Appliance repair man here. You can turn the screen off from a cover you remove from the top of the fridge door. Do so. You don't need a fucking android tablet on your fridge.
Also don't buy these kinds of appliances. They're terrible!
this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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Yeah man, I'll take my 1990's ass GE fridge I got for free over one of these any day.
It's a significantly better fridge in every way a lot of my clients have a really hard time understanding or believing that.
But it doesn't have stainless steel or French doors. I can't even talk to Alexa on it. It's just like, a fridge. Who wants that?
Are there any brands that are total shite these days? We are gonna have to replace our crappy Samsung fridge from 2013 soon.
Bosch makes a few descent models.
Things to skip on all brands.
External water & ice dispensers, doesnt matter the brand. You're cutting a fucking hole in the thermal envelope to put a faulty device that's experiencing mechanical stress on parts every time you open/close the door. It's not a matter of if it will fail, but when. Also, increased operational cost. Internal water dispensers and automatic ice makers are always the better option if you want those features.
Smart features. Why the fuck do you need smart features on a fridge? Even if it's using AI vision to scan for inventory... Just no, fucking no. That's more personal data on you to be bought, sold, data breached, and utilized to fuck you somehow.
Fridges that split the freezer and fridge on a vertically.
Fridges that split the freezer and fridge on a vertically.
THIS. they call them french doors. Stay away from this bullshit. You don't need it.
No, French doors just means two doors that meet in the middle, usually just the fridge (which is up top) has it, and they're ok usually. Split vertically is called side by side, and they suck, can't even handle frozen pizza...
I remember helping my mom buy a fridge and the main thing was we wanted a good ice dispencer that wouldnt break, and the dude was like sorry dude doesnt exist they are all equally shitty, its always going to break, pick any
I just bought this one a couple months ago. It goes on sale frequently for $2K from Lowe's: https://www.lowes.com/pd/Frigidaire-Gallery-21-5-cu-ft-4-Door-Counter-depth-French-Door-Refrigerator-with-Ice-Maker-Smudge-proof-Stainless-Steel-ENERGY-STAR/5013313509
Pretty sure we got an RMA for the first unit as the door had a scratch and the compressor fan sounded high pitched. Got a next day replacement and no complaints on the second one. Was concerned about sqft as we were coming from a 25sqft but am surprisingly happy with this one.
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by the way the fridge cost 1800$
Fridge with ads should be 1/3 the price with free repairs
Sorry, the best I could do is increase the price by 20% and bombard you with 24/7 ads.
Also ad free refrigerators will be rapidly phased out
Also, these will break down more often and not be easy to repair
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Wait why the fuck would a fridge be connected to the internet?
Edit: where I come from we don't have unlimited internet plans so this would just be taking up expensive bandwidth and monthly quota.
I'm not defending this practice because it's remarkably awful but I will note that I have a router that lets me monitor the traffic that individual devices use and most smart devices like this actually use incredibly small amounts of bandwidth. Our smart water tank uses ~10 MB a month which is smaller than most images.
And yes I do think a smart water tank is valid because it can do shit like tell me when it thinks it's about to explode or leak or whatever and it can also like, be remote controlled, and it has a heat pump which is nice.
I'm also not against automation or making machines "smart" it's just that what companies are marketing nowadays is just mostly overpriced shit.
And by consuming bandwidth I didn't mean for the indented usage I was mostly talking about the ads which will probably be filled with unnecessary metadata, trackers, unnecessarily large CSS files (if it was web based) and maybe high quality images. All of these things I find completely unnecessary.
Also coming from a computer engineering background if I was living in a "smart households" I would probably want to set up my own firewall. And like I said while I like the idea of home automation I don't want a corporation to be able to control or access my appliances too.
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The whole selling points was to track fridge contents via cameras so that not only could you ‚see’ inside without having to open the door - theoretically saving electricity, using AI it was supposed to be able to track expiry dates, and suggest shopping lists in order to have full recipes.
Additionally it had all the usual „smart home” integrations on top of that.
But let’s be honest, the whole point was just to put in yet another screen that vendors could sell advertisements on, as well as track/sell personal information.
