that mandate you give it a jiggle before the washer does anything, even if it's already on the setting you want.
I want kachunk-a-chunk back first. Then we can decide if it needs smarts.
The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive.
They're more expensive (and more failure-prone) than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.
But one cool part about things like motorized kerchunk-a-wheels is that, upon failure, a motivated person on Gilligan's Island can often mend them back into service with a screwdriver and a sharp rock.
But these are [often] thousand dollar appliances. "Capacitive buttons are cheaper" shouldn't be a factor.
It's hard to understand why companies can't build things to last, use real buttons, provide parts for servicing at cost, add local APIs for anything "smart", forgo any secondary income streams (eg screens showing ads), and still make a profit.
It's not just the buttons themselves (in a capacitive-vs-mechanical sense) -- it's also warranty services.
When the electronicals are bottled up behind a sheet of glass or Perspex or whatever, then: They tend to last longer because their operating environment becomes less hazardous to them.
Exact hourly rates vary too much to write about specifics, but whatever they are: Sending a tech out to look at a thing costs real money (in the ballpark of hundreds of dollars, not dozens) that really bites into profit margin of any individual unit sale.
It bites into the margin even if the root problem is that the owner's roommate's friend pissed into the control panel with a head full of acid. They'll still be paying someone to physically go out and make that determination.
So if mush-buttons generate fewer service calls than push-buttons do, then: It's a big advantage to a manufacturer.
So... I think it's quite easy to understand how we got to where we are: Fewer moving parts + better environmental isolation for those parts = less after-sale risk.
(I don't necessarily like it, but there's lots of other things in the world that make good financial sense at the manufacturing level that I'm also not fond of. I can accept this reality without also pretending that it can't make sense for someone, somewhere.
Good answers? Speed Queen, for one, still makes good washers with real knobs and real buttons, for the consumer who favors these features.
Just add a smart plug or current monitoring and an iteration of Home Assistant or whatever running on a sleepy little Raspberry Pi or a VM/container or something to detect and notify soon after the wash is done. End-of-cycle detection is really all that is ever needed for smarts anyway. And that may sound convoluted, but these are smarts that you control yourself and are about as open-source as anyone may wish them to be.
(I don't want an appliance that I hope to last for 20 years or more to be connected to any networks at all: "Wake up, babe; new rootkit just dropped and our clothes washer is fucked" isn't a meme that I want to live through, even if it does have a nice API running on a stack that was last updated in [checks calendar] 2005.))
> End-of-cycle detection is really all that is ever needed for smarts anyway
To me that would be the least interesting part about a smart washing machine. Like when I start it, I can already see when it's going to be done. The part I'm really interested in is preloading and autostart it at a given time. Guess it's usecase related what one considers "needed for smarts"
So put a smart plug on a dumb Speed Queen, preset the knob and the buttons, and have it turn on at the time you wish.
Are there any other automation scenarios that you wish to address?
Because the goal isn't to turn a profit, it's to turn the most profit.
Your user experience does not matter a bit to them. If you don't buy again, they don't care. That's invisible cost.
Everyone is doing data analytics and metric-driven product development. Opportunity cannot be measured, so it's as if it doesn't exist.
Yes, in the long run, this is self destructive.
> It's hard to understand why companies can't build things to last, use real buttons, provide parts for servicing at cost, add local APIs for anything "smart", forgo any secondary income streams (eg screens showing ads), and still make a profit.
It isn't that hard to understand. They can. They just choose not to, because success isn't defined by profits anymore. It's now defined by profit growth. The only ethical way to achieve that is to capture more market through relentless innovation and diversification. But that's impractical in a large corporation due to creeping inefficiency - it's a negative feedback loop. So they try the alternatives like:
a. seek rent on products they've already sold, even if there's no reason for it to be under a subscription (eg: heated car seats),
b. deliberately shortening the life of products (planned obsolescence), so that the consumer is forced to upgrade frequently
c. kill the concept of repair and reuse, forcing the consumer to spend even more frequently
d. sell your attention or data to interested third parties (ads)
e. gatekeep advanced or sometimes even basic access to your devices behind a paywall
f. and more.
