I am frankly astonished by this article and all of these comments. Right now I have only 3 digital subscriptions totalling $20.58/month. (Admittedly that's low right now; I usually have an additional 2 streaming services, rotated every few months, for maybe another $25/month).
The key thing to remember is that any recurring subscription costs us theoretically infinite money (given infinite time). Obviously we won't have that subscription forever, so it's up to us to calculate how much it will cost us over the next month, year, decade.
Any time someone says "Just $N per month!" all I hear is "costs infinite money unless I do something about that." This thought really helps me resist leaking money like that.
That seems like an unhelpful way of thinking about it. I always think about it as "I make X per Month. This thing costs Y per month. Is Y/X a reasonable amount of money to spend on a thing?"
By your logic, I earn "just $N per month" so I'll earn infinite money unless I'm fired. That's obviously not a useful way to budget, but neither is thinking about $5/month as "costs infinite money".
If, after taxes and mandatory expenses I have $500/month left over, then the proposition "Should I spend 1% of my discretionary money on this?" is a much more reasonable way to think about things until your financial situation changes. If I lose my job, or take a pay cut, then it's obviously time to consider cutting back unnecessary expenses, but otherwise, it's as "infinite" as my income.
It is interesting to me that you have income and outflow so tightly coupled that you think in terms of "N% of income".
I did that for several decades. These days I take pains to decouple income and outflow. That is: I judge the expenditure on its own merits, whether I need or want it by itself, without regard to what % of income it might be.
Think of it like a leaky bucket: my paycheck goes in the top, and I control how much leaks out the bottom. Of course, I am lucky enough to have that luxury. Many people (most Americans) don't have enough income to decouple outflow from it, and are forced to think in percentages of income.
Sure - there's benefits to both ways of thinking about it. It's less that I tightly couple them and more that I find, for a sufficiently low percentage of my income, it's not worth stressing that much about the expense.
My mental model is quite close to yours for larger purchases ($100 or more, generally), but for something whose monthly cost is less than my hourly wage, thinking too long about if it's really worthwhile is probably not a great use of my time.
It's just a matter of cashflow. Presumably, you will continue making money. Either from salary or hopefully from investments / pension later on. Is money in > money out? Then you're good. You can keep paying infinitely if you have income infinitely.
An infinitely recurring payment shouldn't be thought of as costing infinite money, even though that's what you'll pay over time. The later payments aren't worth as much as the payments today because the money today can be invested. It turns out that the value of money decays exponentially over time, and the total value of the money paid is an infinite series that converges to P/r, where P is the payment and r is the applicable interest rate.
So a never-ending subscription of $100/yr is worth about 100/0.03 = $3333 total today (assuming you would have invested the money in something like a 5-year treasury bond instead). Still a lot, but not infinite.
"The people at this company actually believe in the mission of bringing the world closer together. They recognize and embrace the huge responsibility it puts on us."
Bro if that were true then the end product of Facebook would be significantly different.
Seems like dude stays at this company that pays him well because, as he says,
- that's not true
- that's blatantly, superlatively not true
- They let him play with the lives of billions of people
- And they pay him well with good perks.
Yeah sorry JK Jensen, I read your post and all it says is you're greedy and avoidant. You love the great pay and great perks, and you lie to yourself about the impact you're having.
The main point to remember is that the fones we carry aren't for us. They are data-gathering tools for various spy enterprises. Any utility we get out of our fones is largely incidental, or at best it's bait to get us into the trap.
It's interesting that most of the replies here focus on the children aspect, while the same spy-device paradigm applies as much or more to adults.
The bottom line is I just don't get enough utility out of my devices to justify spending all that privacy on them. Plus ads make the internet unusable on them. I'll just use my laptop because it's more convenient.
I hate smartphones mostly because of this (although there are more reasons), and I wish I could stop using them altogether, but there are too many people out there who only communicate using text applications (WhatsApp and Telegram, mostly. Which are about the only things I've installed aside from Firefox, which I also use only rarely). So in the end it's basically a choice of eschewing your social life or eschewing your privacy, at least partially. I've managed to convince a grand total of 0 people to use other means of communication such as email. There are also some services that I use (and some that I'm forced to use as part of my job, although these go to the company phone) that just plain refuse to offer a web interface and I can only use them as a fucking app. Who knows which data might it gather.
