Every time this comes up I feel obligated to add the following:
1) Samsung televisions spy on your mercilessly. They collect everything they can, including screenshots at regular intervals and send them back to Samsung so that they can sell this to "partners". They are not a FAANG and don't have anywhere near their level of security expertise. I have second-hand but reliable information about their security approach, and "laughable" doesn't begin to describe it. Assume that whatever you watch on a Samsung TV is being relayed to multiple state-level spy agencies.
2) Even if you buy a flagship Samsung television for five figures, it's virtually guaranteed that within a year or two they will release an update the slows it down to molasses. These things have controller boards with miniscule amounts of RAM in them, and they use the same firmware across all models. When a new model with more RAM is released, they add more features, causing all older models that self update to start swapping to the pagefile. I've seen several Samsung televisions across several model years and price points get slowed down until response times are up to 2 seconds for most actions. This is "unusable garbage" quality, for crazy money.
NEVER buy a Samsung television, ever. You're treated as the product, not the customer, despite paying them a lot of money.
PS: This isn't even the only display calibration cheating that they do! Practically all Samsung models use a "shop mode" that cranks up brightness to 11 and oversaturates the colours. Even in "normal" mode Samsung televisions have forced "enhancements" that can't be turned off. There is no "calibrated mode", because it would look like trash on these over-priced televisions.
> use a "shop mode" that cranks up brightness to 11 and oversaturates the colours
Practically every TV does this. It makes them look better in brightly lit shops, and any TV that doesn't will look washed out next to all the ones that do even if they are actually better. Always review display settings when you get a new visual device, even if you buy online (devices are set this way out of the box rather than relying on the showroom making any tweaks, so all purchase methods are affected).
Can't tell if you're being facetious or not. If a technologist can't change an IP address on a TV's network settings then they're probably in the wrong community.
It's the attitude of "well tech nerds are fine because they can dumpster dive through a bunch of settings pages to turn off some egregious shit and setup the rest of the infrastructure needed to do so (buying and setting up a pihole/ signing up for someone else's service and then having to monitor/manage/diagnose when that falls over); oh the normies? Errr, screw them"
I think the wider point here is that technologists represent a small portion of Samsung's target market. Most people won't know or care how to change an IP address in the TV's network settings.
Whereas I fall into the "I could, but why should I?" category of people who mostly try to buy devices that don't actively spy on me in the first place (doesn't work so well for modern phones or games consoles).
Right, and I said I'm not justifying the need to do this. It pisses me off that I have to. But at least I can try and help out and provide a solution that will work for the majority of this community.
"Whereas I fall into the "I could, but why should I?" category"
Same here.
I've three Samsung TVs of various age none of which has been connected to the internet (in fact, only one has that capability). Knowing what I know now I would never
connect a Samsung TV to the internet - in fact I'd never buy another Samsung TV set, phone or other appliance again.
The people behind Samsung who authorized the spying as well as those who've attempted to fool testers into believing the specs are better than they actually are have shit ethics - there's no other way of putting it more politely (as this is a public forum, I've toned down my language considerably).
I've been around in tech and engineering quite some time and I am alarmed at how the ethics of engineering people have waned over recent decades. In recent decades, we've regularly seen unethical engineering practices introduced into products in ways that in the past would never have even been considered let alone that would have ever made their way to market. Samsung is not alone, remember the Volkswagen fiasco; now it's commonplace - Microsoft et al.
In this laissez faire environment sans ethics it seems that almost any behavior is acceptable. I often wonder why those in my profession who are responsible for the introduction of such products no longer object to designing them in unethical ways. (If engineers objected on mass to such practices, management would have difficulties enforcing such policies.)
As I see it, two approaches are needed: the first is the need for proper legislation that would outlaw such practices with the aim of protecting consumers, and the second is publicly exposing those who are responsible for them (legislation should ensure violators cannot hide behind a corporate façade). Engineers would object to designing unethical products if they knew their names were associated with them and that they were being held responsible.
Moreover, professional bodies such as ACM and IEEE, etc. should be proactive in this by expelling members found guilty of unethical practices associated with their profession. This would go a long way to stopping such practices, I reckon.
Incidentally, for some decades I was a member of both the IEEE and
ACM and I withdrew from their membership because they failed to uphold their own ethics. Especially the IEEE, it rarely, if ever, questioned unethical and questionable engineering practices. It seems to me these organizations should be embarrassed into actively doing something to stop the slide in ethics amongst their members.
I'm also of the opinion that we need some deep research into exactly what has happened to the engineering ethos over past decades. Laws and sanctions as mentioned above may provide a partial solution but finding the underlying cause and rectifying it is clearly the ideal one.
I guess every other parent comment here is talking about general public. In other words, what's the ratio between people here @HN that can change a DNS and the global Samsung market?
> They collect everything they can, including screenshots at regular intervals and send them back to Samsung so that they can sell this to "partners"
Isn't this a gross violation of privacy and be clearly illegal? I could be playing my home videos with very private content. Add to that copyright violation if they are using screenshots of my content for commercial purposes.
Yes, it’s a gross violation of privacy. People watch porn on their TV, including home-made porn they made themselves. This is being captured and sent back to Samsung.
The bigger danger is that you could be watching something on a streaming system that could land you in jail in an authoritarian country. No amount of HTTPS encryption or VPNs will save you if the decoded image is sent raw back to Samsung — where it is not safe and secure!