Remember how HP's CEO said that those customers who don't take their subscription services are 'bad investments'? That's their attitude towards consumers now. We're no longer their esteemed customers. We're just cash cows for them to squeeze ever more tightly for our every last penny and drops of blood.
To summarize all the above in two words - 'insatiable greed'. But what worries me is how far they'll take it. What next? Washing machines that will hold your clothes hostage until you wire them a service fee? Lock you out of your home amenities like AC and power supply if they think yourey a racist? (This has happened already.) Robotic vacuum cleaners that follow you around and record you to recommend the number of contraceptives you should stock at home? Or mandatory heated toilet seats that will test your body wastes so that medical insurance companies can decide your premium?
> It isn't that hard to understand. They can.
What's hard to to understand is how we allow them. How the market hasn't seen an opening; why someone else hasn't started making machines to fill these niches.
There are so many pro-consumer ideas (I've only listed a few) that a company could seize upon to market themselves. And unlike pocket consumer-electronics, there's little barrier to entry. You don't need to reinvent anything (quite the opposite).
There's the dampening effect of private equity and reputation arbitrage to consider. If you build a company around steadfast refusal to profitmaxx, potential acquirers who are willing to apply these techniques can financially engineer their way to offering you a very, very, very tempting price for it. Your personal convictions will need to be proof against extremely strong financial motivation; and if you have partners or creditors, they'll need to share the same tenacity.
It still does seem like it should be more visible, though. I'm not sure how many good examples there are, if any, of new companies growing to an appreciable size from explicit repudiation of these practices only to then eventually be acquired and gutted. Maybe people who think like this just don't start companies.
You're quite right there. I've wondered those myself. Here are some theories.
> What's hard to to understand is how we allow them.
I think that this has to do with two factors - motivation and organization. Ordinary people are not motivated enough to seek long term affordability and market health. They are easily tempted by anything convenient and cheap (in the short term). That's how big chains and big online shops were able to out-compete brick and mortar and mom and pop shops. Once the competition is gone, the big shops show their true colors and hold the market hostage to extract as much revenue as possible. BigCos can do this because they're motivated strongly by the promise of great profits to seek long term strategies like this (as delayed gratification). Meanwhile the consumers make short term gains and accumulate massive long term losses!
The second factor is organization. Consumers hardly ever organize to make a concerted effort to force the hand of big companies. For example, let's assume that someone is marketing a simple, good quality and long-lasting washing machine. The only catch is that it's pricier than the other 'smart washing machines' because of the lower scale of production. Assume that the people organized together and decided to buy only that washing machine or any other that competes with it on merits (but not the price). The new washing machine will eventually become cheaper and better because they can now increase the production capacity as profits roll in. Meanwhile, the other companies will be forced to make their offerings cheaper and remove any offending 'features' if they want to sell any of it. And when they do, it will restore the market competition and drive the market further in favor of the consumers. This is what we want.
However, what happens is exactly the opposite of the above. Someone introduces a smart washing machine into a market full of regular dumb washing machines. They make it cheaper by collaborating with other companies - like recording and selling user data to third parties. Since the consumers are not organized, a sizable portion of the population will start choosing it. That population doesn't have to be the majority. It needs to be just big enough for other manufacturers to notice the slump in their sales. Even if malpractice in the product is obvious, they'll choose to sacrifice their privacy for the short term savings with some justification like 'I don't have anything to hide'. What happens next is well known. Other companies notice the loss of sales and are forced to follow suite. At some point, even the consumers who were never willing to compromise will be left without any choice. This is a repeating story with a lot of products. But one where this is very egregiously obvious is the smart TV market.