Windows users are also suffering a similar problem because of the smartphonisation of the desktop (side note, I hate that people still use that meme about "one version of Windows is bad and the next one is good". W10 still has most of the problems of W8, and some of them are even worse. I don't think we're ever going to get a "good" Windows ever again). We need to choose between being able to run old, trusty software or being actually in control of our computer (in terms of privacy, updates and so on). Then again I suspect that I have only a few months left of personal Windows usage.
The replies focus on the children aspect because that strips away the most challenging counterargument: why shouldn't adults be able to decide, as many if not most do, that they do get lots of utility out of their phones and don't much care about being spied on incidentally? It's hard to tell a story where smartphones are more dangerous than smoking, and despite being completely illegal for kids we mostly let people do it once they're old enough.
The majority of consumers are not tech-savvy enough to make informed decisions when it comes to electronics and their own freedom because the tech stack is just too complex, and even if they wanted to learn about it, most of the hardware and software is closed source and nearly impossible to modify. Most smartphone users don't even know that they're being spied on. To compound the problem, the companies that make the phones put out deceptive advertising claiming that these devices are private, and your data stays in your pocket. They're lying, and even the ToS agreement you click through during a new device setup says as much.
I reject the notion that a majority or even a plurality consent to this garbage.
That isn't true at all. Citizens in countries without puppet governments have no problem informing themselves and contacting their legislators to drive real change.
In a place like the US, you get the illusion of choice. It's quite literally red team and blue team, and proponents of this system treat it exactly like a sporting event. The average American has zero ability to get any law changed or enacted.
A great contemporary example is the right to repair activism. Most people are sick of the "throw it away and buy a new one" mentality, and a lot of them are becoming very vocal in their support. This could be an easy way for politicians to boost their popularity and get reelected while doing real good in a bipartisan manner. Instead, these politicians pay the crowds lip service, sit on their hands and drag their feet while making up any reason not to do it. They know full well that their continued enrichment is contingent on the bribes they take and the connections they have, not your votes.
Because the average adult is completely uninformed on this matter. And this is no fault of theirs - life is far, far too complicated and busy to become experts on the thousands of things we participate in.
Luckily, we can rely on regulation. We plug in a new appliance and it doesn't blow up. Our cars rarely catch fire on the highway due to defects, and if they do, regulation and the legal system forces recalls.
Sure. The original piece isn't proposing that social media just needs a couple regulations, though - the author says they're convinced social media is bad even without the effects of being monitored.
My phone is for me, whether or not FAANG et al gets some value out of it.
I get more utility out of my tech interactions on my phone than I give to "various spy enterprises". I use many services to their maximum, IMO negating most of the benefit they gain from loss-leader products that are their bait for me-as-a-product.
You _are_ being tracked and monetized. Your devices _are_ fingerprinted, and your demographics are tabulated and collated. The modern web doesn't have an effective opt-out (Ye Olde Web didn't either), so you may as well go all-in and extract as much value of your own as you can from the system.
I just feel like this author could have chosen a better example. The if/else block that he complains about is easy to read and simple to understand. The ternary he advises raises the bar significantly for anyone trying to read the code, while having no practical effect on runtime or usability.
Based on my 25+ years of experience I strongly believe that the "if/else" that this author complains about is actually BETTER than the ternary he recommends. This is yet another example of the endemic problem where software engineers think "harder to read is a virtue".
On the surface this seems blatantly illegal: after the sale is made the no-longer-owner removes functionality.
Can someone please explain how this is legally not some sort of theft, or bait-and-switch, or ... something?
I read comments about firmware licensing, or Japan's camera noise thing. Those sound like Samsung problems, while disabling a camera sounds like an actionable user problem.
It's not really an after-sale thing. They sold a phone with a booby trap set already. If the customer springs the trap, that's a customer action, not a Samsung action.
Most laws tend to frown upon traps. And the blame goes to the one who sets the trap, not the one who trips it, even if the victim was engaging in otherwise illegal actions.
As always, intent is king. If you make a hole intended to be a trap for trespassers, you likely will be liable. If the hole has a different, legitimate purpose, then you're likely not liable if you've marked the hole properly.