I have one of the earlier mid range 4k Samsungs. About two years in they gave it an update that added a Lote of bloatware, some of their own TV streaming channels full of Samsung ads. And for a bit I had Adguard home on my router and Samsung endpoints where the biggest thing blocked by far, and it was the only Samsung device in he house.
Now I have the internet disabled on it and just use an Xbox for smart stuff, will probably get an Apple TV next time they upgrade it.
I use an Xbox aswell, since my TV has an open security hole that the manufacturer refuses to patch, and because it sends unspecified data and fetches updates over an unencrypted connection.
Mind you, the Xbox does just as much snooping, but at least the Xbox fetches updates over encrypted channels and doesn't let anyone on the same network have root access to the TV's linux installation.
True with the Xbox, bat at least imo MS is slitty more trustworthy with my data than Samsung. The tv was doing more network requests than the xbox and a few Apple devices combined.
Every thread dozens of people say, "just don't connect!" They can connect to open networks such as Amazon sidewalk and other deliberate corporate IoT sabotage, and soon I'm sure we'll see the first televisions that require connection to even pass a signal from the HDMI port.
The best thing to do is not support this immoral garbage through apathy or ignorance.
And every thread says they can connect to open WiFi without providing any proof that they do. It would be trivial to test and prove but no-one ever does.
I'm not saying they wouldn't do it but I'd prefer some proof before judging them (without having to shell out to be the guinea pig).
On a Sony TV, at least on my one (before I yanked the wifi antennas out) you could just create an open network and then sit watching the Wifi settings screen on the TV and watch it just jump right on.
If you're really concerned about proof, just go to a hifi store and turn on your mobile hotspot without a password - I bet you could get a TV somewhere to connect with minimal effort.
The reason there are likely so few reports is because a)open wifi networks are very rare b)you can't really tell that the TV has done it, until it shows its hand (as in the case above, notifying the user that it auto-updated itself.)
> If it’s not showing you ads, it’s not connected.
If it’s not showing you ads, it might not be connected. It could still be connected and performing all sorts of shenanigans without necessarily showing you any ads.
Any chance you could upload the part of the manual that says that? That's insane - I have a Samsung TV and generally thought I was safe by disabling internet access.
Samsung (and the rest of the TV industry, Samsung is just the worst of the bunch) has fucked up trust in them extremely hard and they are not showing in any way that they have learned from the past or how they plan to re-gain consumer trust. Until that happens, it is foolish to assume they would never implement something like "connect to an open wifi".
See you’re moving the goalpost here. You went from they can to they could. That’s exactly the point of people who require proof it has happened.
When we have proof of one manufacturer connecting to an open wi-fi network to send its snooping data, we’ll have a a reckoning on our hands. I guarantee it.
Of course I'm moving goalposts. This kind of shit should be banned before someone gets the idea (or audacity) to implement it. The time for "move fast and deal with the law later" is over - it's obvious that the technical possibility is easy to implement and hard to detect for the average user, it's obvious that there is nothing good for the customer that comes out of it, and so the law should for once be proactive instead of reactive.
Wireless networking is something I usually avoid in a technical capacity, but this seems like something worth messing around with (and reporting back on).
Should be a fairly straightforward bit of airodump. Even if you don't capture the handshake, you can cross-reference the macs of stations associated with the AP of interest against the mac of your device. If the mac is randomized to a sufficient degree that you can't cross-reference it I guess you'd need to capture the association, but that shouldn't be a problem if you can turn the tv off/on and it does the thing consistently.
Interesting you mention that. My partner just bought a Samsung monitor and set it up in the house
Then she sat down nearby and used her iPhone. Immediately a message popped up on the monitor telling her it had detected her iPhone and did she want to set up some app or remote thing
It was incredibly creepy and I imagine it was implemented by scanning for nearby Bluetooth devices
Is it possible to setup an open wifi "honeypot" on some old Android phone to 'capture' the TV?
Yes, this should not be necessary, but actual legislated protections for this kind of behaviour don't exist, and aren't even being discussed at any high-enough level that makes it appear that action may be closer than a decade away (unless maybe in Europe, in which case may be only five years away).
Heh I would not be surprised if in the future TVs start shipping a DOCSIS modem in the cable TV backend and put up deals with major network operators to allow a low bandwidth back-signalling channel.
Well yes, but then you're basically buying an expensive monitor and will need a second device to be the "smarts".
I personally use an Apple TV for this, but in general this can be frustrating for users that just want their Smart TV to work without spying on them or implementing centrally triggered scheduled obsolescence.
This is a bit like saying you should "never" turn on your new car's engine and should immediately swap it out for a third-party one, because every knows Manufacturer X leaves ticking time bombs in their engines.
This is why consumer protection agencies are created by governments!
> This is a bit like saying you should "never" turn on your new car's engine and should immediately swap it out for a third-party one, because every knows Manufacturer X leaves ticking time bombs in their engines.
I don’t think it’s at all like that.
If anything, it’s more like saying don’t use your car’s built-in navigation, and instead, use another connected device for navigation.
The engine is a critical part of a car — without it, it can’t function. Period.
A TV doesn’t have to be smart to operate it, and you can’t buy a TV without it, even though it’s 100% not necessary, especially if you already have another device for that.