Meanwhile, the big companies actually organize to drive the market in that direction - again motivated by profits. One well known example of this is the 'Geneva Cartel' where manufactures banded together to mandate planned obsolescence of electric bulbs. Another example is the US telecom industry. Those companies would have preferred to create a monopoly first and then do this. However due to the anti-monopoly laws, they're motivated to organize together as co-monopolies instead. To this end, even the billionaires that own these rival multinational giants maintain an exclusive and secretive social club where they conduct all these scheming. They behave exactly like those old royal families and modern crime syndicate families to protect their privileged position in society.
> How the market hasn't seen an opening; why someone else hasn't started making machines to fill these niches.
> There are so many pro-consumer ideas (I've only listed a few) that a company could seize upon to market themselves. And unlike pocket consumer-electronics, there's little barrier to entry. You don't need to reinvent anything (quite the opposite).
I think the above explanation answers these questions too. The final point is that the larger consumer community lacks the long-term strategic planning that involves sacrificing short term savings, and the ability to unite for a common cause. The much smaller business community uses these same skills effectively against the consumers to consolidate wealth as much as possible. This weakness of the consumer community is clearly evident even on HN. Despite being a technical community, a few here would rather argue that privacy is not important to them, than unite with everyone and use their weight to push the market in the opposite direction.
The above situation is not a lost cause though. People have united together to achieve much harder goals. What's needed is a solid motivation. And in this situation, that motivation can come from the awareness of the class war and the exploitation they're subjected to under it. That needs a lot of public campaigns. It needn't start big outright. It can start with token signs of protest and gradually build up mass and momentum from there as the people take notice. We already have such a campaign in progress right now - the clippy propic campaign that Louis Rossmann kicked off. We need more people to take similar initiatives.
> To summarize all the above in two words - 'insatiable greed'. But what worries me is how far they'll take it.
Neo feudalism. They’ve laid it out quite explicitly several times in the last few years
> "Capacitive buttons are cheaper" shouldn't be a factor.
"Capacitive buttons" are implemented and tested together with the software. Real buttons need a PCB and maybe some wires and connectors which must be assembled, tested, reliability tested (aging, vibrations). It _is_ more expensive.
I'm not questioning whether or not capacitive buttons are cheaper, I just don't believe they make the difference between profit and loss.
How many more sacrifices must consumers make to increase margins?
But tt's not just the buttons -- it's also the motorized knob, sensors, and control logic.
A board with model-specific software and some garden-variety relays is cheaper to copy than model-specific motorized knobs are.
And it's not the singular key to profit, and I don't think that anyone ever said that it is. It's just a part that we can see, and touch.
There's other things that modernization helps with, too.
For instance: Variable-speed motor drives, with a computer brain to drive them (which we already have in the BOM once we abandon the motorized knob).
These can improve electrical efficiency (reducing motor size and cost), and deliver power more smoothly (reducing transmission size and cost).
That's real copper and real iron that is saved by using electronic controls.
(I can do washing machines all week.)
Gilligan's Island reference and analogy for competence ... well done! hilarious & original. I'm borrowing that.
> [...] more failure-prone than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.
No, they're not. And even if they were, they're repairable. I can even drill a new hole, mount an industrial 5cm push-button and wire it where the original button was connected. Can't do that with a touchscreen.
>> The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive
However, if you go to the store, you'll see washing machines with old knobs much cheaper than machines with new fancy screens.
They're not expensive, they're inefficient in terms of water use. Which means they are a non-starter for national retail in the US because there are a few desert states that have captured federal regulation which mandate ever decreasing water use because that's what those desert states want.
Some poor schmuck in "basically Vietnam" climate part of Arkanas has to go to work and fix waste plumbing that's full of deposits from low flow urinals, get home, throw his clothes in a washer that won't clean them because it's trying to sense the bare minimum water it can use (which is too little for anyone who does work outside an office) and then shower under a POS low flow shower head, all so some jerks in the desert can feel like they're saving the planet.
State water situations are diverse. This is a textbook example of something that should not be regulated federally.