Not really related to the discussion at hand but I often wonder if that's the right way to make laws? "Intent is king" is the watchword of modern American jurisprudence but I ask you: If you killed 3 people, are they less dead if it was an accident? If people knew they would be punished for consequences instead of intent, would people be more careful about considering the consequences of their actions? Would that make for, just in general, a more observant, more considerate, more intelligent populace, with less collateral damage? By extension, might that result in more just/fair laws just in general?
I'm fairly confident this "intent" thing is absolutely the wrong way to build a society. I would love if someone would engage with this idea and offer criticisms for/against but so far nobody has.
Yes, that’s actually why tort reform is such a big topic in American jurisprudence. Because property owners are liable if a bunch of kids suffer injuries on their property by falling into a hole, almost regardless of intent. Yes even if it’s properly secured with fencing, in many jurisdictions the trespassers sue for damages and succeed often.
Even failing to shovel the snow and having someone trip and injure themselves is enough grounds for some sort of tort liability.
To a lesser extent it’s true in Canada and the UK too I believe.
It seems that bootloader unlocking isn't listed as a feature and this restriction is implemented from day 1. So it shouldn't be illegal, I think. It's still better than phones that don't support unlocking.
It's probably somewhere deep in the EULA/ToS and furthermore it is shown, while unlocking the bootloader. Whether this is legal or not, is surely an open question.
One basic pillar of contract law basically everywhere is that one can not be bound by a contract that they didn't read, even if they signed it. Usually these cases involve coercion or not knowing the language. If nobody can read the EULA because it's 10 pages of densely written legalese, can they even be bound by it?
Since BigCo deliberately made their EULA harder to read than necessary, that probably counts as "acting in bad faith" which is an entirely different legal avenue for the EULA to be void.
I can't help thinking that the correct "malicious compliance" strategy for legislators to tackle this is to pass a law that says any time a user is required to agree to an EULA on a device which is capable of playing audio files, the device should have to play an unskippable audio recording of the EULA being spoken out loud by a voice actor, at a normal talking speed.
Adding a 30 minute wait before someone can use your product or your website would ruin the customer experience, and would encourage at least some companies to question which clauses are actually needed.
> One basic pillar of contract law basically everywhere is that one can not be bound by a contract that they didn't read, even if they signed it.
Wait, there has to be more nuance to this, right? Like, I can't just sign a contract and say "I didn't read it" when a term I don't like comes into force. Is there a precedent for where that line is?
For those who can't be bothered to read wikipedia, this only applies when the courts can find you read it to the best of your ability and misunderstood it. Mostly it applies to those who can't read (either at all or the language of the contract) and so trusted someone else to tell them what it meant and they were deceived.
If you could have read the document but didn't, that is your own fault and the contract stands. Only if you couldn't have read the contract, or you clearly could not understand it does the contract not apply.
"If you could have read the document but didn't, that is your own fault and the contract stands." That's the point, isn't it? Gideon v. Wainwright clearly established that no non-lawyer can be expected to win against a trained lawyer. Since BigCo has a team of trained lawyers making the EULA impossible to read, ... Well, Gideon didn't go this far, but if we extend the logic in that ruling, there's certainly a major precedent that nobody can be expected to understand the EULA, and thus it might be void.
I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a native speaker but I have spent way too much time on EULAs and groklaw and stuff when I was younger and my honest conclusion is a competent lawyer can probably make a planet size hole in a contract without most of HN noticing: many because they don't read it (I'm here now), many because English is not their first language an even among those who know English well(I used to be in this camp), legalese is almost a separate language.
Of course there's more nuance to this. As I mentioned, these cases usually involve coercion (someone held a gun to your head and made you sign the contract) or not speaking the language (interpreter wasn't available/translated wrong/deceived).
This question then rests on: Can the user reasonably be expected to read 10 pages of dense legalese?
I think the real-life answer is an obvious NO. Current law generally assumes YES, except in cases where it doesn't. You see how there's some conflict here which I expect to be clarified by some court soon.
It's printed quite clearly in the quick start guide that it'll break your phone if you do it. Maybe people should read the little booklet, but as you can see it's not hidden under a pile of text.