Again, it’s like cars with navigation — completely unnecessary, especially if you have another device for that.
I find this argument weird. Most people don’t want smart TVs. Dedicated smart devices are just better. Even non techies will probably feel this way because the TVs suck and the remote control interface is clunky and confusing. There’s simply no option to buy a dumb tv that isn’t something weird like a monitor or digital signage.
Imo nothing beats a laptop with a wireless mouse and keyboard. So much better than a shitty remote. Browsers and Google are familiar. Can also do games. Can access whatever sites you want or things the smart device wouldn’t approve of. All of these devices like Apple TV and fire sticks seem pretty dumb to me.
Because it's just so convenient to have to plug your laptop in via an HDMI cable and have it permanently tethered to your TV, and I just love sitting on the couch attempting to move a basically nonresponsive laser mouse on the furniture surface.
Cost of chromecast+remote: $30
Cost of secondhand laptop + wireless keyboard/mouse: $250
- Most people don't know what they're missing re: clunky interface controls
- Most people want a single feature-complete device that doesn't take up an HDMI port or require another set of cables to connect (yes, that's trivial, even enjoyable, for 'us', but 'they' are not 'us').
Most people have no idea what their smart tv can do, and are confused by how to use it. In my experience it’s hardly something they sought. Just anecdata
Exactly. I purchase an Apple TV for each screen in the house, whether that screen is dumb or smart. Actually, I have three screens and two Apple TVs, so for movie nights I move one Apple TV over to the projector so we can watch a movie there (Apple TVs are expensive!)
I also had a Fire Stick and a Roku but refused to keep using them after reading their privacy policies (their UIs are also complete and utter trash, they are so terrible compared to Apple TV)
I think the advice to never allow a screen to connect to Wi-Fi is reasonable, and I tell my family the same. In the past I have give them old Apple TVs or help them set one up to ensure that they are not allowing spyware on their network
Agreed that this needs to be handled by government, as the level of data abuse by these companies is unacceptable
IMO, not a big deal. Google was basically giving away chromecasts with google tv, and if that's still not happening, ONN makes one that works fantastic for 20 dollars. With voice search and all if that's your thing. Both are way faster and easier to use than a built in smarts, and both you can take with you on the go if you want.
It's pretty unlikely that you'll have ethernet over hdmi happening unless you go way out of your way to have it. It's not really something that just happens spontaneously, you need your devices to have it and the cable to support it. I think eARC canibalized the channels it used too?
> Even if you buy a flagship Samsung television for five figures, it's virtually guaranteed that within a year or two they will release an update the slows it down to molasses. These things have controller boards with miniscule amounts of RAM in them, and they use the same firmware across all models. When a new model with more RAM is released, they add more features, causing all older models that self update to start swapping to the pagefile.
Samsung's approach to security is writing a memory mapper for the camera app which can map any memory region to userspace and is by default world accessible. I'm not expecting anything.
I just recently upgraded my LG B8 OLED TV to a C9 model by switching out the main board with one I got from eBay. Now I have 4K@120Hz, HDMI 2.1, and VRR ;)
If Software Freedom Conservancy win their lawsuit against Vizio for GPL violations in their TVs, you will probably be able to install open source Linux distros with Kodi on any Vizio TV and soon afterwards lots of other smart TV vendors will be similar. Allowing the vendor operating system to remain on the device after you purchase it basically means spyware these days.
I don't think the GPL covers signing keys, just some mechanism for installation. Allowing addition of additional signing keys is a good way to do it, just like UEFI Secure Boot does things. There are also plenty of phone vendors who allow bootloader unlock after wiping the device DRM/etc keys too.
> They are not a FAANG and don't have anywhere near their level of security expertise.
What a weird thing to say. Are you suggesting that it's fine that FAANG companies also spy on you mercilessly, because their security is ostensibly better?
When Google collects data about me, I’m relatively certain what I’d going to happen to that data — it gets folded into a bazillion models and is used to sell me shit. When Samsung collects data about me, I have absolutely no clue what happens next with that data. It’s not necessarily better or worse, but it’s a very different bit of privacy calculus you need to work through.
You may have forgotten the part where it's directly fed to the NSA. PRISM existed and still exists, and there is ongoing collaboration between every large tech company and the NSA.
I have a QN90A, the ads are annoying but it's fine and it's a great TV overall. It's basically just a tiny banner ad at the bottom right of the home screen.
Personally I take much bigger risks day to day by doing things like biking to work, so I'm okay with the risk of my TV sending data back to advertisers.
BTW, I'm pretty sure the only Samsung TVs that are five figures are the 98" beasts. My 75" QN90A was $1600, and the middle tier models are much cheaper and look great.
I think you would have avoided all the downvotes with, "Double negatives are very much an English language thing and are commonly used in every day language", since American and British English both involve double negatives in colloquial usage.
I only know a handful of Americans and we often talk about the differences in our language. Even had an Australian join the conversation once too and it was a very interesting discussion.
The use of double negatives stood out as something more commonly used in British English however I accept it was a very small sample size!
It does parse. It's not like what you say, it more like "this apple has a bruise and some blemishes but I'm still happy to consume it". Television has had annoying ads for much of the past century and millions of people still found enough value in it to watch it.
I can't speak for the parent comment, but when I use such a grammatical construct, I mean that although it is suboptimal, I am putting up with it. It does not mean that I think it is ok.