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I don’t buy the “more failure-prone” thing if “failure” is defined correctly. Here’s my comparison:
1. Assorted old appliances I have experience with. I have washer and dryer buttons (possibly the last LG model that had them, purchased quite deliberately) working flawlessly after quite a few years, and I have experience with some high-end old dishwashers that had absolutely perfect button performance for about 20 years.
I can compare this to new high end dishwashers where turning the thing on requires triggering a capacitive power button that is very very hard to trigger deliberately even with completely dry fingers. I’ve seen two different related models of this unit with the same problem - they are effectively “failed” almost immediately. Never mind that these dishwashers react to anyone leaning gently against them.
So my score is: near 0% failure rate for mechanical buttons and near 100% for capacitive sensors.
(Even the really nice capacitive sensors on nice phones and watches don’t work well under kitchen conditions, so I’m not sure this problem is fully solvable even with more expensive capacitive buttons.)
>> I just want normal buttons and dials back. Not time-based capacitance buttons that take 5.02 seconds to activate, not 5.0 seconds; nor free-spinning encoder wheels that mandate you give it a jiggle before the washer does anything, even if it's already on the setting you want.
> The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive.
> They're more expensive (and more failure-prone) than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.
Capacitance buttons also failure-prone because they literally don't work half the time. The GP was also describing other failures with the modern style controls.
I'm tired of this gaslighting: "kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons" work and are more reliable. I have literal first hand experience with them working reliably for decades. I also have literal first hand experience with capacitance buttons, etc. constantly not working from day one.
The only bit of truth to your argument is they may be more expensive. But I'll take [slightly] more expensive and working over not working any day.
And if you disagree with me, I'll sell you an empty box as a dishwasher. It won't work, but it'll be less expensive!
It is with immense displeasure that I find that my playful descriptions have been interpreted as "gaslighting" by someone on the internet who suffers from selection bias.
If your intent is to demonstrate that there is nothing here that can be discussed, then: Congratulations. You've accomplished that.
Capacitive buttons are very inaccessible it's honestly need to be a crime to be making such appliances
I feel very sorry for the visually impaired that are looking for house appliances in this decade
My grandma lost her vision when she was young. Even before capacitive buttons, buttons were very hard to find by touch. It has been an issue for more then a decade.
Off topic, but a lifehack for those who have visually impaired loved ones: we use glass paint contour paste on the center of buttons. It's basically used in glass paintings to stop paint sliding from the glass, so it can make a good noticeable bump or line. But – it only works on hard surfaces and if the buttons themselves are not very sensitive.
If you can lightly brush the button while you are "looking" for bumps, then it works.
I discovered they are also dangerous:
My former cook top was solely driven by capacitance buttons - which became entirely inaccessible the moment there was an overflow, leading to more overflows and a situation that rapidly got out of hand.
The first step in an emergency is switch off the cook top - luckily the breaker switch was nearby.
Can we keep the happy sunshiny tune it plays when it completes the job?
No. That was the first thing I disabled on my washing machine.
I want it to be less intrusive and irritating not more.
was this a UI option or did you have to fix it with wire cutters? mine is mildly irritating.
Joking aside, for my old LG washer/dryer there was some kind of baroque incantation buried in user manual to turn the sound.
had to reverse engineer the circuit board
Genuine people personalities /s
Mine doesn't have one and that's it worst drawback
Speed Queen is an American brand that tries to differentiate itself with quality and simplicity:
[1]: https://speedqueen.com/products/top-load-washers/tc5003wn/
>> I just want normal buttons and dials back
There are washing machines without any screens, just old buttons. Also they are cheaper, I can see now in the store for just €270.
But looks like many people wants screens, apps and happily pay extra for washing machine with extra features.
Do people really want them, or is that what is offered and do most people just buy whatever they see in a store or on the first page of a retailer online?