Discussion question: If something is immoral and debatably illegal, does documenting it in the quick start guide make it somehow less immoral? Or does that just mean it was documented?
Imagine if the wrapper for a ream of paper said "by opening this wrapper, you agree to pay us $5 if you print double-sided on any of this paper". That's what EULA/ToS on things I already own feel like.
If you tamper with the device it's your responsibility, innit? It's not like they disabled a properly functioning device that uses the original firmware with an OTA update.
> If you tamper with the device it's your responsibility, innit? It's not like they disabled a properly functioning device that uses the original firmware with an OTA update
And more to the point, Samsung is under no obligation to allow bootloader unlocking at all, much less ensure that it continues to provide any specific set of functionality.
The alternative here isn't "Samsung stops disabling the camera when the bootloader is unlocked," it's "Samsung stops allowing bootloader unlock."
This is always the game with Android phones - you have to do your research to understand whether you can install your own software on them, and what might be lost if you do so. If you don't want a bunch of headaches, just buy a Pixel series straight from Google.
It's not up to Samsung to allow bootloader unlock or not. There will be exploits that will allow for a bootloader unlock or worse unless they allow for it.
Besides, we don't have to be happy with the status quo, we can legislate for bootloader unlocking to be allowed.
> Besides, we don't have to be happy with the status quo, we can legislate for bootloader unlocking to be allowed
Unfortunately, that's not the world we actually live in. This thread is in response to the (great?) grandparent who suggested:
> On the surface this seems blatantly illegal: after the sale is made the no-longer-owner removes functionality
Our governments may theoretically have the power to force vendors to provide functionality like this to end users, but it's hard to imagine that actually happening (can you imagine how hard Apple would lobby against unlocking iPhones, for example?).
The only thing we can do is stop buying devices from vendors who exhibit such user-hostile behaviors.
There is in my opinion a difference between a car and a phone.
If a car fails, people can die. If a phone fails, it normally doesn't have a huge impact.
If a car disables itself, because the central electronics were messed with by laymans, not some repair shop, it is in my opinion totally okay, as it would otherwise endanger humans.
But for a phone/other non-critical electronics, there is in my opinion no reason why its functionality should be reduced, just because you did something harmless like unlocking the bootloader. (In this case, the camera could still make photos, just without the fancy patented/copyrighted algorithms)
Is that a legal distinction where you live? If not, this all needs to be phrased in the context of “I think this is reasonable and am advocating for legislation with my elected representatives”.
That's great! As other commenters here have mentioned an online menu accessed by a QR code can have lots of extra features: multiple languages, filters for gluten/nuts/etc.
Meanwhile since I, speaking the local language and not having special dietary needs, want to look at a paper menu while my fone stays in my pocket.
I don't think anyone is actually arguing against having the QR/online menu. That's a great thing. What we're complaining about here is that restaurants have taken away the IRL menu.
Have you actually been to anywhere that has refused to give you a paper menu? Everywhere I’ve been lately has either clearly had a stack of menus up front that you can grab on the way to your table or the waitstaff has given us (typically fewer than are in our party) paper menus. Typically one or two of us will use the paper menu and the rest will use the digital menu.
Payment by QR on the receipt, however, is absolutely fantastic. A place near me uses Toast and it just opens an app clip, has me review my receipt, touch Apple Pay, and I’m done. I’ve always felt uncomfortable giving my server full access to my debit card details just to pay for a meal.
We could talk about why all day long but I want to make this fact super clear to any restaurant workers/owners: If you ask me to get my fone out of my pocket then I leave and give my business to your competition. Literally all it takes is a menu printout taped to a wall and you can keep my business. Make it happen.
For years I've been asking: Why does my toothbrush have to connect to bluetooth? Why does my refrigerator twitter? These were always useless mis-features and we can hope some of them can get pared down now with the shortage. Bring back old style dumb appliances!
For all the hooplah about smart homes and Alexa and Thread and Merlin Mann screaming about HomeKit and blah blah blah…most people have dumb lightbulbs, dumb garage doors, and dumb fridges.