It took me a little while (and it seems like they managed to add some more domains at one point) but I’ve successfully blocked all outgoing connections from my TV and removed the ads
I’ve got a Samsung frame… and you need the net to get the picture screen going … ! Which I quite like as a feature. Even though I put all our digital tv through an Apple TV.
I have an LG TV, and the ability to have Apps on the TV, without a plugged in decide - Netflix, BBC iplayer, ITV Hub, AppleTV, Twitch, Youtube etc. makes for a very pleasant, seamless experience.
I too have an LG TV that I quite like. It’s fun seeing WebOS in use and I actually like the built-in apps. Then again, it doesn’t show ads. The day it does, it’ll never see the internet again and get fed from an external device.
Just because one tolerates something doesn’t mean they think it’s ok. Besides, what’s the other option? Any “smart” platform needs an internet connection, and will show ads because of that.
> Personally I take much bigger risks day to day by doing things like biking to work, so I'm okay with the risk of my TV sending data back to advertisers.
It's up to you how you feel about the privacy issue, of course, but that's not how risk works. It's additive. The fact that you take other risks, bigger or smaller, doesn't rationally change the value of this risk.
Steel-manning, they could have meant that the larger risk makes this smaller on insignificant. Adding 1 to 1,000,000,000 also results in a larger number - not that I think the actual compared risks could be given these numbers on any scale, but to their mind the TV privacy risk may be too insignificant to bother with when there are easier and larger risks to work on.
I'm totally done with Samsung.
Their TVs are overpriced and bad, their phones add undeletable bloatware, remove useful stuff like headphone/mic jack, have low battery life and capacity and they force you to buy the flagship model, if you don't you'll receive a really small battery that even in the flagship model is not large enough.
If you don't buy Galaxy series you won't even be able to mirror output via USB.
And software support is really short. Even if the hardware works, they want you to buy a new phone 5 years later.
Likewise their TV OS is subpar and region locked, not that Android is any better or the other OSes.
All the TVs right now are really bad and not worth the money. My price limit was 600€. I ordered 4 TVs and returned them all, the worst was a "TCL" TV which had such a weak CPU that it couldn't even decode a 2MB/s SD stream.
Recently Samsung had a bad batch of SSDs and they sold them via Amazon and despite them knowing that the batch was bad it wasn't pulled, instead they lowered the price. One guy bought 8 , 5 died and 2 were in spare mode and despite them being from the same batch the refused to replace the 2.
Imagine buying a 4TB SSD, copying your stuff over from the old HDD to have it die 2 months later.
It's a shame because my 8-10 years old Samsung dumb TV, oven/microwave and laser printer are all working great to this day.
(That's more coincidence than brand loyalty, my Laden (French cheap brand) washing machine has also been working with no maintenance need for 13 years)
Samsung's laser printers were jointly made with Xerox. They run the same firmware and hardware. They are just branded differently.
Since Xerox tried its hand in shady electronics and burnt badly, they can't make bad printers. Hence, their printers' reliability is at HP Laserjet 4L levels. I'm on my second Samsung printer, because I've worn the first one's rollers down, and this one will probably last another 7-8 years, at least.
Same, I have an older 2014 samsung 4k (3d), I bought the UHD evolution kit, and aside for some random black screens (maybe 5s every 4 hours), it's been a great TV. It's hard to upgrade, but a second gen QD-OLED might be what I get next.
The now surprising thing is there are no ads, and my AppleTV 4K(2nd gen) is more than good enough to watch everything I want to on it. Only QD-OLED and HDMI 2.1 and more expansive HDR are going to get me to upgrade at this point.
Can confirm - bought mine in ~2010 and it's not smart and it's been working ever since. If I hadn't read about all the bad stuff in the last few years I would've absolutely looked for another Samsung first.. Good job!
I suggest Bosch. Especially for dishwashers. My old apartment had one: 7 years with zero issues. My new house has one: zero issues, the design is a real pleasure to use, and it also happens to be the quietest dishwasher sold in the US, at least according to the Googling I did when I first ran it and could barely even tell it was on.
Seconding Bosch. I've only owned one of their dishwashers for a little over a year, and I'm really impressed with the low noise level. It also had a great leveling system that raises the back by turning a screw that was accessible from the front. It made DIY installation much easier. Bonus: no smart features to go sideways a few years down the line.
I recently bought a condo that has a Bosch dishwasher and it works extremely well. Every other dishwasher I’ve owned has required some level of pre-rinsing in order to do its job. This thing has never left a speck of food behind. And the dishes actually come out dry. It’s almost confusing how well it works.
When I researched appliances, nobody could decide on the best fridge other than suggestions that were 4x the price (or even more).
But dishwashers it was almost unanimous, Bosch is best.
I couldn't afford new ones, so I found good deals on second hand 500 series ones and they're both still going fine for myself and my rental suite (only a year and a half so far though).
Crazy quiet too, I suggest people opt for the one that shines a light on the floor cause otherwise you can't hear it running (or finish).
There's also a fancier model that projects a timer.
You also suggest Siemens, AEG and all the others using the same Bosch internals? They are mostly the same but are cheaper in general.
Note: I own a Bosch the internals are great but the plastic is too thin in parts especially the corners of the top of my stand-alone dishwasher model since they broke.