We keep pretending that everything that companies do is because consumers want it, but we ignore the part where companies do certain things because its better for them. Like a washing machine that uses 4 gig of data a day, or a washing machine that needs access to you photos????
Obviously they don't say it will spy on you. But "innovative design with AI app" with price tag €1000 is there along with old style €300 washer with knobs.
Many people rather buy new shiny thing than old style cheap item.
If you're talking about the motorised control wheel things that old washing machines used to have, they went away largely because they are failure prone, and their failure modes can be bad (for instance in some machines if they fail while the machine is filling, well, it will just go on filling forever). The microcontrollers in modern machines can fail, to, but generally are easier to make fail safe.
As has been said already those can fail nuclear disaster style so I have no interest in having those back. Give me an ethernet port and a wifi interface (ideally supporting at least wifi 6 but ideally wifi 7 so it's not polluting the airwaves causing interference. It should also be able to be disabled if I want to use ethernet only) that has a locked down web interface exposed on one port with some standardized interface (is rest still what all the cool kids are using?) that exposes all the machine functions and lets me configure access credentials. The apps are spyware garbage that I'm sure are fine for some people but with local polling I can integrate this stuff into my home assistant setup and do all I would ever want with it and block the machine's external access. All these commodity manufacturers of household goods are trying to lock us into their software walled gardens to rip us off more/sell our information to advertisers and governments and that needs to be aggressively stopped imo.
Your primary concern is "Will my washer work after a nuclear strike?" ?
That is a turn a phrase. It means catastrophically. Like fill your whole house with water catastrophically
Most low end appliances have buttons and dials as the interface to the "will last long enough to not be available when it breaks" computer that the fancy touchscreen stuff uses.
"Most". I do not think that word means what you think it does.
My parent's new washing machine doesn't have a real indicator of position on the selector wheel. The wheel has a chrome-like band going around it. Somewhere in that band is a light-grey stripe. It's barely visible from the side even if you look very closely. It's completely invisible when simply looking at the machine from a normal perspective.
Who the hell approved that design?! I have drawn a big black mark on the wheel with a sharpie.
I recommend Speed Queen.
my microwave oven has two knobs: how hot and how long. I paid an extra £50 to get a model of fridge without WiFi. sadly my washing machine is already at the free-spinning encoder stage - I don't hate it with a passion, but more of a low-enthusiasm.
I dread replacing anything that breaks in the next few years.
Why not get the wifi enabled fridge and just not hook it up to your router?
Genuinely asking because I plan to do this once I have to get new appliances, is there something missing that way?
Why not buy the fridge that doesn't have wifi smarts to begin with?
If I want to monitor my fridge's temperature, I can buy a widget that does that for a dozen or so dollars and have that sensor talk to the home automation system of my choice. And when the fridge dies or otherwise gets replaced, I can move the sensor to the new fridge. (And when a new sensor comes out that I like better, I can spend another McDonald's Value Meal worth of money to use that instead.)
Besides: We here on HN should all have a certain amount of distrust for devices that self-report problems.
This distrust is part of the reason why ZFS doesn't trust hard drives to self-report issues and does its own checksums instead.
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But that's a general rant. To answer your question more-directly, if somewhat-tangentially: One of the popular open-source-oriented YouTube dudes (Jeff Geerling?) recently bought a dishwasher that had functional modes that could not be accessed without a wifi connection to The Clown.
And that's... that's not good: In order to be able to use the functions that the thing natively includes, one must always allow it to call home to mother.
My folks have one of these: it bitches at you for internet.
Also the device is generally designed with internet in mind, so certain local-only functions don’t work properly without internet.
at some point they'll put limits until you connect. it might go from just not working to limiting the temperature or whatever.
hey, AI needs to reinforce-learn everything about your dirty laundry
> Introduced in the early 2010s, the smart washing machine promised convenience and efficiency by allowing users to control and monitor their washing machine remotely. The connection to a Wi-Fi network allows the user to operate functions from a smartphone, download additional wash programs, and receive alerts when a load is complete.