The obvious exception is a smart TV, which are effectively mandatory now. And…after years of being a contrarian…guess what? I like my Roku-enabled TV. The apps are nice. I don’t have to have an external box. It’s fine. More than fine, even—I am kinda shocked at how good this Amazon-special TCL TV is.
> For all the hooplah about smart homes and Alexa and Thread and blah blah blah…most people have dumb lightbulbs, dumb garage doors, and dumb fridges.
For now. The profits to be made on microtransactions and subscriptions from internet-requiring features are too gargantuan to pass up, to not become the new norm. And, of course, unblockable ads and tracking.
A fun recent example is a motorcycle emergency vest that stops inflating when you stop paying the subscription. An outlier for now, but the average tomorrow; The slope is real and it's coated with vaseline.
No, they'll only become the new norm if the majority of people buy them. And they cost more, because internet-enabled components aren't free. And most people really don't see the value in an internet-connected light bulb. Does it emit more light? No? Then why would I pay more for it? So if they have to sell the higher-cost BOM for the same price (because people see no reason to pay more), then where are the gargantuan profits?
So I really don't see internet-connected X taking over the market, no matter how much money companies could make if customers cooperated.
But still…that’s high-margin subscriptions on top of a high-margin product. I am, currently, skeptical we will end up with low-end Internet of Shit for everything, because running that subscription service requires a big up-front investment that’s hard when you’re selling, I don’t know, toaster ovens.
There was recently a subscription dishwasher featured here. It turned out to be easy for the author to hack theirs, but it will get harder over time, just like ink cartridges.
If I go to “shop all” in the refrigerators section of Home Depot’s site and look at the count next to the filter for “smart” features - Only 97 out of 798 refrigerators they sell have smart features.
TVs are different as there is a large number of people who realize they don't need TVs anymore, they need gaming/computer monitors and can stream all the content they need. This increased substitutability with cheap, dumb monitors -- you no longer need a TV to watch TV -- means the pricing power of TV makers has fallen -- TV prices have plunged dramatically -- and they are desperately trying to find new business models and new value propositions, one of these is to subsidize the physical product and start monetizing attention.
I don't think washing machine makers have this option, nor is the internet a threat to replace washing machines. Of course business majors keep graduating and they will get bright ideas like selling information about what you wash to third parties, and they will have dreams of subscription revenue, but until they can provide a compelling value proposition, these are not going to get widely adopted. TVs are declining in price at 20% a year. Users are getting great value in exchange for putting up with the ads.
The first smart refrigerator came out in 2000. The first smart tv came out later in 2007-2008. I think smart appliances just aren’t as popular as their dumb appliance counterparts. But yeah, maybe someday they will be.
Yeah, though I would argue that smart kitchen appliances have a lot more going against them than smart tvs.
- Historically, the TV has been used for playing media transmitted on radio waves, so an internet connected TV isn't a big surprise.
- Television media formats seem to completely shift every decade or 2, so people are very used to buying something they'll throw away soon.
- People usually take their televisions around with them when they move houses, but not appliances. Transfering "smart" things between owners is generally a pain and a security hazard.
Not sure exactly how old that fridge is but I think it’s unlikely that it’s anywhere close to as energy efficient as an equivalent fridge made today would be.
Appliances have made huge strides in energy efficiency in the last 30 years.
Many people I know are asking for and seeking out smart tvs. It's not being pushed on them. I don't hear those people asking for smart fridges (but occasionally I hear them talk about integrated ice makers).
For me it's like separation of concerns. Give me a TV with good picture/sound and a good selection of ports. If I want a smart TV I'll stick a Chromecast/Fire stick in it; if I want a metrics displayer I'll use a Raspberry Pi; or maybe I'll use it with a games console. I'd prefer not to pay for smart features If I'm not gonna use them.
and for all we know, if cars were still made with carbs and solenoids and old fashion-y tech, that manufacturing might be impacted by a pandemic as well. I don't think there's anything fundamental about chips that are causing this delay. A lot of it has to with cancelling orders and manufacturers winding down and then restarting a major supply chain takes time, especially if demand shuts down fast and then starts up again faster than expected.
There's a wide space between connected and dumb appliances. For instance my espresso coffeemaker is fairly dumb : I'm not even sure that it has a chip that turns the light green when the resistor is hot enough, it might be just some "dumb" sensor. (Still, because of this, it's not completely dumb.)