No, they do not. The TVs and the appliances are garbage.
So garbage they still can't hire techs in LA. They pay you commission but only only on closed and profitable calls. They are almost never closed due to backorders of parts, especially boards, and especially now.
Samsung and LG are both the same garbage in different packages.
For TVs Id do your best to find a dumb one or use a monitor.
For applicances it depends but stay away from Maytag and Whirlpool and Kitchenaid. WP bought out maytag and now both are garbage. Speed Queen makes amazing washers and dryers, kitchen applicances I'd try and go with Subzero for refrigerators and freezers, and ranges don't really matter just stay away from induction heating and dual or cabinet-microwave ranges.
Just my $.02 after working on them and still being WP certified. IMO WP/Maytag and Amana are probably the worst. Samsung and LG not far behind, doubly so for their insane prices.
Most people would be better off buying a new fridge every time it breaks rather than a subzero. Subzero is at least twice as expensive, if not 4x as expensive as a consumer level fridge.
Costco even offers a 4 year warranty if you buy with their credit card.
Sub zero will last you as long as all 4 of those new ones combined, and thus are worth the hefty price.
The only good (read- meant to last) fridges are older ones.
Same for washers and dryers, can't tell you how many times someone would get a new set, sell or donate their old ones, and get pissed when one or both stop working and require extensive repairs within the first few months.
Costco, Home Depot, Lowes, Urners, we did the repairs for them all. Wish I'd taken pictures of the warehouse full of brand new units we had to diagnose and repair.
It's gotten so bad for instance maytag still has some units with 10 yr parts and labor (but it's only on select parts). Say I had a bad frontloader with a drum issue- boot warped, literally anything where I'd need to disassemble the case to get to the drum- they'd just send a whole new assembly. Still a bitch of a job, still quite a few hours, still an expensive part, and definitely would have been cheaper to replace the unit. Still we'd have to effect the repairs. Nothing makes any sense.
Edit to add- a few years ago now Frigidaire was merged with Electrolux. Shortly thereafter their 'website was hacked'. Their words. They have not, to this very day, gotten that back up and running. Need to look up a Frigidaire/Electrolux/Amana/whatever other names they use part number? Service issues? Good luck, you have to call them from on site and sit there for hours (super common with WP too).
Apparently no one had a backup. Or was able to put something new together within two years
This is how little these companies give a fuck about customers or the equipment they sell.
In my experience, they last me at least 6 years. I bought my parents’ washer dryer in 2012 (Electrolux) and it hasn’t had a problem, and my LG stuff from 2016 is still fine. And I had babies, so we were doing washer/dryer loads almost every day, multiple times per day many days, and opening and closing the fridge and freezer all the time too.
I feel like the calculation is more like spend $1k to $2k for a machine with 80% probability of lasting 5+ years, and 50% chance of lasting 10+ years, or spend $5k+ for machines with a 95% chance of lasting 10 years. But the problem is the subzero does not come with a parts and labor warranty for 10 years, so might as well go with the former option, and replace it if it breaks.
And also, I am not running a mission critical operation at home where a broken fridge is going to drastically affect our lives (we have a 2nd in garage anyway), so why not take the gamble, and invest the extra money?
We have a Whirlpool dishwasher and it’s very quiet. I don’t know if it’s as quiet as the Bosch ones mentioned above, but I often don’t notice it’s on. It does take forever to complete a load, and it never fully dries the dishes. Even with the setting to high heat, they still come out dripping wet. I’m not sure why.
Sure your rinse aid dispenser is filled and at an appropriate setting? Modern dishwashers depend heavily on rinse aid, which is ultimately a surfactant to prevent surface tension from making water cling to your dishes - the dry boost setting can help but it’s not going to get pools of water out of cups with convex bottoms and such.
Where to start. The glass can easily chip/crack/splinter, and if you use the wrong choice if words it won't be covered under warranty.
You have to use specific pots and pans, regular ones will destroy your glass.
They are too expensive, and from what I understand pretty hard to cook with (I've not used them myself aside from testing and whatnot).
They simply aren't worth the added hassle, fragility, and added expenses. If it did something super awesome to offset those issues it wouldn't be so bad.
Maybe some knockoffs do, but basically the only way to crack the glass is to make something heavy like a pot fall from a serious height on it.
> You have to use specific pots and pans, regular ones will destroy your glass.
That's untrue, they just need to be metallic for the induction to work
> They are too expensive, and from what I understand pretty hard to cook with (I've not used them myself aside from testing and whatnot).
No? They aren't harder to cook than any other cooktop.
> They simply aren't worth the added hassle, fragility, and added expenses. If it did something super awesome to offset those issues it wouldn't be so bad.
They're the best electric option - fastest to warm and cool, and most efficient. Gas belongs in the past for most people ( air quality, pollution, risks ( like leaks, fires) and in general we should be moving away from all fossil fuels).
1- They crack/scratch so often often its not unheard of to replace the glass on a new install.
2- if you think 'metal' pots and pans is all they need... I don't even know how to reply to that.
3- I only have hearsay.
4- best electric option? Dude you are arguing with a repair tech about things from the consumer side. They are hands down the worst option and universally hated by techs.
You may prefer them and that's fine, but google can inform you on the myriad problems apparently better than I can.