Unless the thing will load and unload itself, all those "features" are stupid.
We really ought to have a special derisive name for buzzy features like those, that make absolutely no sense and are basically useless in the real world.
One feature I would like to have in a washing machine is a controlled start and an end signal so that I can automate a valve switching the water on and off.
For the rest I agree, the real deal will be a load/unload functionality :)
They better not be airing my dirty laundry!
My washer/dryer has a microphone so it can hear the tones from LG support over the phone that tell it to play back its diagnostic code.
Kidding aside, the trust we put in the myriad of internet-connected devices with microphones in our spaces is mind-boggling. Even lightstrips and lightbulbs have microphones to sync with music, and often show up as open Bluetooth devices for setup each time the wall switch is turned on.
I bought a house and was pleased to find 0 smart anything in it. It's not even that I care about privacy, just don't want to deal with pointless tech problems like uh lightbulbs needing updates.
I've also got one of those LG machines. Keep hoping for it to break so I can use that feature haha
I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. This rinse cycle is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
We already have this with the dryer function... It's too hot to allow you to open the door and accept the risk yourself, so I need you to wait 10 minutes for the machine too cool before I unlock the door.
I have that with my washer. There's a catch on the door that won't open until it's CERTAIN spinning has stopped. Granted, that's a safety issue of sorts.
Of course it was the first part to fail. Of course you have to enter from behind to override it.
I am playing with home automation, and one of the reasons i’m only using zigbee devices is that they have no outside network access. I have two wifi thermostats that I bought before, and one of these days I’m going to have to set up a firewall of some kind to block them from outside access.
I'm sad I went for a WiFi based solution many years back (Tado). They say cloud costs are getting too high and are suddenly super aggressive in limiting API usage. Give me a fully working local API then, you twats.
I haven't found a good local-only or ZigBee based system that allows precise room control that controls the central heater efficiently based on demand. I could get a bunch of ZigBee radiator knobs, but then I'd have to do a lot of programming/automation to get a good system as a whole. I have to say that Tado does that brilliantly (that's why I chose them in the first place)
A selling point of Matter is that objects can operate without net access. I guess we'll find out whether the spec ensures the guarantees.
The wifi devices are cheaper IME, so I created a IOT VLAN that does not have internet access, nor access to my normal network unless it was initiated from the trusted side.
Ikea home automation is all zigbee, and that stuff is dirt cheap. But if you want something ikea doesn’t sell, like wall switches and thermostats, wifi stuff does tend to be a hair cheaper.
A vlan sounds like the way to go to quarantine devices.
The problem with WiFi IoT is they are power-hungry. A smart plug is obviously not a problem, but a standalone switch - yes
LG owner was baffled in Jan/2024 (104 points, 150 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930507
Internet owner was baffled about 22Tbps thanks to all those appliances https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45365179
Looks like IoT devices are the next frontier in residential proxies ... or provide spies the next leading indicator into SV business performance.
They've been the current frontier for nearly a decade now! Mirai, back in 2016, famously was heavily composed of IP cameras, one of the earlier examples of what we now call IoT.
> For context, 3GB of data is the rough equivalent of streaming high-definition video for an hour on a device.
Watching Sanctuary Moon? Fair enough, washing clothes is pretty boring.
When our oven gave up the ghost last year, I bought one with WiFi connection. Installed it, then discovered that the smartphone app that goes with it is horrid, borderline unusable; moreover, oven programs (pizza/cake etc.) are only available on the app. Finally, when WiFi is on, the oven cannot be operated through its front panel.
We are left to using it in the most basic way, with its capacitive touch buttons, a downgrade from the previous oven…
Also, its interior lighting is on when door closed, but shuts off when we open the door. Who designs such things?
My guess would be MBAs, via compliant PMs.
I suspect "money laundering".
I wanted to say it was just constantly downloading an update.
But it it appears to be outgoing traffic ...
It was probably hacked and is part of a botnet.