In comparison, my electric kettle is much smarter, and most likely requires a chip to make all the logic around the various buttons and the screen and the water temperature settings work. Still, it has zero connectivity.
Why does my toothbrush have to connect to bluetooth?
Why does my refrigerator twitter?
Analytics etc; to get "relevant" ads. That's all this IoT and data syphoning etc is mostly about.
How often do you brush your teeth? What toothpaste do you use? Maybe your dentist needs to know that or, at least, someone from some (big) (tech) company doing data science about it for whatever reason (mostly to show you ads).
Dollars. Somebody's going to follow the dollars. If it costs less to build a toothbrush without bluetooth (and it absolutely does), and if the most of public doesn't care enough about bluetooth to pay more for a toothbrush, then the one who makes bluetooth-less toothbrushes will make more money. Somebody will do that.
In this day and age its easy to forget that even "dumb" appliances still use microcontrollers.
Yes, even functions like monitoring temperature, turning a compressor on and off, and beeping if the door is left open for too long... are probably more easily and cheaply done with a low-end microcontroller than some sort of electromechanical contraption.
I'm always very sceptical when electronics and chips are used as a solution to problems that nobody had. Reliability seems to suffer most of all. When I hear from my parents how long their products lasted back then ...
Appicances with cheap membrane control panels are the worst. Mechanical dials lasted forever and when they broke you could at least still work them with some vise grips
Connected devices are a good thing - i.e. I should be able to make the washing machine scriptable from my computer, but I bet these solutions are always crap because they are implemented in a hurry by engineers who don't understand either the hardware or software well enough to make it work, so you end up with quasi-useless boss-pleasers like we have now.
The world isn't driven by "I should have all the nice things I can imagine". How are you gonna script the washing machine to take the underwear off your bottom and put it in the drum? You'll have to do that yourself. And when you do it, you might as well "script the washing machine" by pushing the buttons on it.
I'm a programmer and honestly I can't wait for this IoT fad to die down a little. Sure, maybe it's cool to have LAN connected lightbulbs as a novelty product. But this kind of shit will never ever be the norm, simply because it makes no damn sense in terms of value proposition.
I’ve got hués through the whole house. Primary use cases are:
- Being able to trigger dimming of the lights in the house as sunset approaches.
- Being able close all the lights in the house in one go (such as when leaving).
- dimming lights when I don’t have dimmers wired in.
- being able to adjust colour temperature of the lights (and full colours, I tend to use a mix of oranges, pinks, and purples).
- turning off lamps that are not otherwise on the same circuit as the ceiling when I flick a switch.
Things like dimming and controlling lights on the same circuit could be done with electrical work, but I’m renting. The bulbs come with me wherever I move. The electrical work doesn’t. I already was bringing my own lightbulbs wherever I moved anyways (to save electricity).
Lights turn on and off automatically, I rarely have to do anything and they are how I want them when I want them / and don’t turn on when I’m
Not at home and turn on when I arrive home. Turning on in the morning during winter helps a ton and when I do need a light on/off on demand it’s a voice command or the tap of a wireless battery less switch
Most (all?) washing machines have a delayed start.
Why would you want your clothes to sit wet, collecting mold, before the drying begins?
See, part of being a good programmer is figuring out a solution using the tools you have. Which includes figuring out how existing machines address your issues without requesting they come with a fully programmable API and wi-fi, just so you can delay the drying cycle.
What we've learned here is you need to buy a new washing machine, or maybe before that, read carefully the manual of the one you have.
Thinking you can dry your clothes better than the people who engineered the entire machine and wrote its programs is honestly cracking me up. Do you think the vendors were like "you know what, we don't need this washing machine to dry well".
Even more, what kind of a marketing campaign would such a scriptable machine even have?
"Our washing machine dries really poorly, but we hope every stay at home mom can script it to dry better, so we included a web server and a REST API with it".
Well if you want it to be scriptable, you might need to spend three month's rent on a new washing machine.