'gas belongs in the past' lol ok, wait till your power goes out. Or do electric, but not induction. There's a reason sales for them fell off a cliff and stayed there.
But, more power to you, if you like induction that's fine.
Ugh. No. Just… no. We moved into a house with LG appliances. The refrigerator broke 3 weeks after moving in. It couldn’t have been even 5 years old.
The washing machine says every load is unbalanced. Small load of only socks? Unbalanced. Large load of blankets? Unbalanced. Moderate load of normal clothes. Unbalanced. If that weren’t bad enough, it doesn’t know how to keep track of time. It has a countdown timer showing how much time is left on the wash. The dryer does, too. They count down at different speeds. They can both be at “10 minutes left” and 10 minutes later the washer still has like 3 minutes left. Well, actually 2 because, unlike the dryer, it stops counting down at 2 instead of 1 for some reason. Also, if you put clothes in it and choose only a spin cycle because they’re wet but not dirty (usually because you just washed them and the load was unbalanced and stopped in the middle), it adds water and rinses them again anyway. Note that this is despite having a separate “rinse and spin” cycle. Sometimes the washer just doesn’t turn on. I press the button and nothing happens. I have to unplug it and plug it back in.
While the dryer counts down properly, that’s about the only thing it does properly. If you set the drying temp, then change the amount of time to dry, it changes the temp back to high. Hope you didn’t have anything that will shrink in that load! It will also be crispy when you pull it out.
LG appliances are so comically bad I can’t even fathom how anyone could say anything good about them.
> It has a countdown timer showing how much time is left on the wash. The dryer does, too. They count down at different speeds. They can both be at “10 minutes left” and 10 minutes later the washer still has like 3 minutes left.
That is usually because modern laundry washing machines don't run on fixed-time schedules, they detect how much load they have and how much water is remaining in the clothing and adjust the cycle lengths for ecological reasons (when the clothes are already dry, no need to spin / dry them further). A fixed-time machine would never be able to hit energy efficiency requirements.
Then why does it have a count down timer? It could just say which part of the cycle it’s on instead. If I see a timer counting down, I expect it to be accurate. I don’t expect it to go from “5 minutes” up to “7 minutes” or to stay at “5 minutes” for 3 minutes. That doesn’t make any sense at all. It ceases providing the single function it was designed for.
I blacklisted LG from my life after my Nexus 5X bricked itself a couple of weeks after I bought it. I usually recommend Sony for TVs, have had a couple over the last 10 years. Good displays, running standard Android, and doesn't (seem to) have ads or any malicious telemetry so far.
https://www.gsmarena.com/lg-phones-20.php
This has a nice list of their phones default sort is by release date which offers an interesting way of looking at how phones changed over time.
I had one of their phones in 2013, LG G2. I found it was decent for the time and had no complaints.
I'm also 100% done with Samsung. Their rise in the late 00's and early 10's was really enticing, but they proved to be the worst of the lot. Every single recent device (last 6 years) of them that I use, I have some major UX issue with. Every. Single. One. Smart TVs, smartphones, kitchen appliances, washing machines, unbelieveably everything.
I would recommend to buy cheaper TVs and use a separate device to make them smart, there are plenty of options, you can go with the mainstream ones Google, Apple, Amazon, etc, a cheap one from Ali express or a DIY (linux set top with kodi or similar).
> Imagine buying a 4TB SSD, copying your stuff over from the old HDD to have it die 2 months later.
This is one if the reasons why I have local backups (as well as off-site backups) on a RAID mirror containing drives from distinct manufacturers. I don't trust any of them not to pull this sort of crap, hopefully if I buy two from distinct sources they might not fail at the same time.
I've recently chosen my first and only TV in the light of their reviews, and I'm happy and content for getting what I've read so far. Their "continuous reviews" are great.
OTOH, TV market has evolved to something bizarre since I stopped watching TV. Now, every big player is rolling out an armada of TVs from low end to high end, and fanboys of these brands fight relentlessly about every itty bitty detail in forums, face to face, etc..
I know, details matter, but nothing is perfect and this bike-shedding is not healthy in my opinion.
When I tell the brand and model of the TV I got, some of my friends counter "but brand X's model Y is actually better because..." with flaming eyes and with an instant enthusiasm. No, it's not. I've got the best TV for my needs and budget, and I'm happy. Thank you.
People seem to be very passionate about tv Brand’s.
I like to look at TVs when I go to the store and personally just looking at them side by side for me visually I would tend to want to pick between LG or Panasonic. But my friend prefers Samsung but it always looks tooooo vibrant to me.
I just want one without any smart features or preprocessing. Signal in via hdmi, rca, or radio waves. Attempt to reproduce exactly the image the signal describes out with no frames waiting in a buffer or other added latency.
I think a lot of us do. I just want a good image and hook up an Apple TV and a computer. I can’t stand using Android TV. I’ve never seen an example of it not being slow. And with ads now becoming a thing I don’t want it even more.
I'm on the same page with you. Actually, I was planning to do the same thing, but the one I got turns on in 2 seconds flat, and there's no feel of lag. It works reasonably snappy, which doesn't make you say "C'mon!". I think it's quite nice.
The video processor in that thing is very nice too. I'm using it with out of the box settings, and I don't feel the need to tweak anything, yet.
The model I have doesn't have blatant ads (and it's not a Samsung), so I'm a happy camper.