Yup, that is the S in IOT for you. And then people say that it is easy to deal with DDOS like this.
My hypothesis was a fast retry loop failing to connect / send over and over.
it attained consciousness and is uploading updates.
I once had a "smart" refrigerator that got hacked and conscripted into an email botnet, it was sending out multiple GBs of outbound traffic a day.
It just wanted to watch some media. Check its governor module.
How to measure the internet usage of a specific appliance? By installing a sniffer in the router, or is there another way?
Good routers show usage by device. I don't know, why the sibling answer is dead, but ubiquity routers seem to have this feature. Mikrotik and keenetic are other routers, that are capable of that. Maybe recent Fritzbox routers too.
That's surprising. The last time I ran a Fritzbox was in 2012 and I think it was capable of doing that. I think virtually all routers showed these kinds of statistics back then. I'm on OpenWRT the last five or so years, so I haven't kept up, has this changed?
On Fritzbox you need to enable it for each device individually. Good thing I saw this post, as I wanted to check out what some of my appliances are doing and enabled it for a few of them a month ago.
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I wonder if Retro washing machines and refrigerators (non-IOT) will go up in price because of this?
You could also just not give it a network, couldn't you?
Yeah, unless it has a cell modem, not that it's cheap enough to make sense today
I have personally installed equipment that included non-optional, always-on cellular data connectivity that allowed it to be configured and monitored from The Clown.
And Amazon rather famously included cellular connectivity with their early Kindle e-ink book-reading devices -- back in '07.
It's been done before. It can be done again.
Eh. If someone wants to waste money keeping up a data connection with my washing machine, I don't have much of an issue with it, as long as it doesn't have any microphones.
It would probably have a mic if they're going to do that
You can but they can constantly scan for any open connection that happens by and then dump cached data into it when one is found. Cell modems are becoming cheaper too, as is bulk cellular bandwidth, especially if buffered for periods of low utilization. In those cases, it might be less data since the connection is limited or the data harvester is paying. People with basement laundry rooms will have a built in advantage when dealing with this sort of thing.
One can still conduct deauth attacks fairly easily, or, if the device just picks the strongest open network signal, one can set up a dummy / honeypot WLAN right next to the appliance that has no internet connectivity, and as you note with the basement reference, faraday solutions can work well, too, not to mention simply removing or disabling the networking hardware.
This is also true for cars - it's often not terribly difficult to pull the fuse for the cellular modem provided you can procure a manual.
> conducting deauth attacks so your appliances don't spy on you
ted was right
Counterpoint: Stallman was right. Technology is a net benefit to society when users can control it, whereas stripping control from users (a la proprietary software) enables and promotes abusive, exploitative business practices like these.
I think that's already the case with some TVs.
Think of all the promotions for all the teams responsible for each screen of the washing machine
Maybe stuck in an endless update loop?? Like requesting update every minute and then not completing! starting over..
So that's who's been probing my servers.
For reference, my LG washer and dryer that are used quite often only have about 17mb each for the month.
How often do you wash your clothes ? /s
DDoS appliance army?
Or, bitcoin ?
Lem predicted this in The Washing Machine Tragedy.
"A tech-savvy San Francisco resident"
Nope. Connecting your washing machine to the internet isn't the act of a tech-savvy person.
Connecting your washing machine to the internet and then observing the outgoing traffic and knowing that it is obscenely high simply IS tech-savvy as compared to the average person.
On HN or similar circles, maybe not - but that isn't Newsweek's audience.
I thought that too, but experience had proven me otherwise. At a software firm, I have many colleagues who don't mind this at all. In fact, it's the opposite: I'm the one who is too paranoid about things like connecting a washing machine to the internet, or installing an app for everything.
"No True Scotsman" fallacy detected.
Newsweek's "tech-savvy" isn't HN's "tech-savvy", in fairness.
By fleas - has it been found vulnerable to bots = infested
My samsung washer has done 1.2mb in the last 24 hours.
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