And yeah, uhmm... most washing machines can run drying after washing. You just took your specific model's issue, and decided to generalize it to "must be scriptable". Which is really a giant leap to make. To recap:
1. Your specific model can't dry after washing.
2. Your specific model can't be scripted either.
3. Other models can dry after washing.
4. Other models have no scripting.
Ergo whatever you do, you're buying a new washing machine. And your problem doesn't require scripting.
You're really dedicated to being needlessly argumentative.
Wrt to your previous comment, of course I'm talking about my model of washing machine.
I genuinely cannot fathom how it's hard to work out that my point is that if they'd stuck even the most basic interface on the back, which I bet the higher end ones already have for debugging just not exposed, I could make the machine do what I want. That's not the way the world is, but it would be better if it was.
In software you should be familiar that exposing a debugging interface can be a 10 minute job. Exposing a public service can be a 3 month job. And not just for developers, but also for documentation writers, marketing, legal, and so on.
If you're an expert, then you can hack with the debug interface, many enthusiasts do things like that with their devices.
And if you're not an expert, you don't want, you can't, and you'd never need to script your washing machine.
Connected washing machines continue to make little sense to me. The only benefit I can think of is a notification when it's done. Otherwise all the interactions with it are done in person. (loading/unloading etc)
The common use case is to want to set the time so that it runs not right now but later - either because for noise reasons, or so that it finishes when you're back home to unload.
Also, of course, there's the "internal scheduling" of various different activities that the machine is doing; you can do that mechanically but IMHO it's simpler now to do that with a cheap microcontroller.
My washing machine doesn't automatically starting draining or drying after finishing, so I have to go up and down the stairs, and it has a mind of its own as to when it finishes.
An ESP-32 is about 2 quid last time I checked, I have many, and I would happily attach it to the machine if not for the fact that it doesn't belong to me.
I don't think so. I can't work out how the washing machine isn't obviously just an example.
Also, the thing that's more annoying is actually that the machine's alarm is extremely quiet and the timer very inconsistent (e.g. I made a Pizza oven that sends me an email, and it wasn't hard to do at all).
Without the hardware to script moving wet clothes to a dryer, and possibly folding and sorting dry clothes, is there a point, other than to set an alarm to prevent a moldy forgotten wet load?
I’d argue that on average the engineers working on these things understand things just barely well enough to implement these things in whatever hardware/software combination is selected.
Any more understanding than that would be sub-optimal for shipping consumer products where cost optimisation is a primary concern as the salaries for more competent engineers would cost the company more.
You can see this effect in action with the explosion of “smart home” devices after commoditised internals were made available by the likes of Tuya. Suddenly your company only needed junior engineers who could skin the whitebox turn-key solutions and product designers who could design a moulded plastic enclosure around a standard set of postage stamp sized circuit boards.
So your default assumption is that a company whose entire division may be selling washing machines, doesn't give a damn about the programs that make those machines useful.
Yes and no, my assumption is that the company only cares about the programs being useful enough to sell the washing machine.
There is no incentive to be any better than that. When the average washing machine lives long enough that the majority of consumers will come back to their next purchase without feeling annoyed about software related issues. Extra frills that pushed them over the line into purchasing a particular model didn't quite work out how they hoped, the iPhone app didn't get updates and looks bad on their new phone, etc ... these things wont factor into their next purchase. It's a psychological time horizon thing, enough water passes under the bridge and the customer stopped caring long enough ago.
So as long as it was otherwise a solid washing machine that didn't have mechanical issues mechanically or wash poorly they aren't likely to hold the manufacturer to account for their poor software quality breaking the "nice to haves".
Not require me to have to go up and down the stairs about 5-10 times to see how it's getting on, and then switch to dry, then check on its progress, etc.
The timer has a mind of its own (i.e. it displays an estimate of when it thinks it's going to be finished), and the option to automatically start drying after finishing the wash cycle is either not present or extremely well obfuscated (The model that shows up on Google definitely has the option on the rotary encoder, the one I have has no such option).
The key thing to remember is that any recurring subscription costs us theoretically infinite money (given infinite time). Obviously we won't have that subscription forever, so it's up to us to calculate how much it will cost us over the next month, year, decade.
Any time someone says "Just $N per month!" all I hear is "costs infinite money unless I do something about that." This thought really helps me resist leaking money like that.