I had a Panasonic using the old My Homescreen. That thing was fast. When I moved I sold the TV as the temp apartment had a TV. It was a Samsung TV and omg its is slower than any Android TV Box I've ever tried. Took ~40s before I could use the TV.
In Taiwan my father in law has a Sony TV with Android, it's a tiny bit slow, but it's acceptable. There's no Ads on it yet.
I'm yet to experience ad's but seems like alot of people are beginning to, makes me worried.
It's a good site, but be aware that they don't cover all the TV brands on the market. I don't see Philips or Panasonic on there, for example. The site is based in Quebec and I wonder if they are only reviewing sets that are available in Canada.
Rtings is great for the data they provide, but they can have a but of a blind eye for other problems. For example, Rtings will tell you if a TV has bad contrast or poor audio, but they're not going to mention when the color is so uneven you can see a pattern on solid colors.
Also Consumer Reports, who do highly scientific tests; have labs, engineers, etc.; and have decades of experience. Also, it's published by a non-profit established to serve consumers.
Just poke around rtings.com and you’ll see the difference. It reminds me a bit of what wirecutter was in it’s pre-nyt days before it became a click generator.
I have done in the past, but I'm not sure what to make of the differences - let's take wireless keyboards as I'm currently thinking about getting one. If we look at Rtings[1], the first one it recommends is the Logitech MX Keys. On the Wirecutter[2], it first recommends the Logitech K380. To be clear, I've only skimmed both reviews right now.
Both go on to recommend the other's first choice as a good alternative pick (the primary difference being whether compact or full-size is better for most people). So that tells me for at least one specific category, they're in agreement.
Does Rtings go into a lot more detail about each keyboard? Absolutely. But that isn't necessarily useful to me--part of the reason I use the Wirecutter is so that I don't end up spending days trying to find the perfect item in a category[3]. I read the review, seeing if there are any caveats for its top pick that matter to me, and make a choice based on that.
So what I don't want to do when buying something that both review is to read through both reviews, because either:
(A) they agree, like on the wireless keyboard, in which case I've wasted a little bit of time, but in the grand scheme of things, it's fine, or
(B) they disagree, because now I'm tempted to go through and weigh each detailed point which is something I'm trying to avoid!
Reporting from a K380. That thing is great. Also they keys are backed by a metal plate, so the whole thing is pretty hefty and stable. Its simple looks are deceiving.
I see where you are coming from. Sometimes I feel the same as you where I just want somebody to give me a recommendation and a few pros and cons. Other times I want to deep dive into the review. I think it boils down to how big of a commitment the purchase is.
Wirecutter is (in my opinion) enough for getting a "good enough" recommendation for a low-budget purchase where there isn't much difference across offerings. I used them when I bought a powerline adapter set to make sure the product worked roughly as advertised.
rtings, on the other hand, offers much more in-depth reviews. I've used them to decide on monitors, TVs, and higher-end headphone purchases so far and their reviews were excellently detailed and accurate.
Not surprised Samsung doing it. They consistently over promise and under deliver. I remember when buying their SSDs they promised support for HW encryption in future firmware update (Opal2/eDrive if I remember correctly) but they never actually delivered it. Since then I don’t trust anything Samsung promises or says.
Hardware encryption should never have been trusted in the first place since it’s impossible to audit. The completely obvious thing happened where it’s incompetently implemented.
They've been caught cheating on phone benchmarks, too.
They also hyped the hell out of Apple removing the headphone jack...and then did the same thing. Ditto for Apple removing the default charger; Samsung quietly followed suit not long after Apple.
The whole headphone jack thing is a joke. Just buy the sub-$10 Apple lighting or USB-C headphone adapter. An adapter that tests better than more than half of the "high end" "audiophile" DACs.
Mine now lives on the end of my one pair of wired headphones. It has been very rough, but somehow I have managed to persevere.
> They also hyped the hell out of Apple removing the headphone jack...and then did the same thing. Ditto for Apple removing the default charger; Samsung quietly followed suit not long after Apple.
I have a friend who worked at Apple then later ended up at Samsung. He said that any original idea at Samsung was immediately squashed and they were basically told when designing features to do whatever Apple did. So I’m not too surprised by that.
I would only be surprised if the other manufacturers are NOT doing the same.
We (collectively speaking) do the same at work. We optimize for what gets us promoted rather than what benefits the company. Companies optimize for revenue rather than a good user experience.
This behavior of trying to game/cheat the benchmarks is entirely consistent with human behavior in other areas of life.
One of the best parts of being happy at a "terminal level" in FAANG is that I can easily pick what I work on for best impact on the teams around me (and the engineering org as a whole) without worrying about chasing a promotion. I know the levers I can pull to get a higher perf rating here and there, but I'm also free to focus on the "papercuts" knowing that I'm not sacrificing future promotions, because I just don't care about adding more responsibilities to my plate. I can do "the right thing" for my coworkers, and all I have to do is make a case for improving developer sentiment or efficiency to justify the work.
I've been doing it for over six years now, so why not? Joined ten years ago yesterday and made it to IC5, and haven't had any desire for a promo since then, so I just work on we/hatever I think is the best thing I can spend my time on for the team, and it's been sufficient for "meets all" or better every half except one. Just pick the right team with the right manager who actually cares about you and what is actually both for you and your coworkers.