Recently I read an article about smart devices uploading and downloading over 1GB per day. I tried to find the article again but all I can find is stores selling smart fridges etc. Search engines are broken. I asked chatgpt, which was able to find articles. How fucked is this. Boring dystopia. Anyway, here are some sources.
https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/your-washing-machine-could-be-sending-37-gb-of-data-a-day
https://www.reddit.com/r/smarthome/s/F5ETernz6f
https://www.reddit.com/r/SmartThings/s/HY2E0uOBiH
In the following article they talk about devices sending up to 19MB per week, but only text (so again insane amounts of data considering it's only text).
https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/smart-appliances-and-privacy-a1186358482/
The following is about researchers finding lots of thirst party domains when analyzing IoT traffic from Smart devices.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.09848
The following is an academic paper on how even encrypted data isn't safe from Smart devices. Bit off topic, but still interesting.
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I have seen a video about this shit also being implemented in cars. You can drive down the highway, with your GPS on and a pop up ad appears out of the blue, blocking the screen, not really allowing you to get rid of it before you remove your attention from the road to the screen, trying to figure out what button to push to get rid of the ad.
And the fact that people pay extra for cars and fridges to show them ads is just so friggin stupid. If people buy these products after knowing that they pay extra to be bombarded with ads, its 100% on them.
But in the case of the car, I do feel that shit should be illegal. It's so fucking dangerous and irresponsible from the manufacturer to implement a "feature" that can cost lives.
Don't worry, the fridge ones'll have ads for kids soon, with a candy-coated Buy Now button. Go-o-o *society!*🥳
Atwood's a gawdamn fortune teller
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Oh no, who could have ever seen that coming?
Now wait for the subscription service to get rid of ads on the fridge you bought and "own". Oh, and that neat thing they do with cars now where you have to subscribe to get certain feature? That's also next. "Only ~~5$~~ ~~10$~~ 20$ per month to keep your fridge cool enough so the milk won't spoil! It's not a normal function of the fridge, it's our super special anti-bacterial option that costs extra.
Black Mirror season 7 (I think) has an episode about this. Surgery to fix a part of brain (not cheap) installing a chip. And after some time pay a subscription to get rid of ads. And subscription gets more expensive over time.
Aggressively American
By 2030 everyone's kitchen will look like fucking Times Square
The stairs to your basement will look like the London Underground. We're going down the fucking tube... literally and metaphorically
Only the poors will have this. Your land Lord is going to go for the cheapest option which will probably have a screen you don't want with sound you can't mute.
People buying subzero or other luxury brands will be fine though.
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Why on earth would anybody buy a fridge with a screen? Why does everything have to be screens? Why is it all one big mobile phone nowadays? Can't we just not be staring gormlessly into a flashing screen for two fucking seconds for a fucking change?????????? I just got back inside from a run and now I'm going outside again for a walk in the dark and the rain because there is an entire world out there that isn't an algorithmically driven advertising funnel trying to shove more bullshit down our eager eyes, ears, and throats.
Although, while I'm on the subject, the outside world is fucking chock full of ads. I've heard it's relatively trivial to open those advertising windows on bus stops - does anybody know if it would be illegal to open one up and simply place a large black sheet of paper or something in there to cover up the ads? Not damage the ads or remove (i.e. steal) them, but just cover them up to give ourselves and our communities a break from the relentless marketers in our midst?
We deserve not have to our senses monetised and weaponised by perverts who cum themselves dry over CTRs, CLVs, CPCs, SEO, Brand Loyalty, Funnels, and Strategies, Local SEO, whatever else. We deserve to be able to look in any direction when we're outside and for five minutes not have some massive gaudy advert designed by a bellend pushed into view.
And as for fucking User Personas? I've got a User Persona for you, you sick advertising creeps. It's my fucking ballsack.
I can see a screen though, if only the consumer had control over it and it were modifiable
Think about the traditional calendar on the fridge - why not update that to digital? It could be a visible central place for lists or white board or notes. Maybe home status notifications or personal locations like the Weasley clock in Harry Potter? But there are so many reasons for this to be a nonstarter from the manufacturer. Just no.
What they should be doing is a modular set of hooks or brackets so you can choose to securely mount items of your choice. Such as a screen you control and can replace when it breaks
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So, if I bought this at Costco, and the fridge was 10 years old, I'd use their guarantee to return the motherfucker and make a ~~huge~~ epic fucking scene if they tried to refuse.
edit: huge wasn't enough, it would be epic.
"Feed me!"
bootstrapping problem if you need to drink your Mountain Dew(tm) verification can before you can open the door.
Gotta keep some warm ones outside the fridge just for this situation. It only takes a couple of warm Mountain Dew's to get people back in line.
Buy my ad blocking tape. 0.5 meters only $19.99
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