These turn of phrases make me wonder what we are really expecting from software.

I can’t imagine you never slapped the door of your fridge and it didn’t properly close. You gave it a nudge when you realized it, and it was fine, but it must have happened. And your whole food supply would be rotten if you didn’t notice in time.

Or do we monitor energy consumption close enough to realize it’s eating much more than what should be expected, the same way people complain about chrome eating too much memory ?

It can also get pretty noisy but I’d assume most people just think it’s normal.

And we put the blame on ourselves for a lot of issues (didn’t put the bottle at the right place, didn’t put the right amount of force to close, didn’t set the right temperature, forget to leave space around the fridge for ventilation etc.). But few users blame themselves for not having understood the software and worked around its weakness, we just call it broken.

That benavior is normal, but I’d take a lot of “my applicances just work” with a grain of salt.

But if the fridge was software it would randomly turn off and ruin all your food. The light would sometimes stay on, except when you open the door. It would require you to decline an update before you could get the milk out for breakfast. During an update the fridge and freezer components would switch places and then give tips about efficient ways you could manually move everything. If you bought a new fridge, part of it would locked shut until you paid more money, but the one in the store was already unlocked. And god forbid you lose your 2FA device used to setup the fridge -- it will destroy everything inside (including irreplaceable heirloom tomatoes) upon reset. It will then update to a subscription model where custom temperature settings will require a monthly fee or you'll be limited in the number of items you can store in the fridge or number of times you can open the door per day.

Fridges have been with us long enough in a ‘pay everything upfront’ setting that we‘d battle to the bitter end if we had to do micro-payments or aggressive planned obsolescence.

To your point, I lived in long stay apartments where you put coins to have the fridge and air conditioning work because they didn’t bother having pay as you leave metered use. That’s super rare (I hope ? I’d expect the same in some predatory situations towards low income people), but it’s to say that alternative exists.

Otherwise fridges randomly turning off is just a matter of time and/or build quality. Sooner or later it happens (or it stops turning on, which is arguably better, but you wouldn’t say it’s great)

I think blaming software for this is a little naive. Take a look at consumer reports for any modern fridge, stovetop/oven, washer/dryer, etc, and you will see complaints about fridge motors dying, touch panels going on the fritz, etc. -- none of which involve anything more than low level firmware.

If you want to put a tinfoil hat on, you can consider that it may be planned obsolescence, but to put the blame squarely on software, I would disagree with.

You don't need tin foil hat when facing the truth :).

Also, while things you mentioned aren't software-related, they're modern tech-related. Like, last 20 years. Fridge motors dry out because they're being made cheaper, with not enough lubricant put into them and no option of opening them up and pouring in the grease. Touch panels are going on the fritz because touch panels suck (that's often very much software), and they shouldn't be put on appliances in the first place. But it's cheaper, so they are.

Worth noting that there wasn't some big price reduction happening from solid appliances 20 years ago to crappy ones today. Price remained roughly fixed, but appliances started to suck more and more.

The big deal, at first, was really with memory. Your alarm clock could ring at the same time reliably. If you invested in a VCR, it could record at a programmed time. If you had a synthesizer it could store and recall exact preprogrammed patches. Pinball machines could downsize in weight and keep truly accurate scores instead of relying on tempermental relays and score reels. And so on, with every category of gadgets getting the computerization treatment. Although not everything succeeded there were lots of straightforward cost and quality improvements, with the main downside being that IC designs are less obviously repairable.

And then pretty much every year afterward, the push was towards cheaper with more software, with decreasing margins of real improvement, with the "smart" device representing an endpoint where the product is often price discounted because its networking capability lets it collect and sell data.

What comes to mind is the Rube Goldberg machines and their expression of a past era of exuberant invention, where physical machines were becoming increasingly intricate in ways not entirely practical. Our software is kind of like that.

Every other week I read about someone's entirely-too-roundabout way of doing X via an IoT device (requiring packets to probably circumnavigate the globe). Meanwhile I'm sitting here opening my garage door with a physically wired switch like a pleb.

I just checked my fridge, it has six buttons and an LCD panel, and in all my (4) years of home ownership, I haven't touched the buttons a single time.

First, the "solid appliances" weren't 20 years ago, but more like 25-30.

And though there wasn't a big price reduction in the interim:

- Refrigerators are more energy efficient.

- Refrigerators have larger internal volume for a given size.

Equivalent improvements have been made to other appliance types such as washers and dryers, but not stoves, as far as I know.

Those improvements are largely orthogonal to declining design and build quality, but it should be noted that there are at least some ways in which newer appliances have been getting better (that aren't just gimmicky features) while prices remained the same.

Conveniently, because macos is ass, it's nondeterministic whether the balance controls display in Sound Preferences to fix the balance issue. You just have to open and close the settings panel in the hopes that it will display.

I'm a software engineer and I don't even know where to begin to debug this idiocy.

Duolingo regularly freezes audio in chrome. Once this happens, no audio will play in chrome until you restart or kill "Utility: Audio Service" with the chrome task manager.

That blew my mind, my $20 Amazon-purchased Bluetooth earphones just work™ with no delay.

books work really well until a pipe bursts in your attic. then you wake up and notice half your collection has been ruined (personal experience).

Things are getting more complicated, like you say, but they frequently aren’t getting enough better to justify the added complexity, especially given all the issues that come along with it.