I would rather get paid less (still in top 99+% of US mind you) to do work that is meaningful to me, my coworkers, and the wider open source community-and then clock out at six pm to spend time with my partner and play games-than earn more and spend all of my time in meetings and design discussions and worrying about whether I'm having enough cross functional impact to meet performance expectations or whatever the new director's pet project of the month is.
Glad to hear this. I’ve hit this point in the past couple of years and I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I actually believe that management will be satisfied with my “no more climbing” attitude. Every time I get a new manager I have to have The Talk where I tell them that I’m happy with my level of impact and I don’t plan to spend my 1:1’s exploring what I need to tackle next on the leveling guidelines for the next promo. It’s a nice place to be, and I wonder when I’ll be able to really relax and stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. :D
Sure that makes sense, but it's irrelevant. We weren't talking about working more vs working less or working on meaningful stuff vs boring stuff.
We were talking about working on things that are good for the company vs good for the performance review process. The fact that there's a difference and that it's distinct from wellbeing is why at big companies some people with 5yoe make 3x as much as people with 30 yoe.
As someone who left one of these big companies to earn under $100k/yr doing something I absolutely love (and working a relaxed number of hours), making less money is not the only thing to strive for. At least, not for everyone.
Having worked with Samsung's TV signage platform, i am amazed the duct tape for this hack stuck together long enough to be discovered in a working state.
I know it's a big company, but some of the design and APIs were just an endless stream of WTFs.
This sounds very similar to how various car manufacturers rigged their products to be benchmark aware. It did NOT turn out well for their shareholders.
of course it harmed people - people spent money on TV sets that do not perform as they expect because samsung was purposely cheating on the tests. All of their customers were potentially harmed, as well as Samsung's competitors.
I wrote Samsung off a few years ago. I was at my dad's house and noticed that his Samsung TV would do this strange thing at the end of commercials for movies. At the end of most movie commercials, there is an all black screen with white text. When this screen would show up, the TV's back-light would suddenly dim and then brighten back up on the when it went away. I went online and found a forum of other folks noticing and complaining about the phenomenon. Apparently, this line of Samsung TVs had an algorithm that would watch for scenes that had a lot of black. Since the TV did a poor job of displaying blacks, it would try to dim the back-lighting so the blacks would look more black and less washed out. In the case of my dad's TV, the cure was worse than the disease. I searched the settings hoping to be able to disable the "feature" to no avail. I eventually found another forum offering up hacked firmware you could install that claimed to disable the feature. Not going to try that on my dad's TV, but I did decide that if these types of shenanigans are in Samsung's repertoire, I would be steering clear. OP article seem to confirm that they're still up to their chicanery which is sad.
Ah, I see you have discovered the joys of "dynamic contrast". Just about every monitor I've bought recently has that "feature", but luckily it can usually be disabled. Unfortunately they still measure contrast with that feature enabled so it's like five-billion-to-one, allegedly.
It answered a question I was going to ask, which is "why don't they just run in benchmark mode all the time?" And the answer is apparently because the extra brightness can not be sustained without damaging the panel.
In Australia, I have been unable to find _any_ dumb TV's over 40" for sale any more.
I've checked a variety of stores online and none offer them anymore.
I managed to pick up a 50" 4K TV from 'Kogan' a few years back and was hoping to get a second (ideally larger) one. But alas. That's not an option.
As alternatives. I believe it's possible to get sinage/display TV's which are still dumb (but much more expensive) and one could look at getting a huge 'computer monitor' as well.
You sometimes bump into a professional TV reviewer on UK forums and suddenly realize when you think you are polling views from the top handful of sites, he works for most of them, so they are actually just his repeated opinion on one TV set...
The problem is that none of these tests are regulatory tests. There is no approval process for monitor performance nor is there a penalty for not adhering to a standard (short of a class action suit). Heck, even when there was such a regulation, testing and penalty, VW saw fit to fake their diesel emission tests.
I'm not following. The article talks about benchmarking "display brightness, quality, power consumption", and the cheating relates to peak luminance. Aren't they pretty normal features for TVs?
1) Samsung televisions spy on your mercilessly. They collect everything they can, including screenshots at regular intervals and send them back to Samsung so that they can sell this to "partners". They are not a FAANG and don't have anywhere near their level of security expertise. I have second-hand but reliable information about their security approach, and "laughable" doesn't begin to describe it. Assume that whatever you watch on a Samsung TV is being relayed to multiple state-level spy agencies.
Ref: https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/resources/tv-...
2) Even if you buy a flagship Samsung television for five figures, it's virtually guaranteed that within a year or two they will release an update the slows it down to molasses. These things have controller boards with miniscule amounts of RAM in them, and they use the same firmware across all models. When a new model with more RAM is released, they add more features, causing all older models that self update to start swapping to the pagefile. I've seen several Samsung televisions across several model years and price points get slowed down until response times are up to 2 seconds for most actions. This is "unusable garbage" quality, for crazy money.
NEVER buy a Samsung television, ever. You're treated as the product, not the customer, despite paying them a lot of money.
PS: This isn't even the only display calibration cheating that they do! Practically all Samsung models use a "shop mode" that cranks up brightness to 11 and oversaturates the colours. Even in "normal" mode Samsung televisions have forced "enhancements" that can't be turned off. There is no "calibrated mode", because it would look like trash on these over-priced televisions.