> Seriously your response showed such a lack of thinking of real world situations and usage I can only assume you work for the Google UI team or something

Laughed out loud. This is gold.

LOL'd as well, which caused my 1.5 year old to laugh; He gets it. Every time I use the Google Cloud Platform web UI I feel like someone is reaching through the monitor to slap me upside the head for not doing Infrastructure as Code.

My dumb LG freezer plays a “ping ping ping” tune whenever the door is not properly closed after a few seconds. No need to send a smartphone notification!

If you're home or not upstairs asleep I guess it's sufficient

And what do you do if you are not home?

So the fridge just opened itself?

Ok, I’ll bite. What do you do? Your phone has just told you the fridge door is open. Now what? You aren’t at home, so you can’t close it.

We did lose a fridge full of food once. On our way out for the weekend, my wife opened the freezer to grab ice to pack the cooler. She left the freezer door slightly ajar and grabbed the cooler and threw it in the car and we left.

We came home on Sunday to the fridge and freezer completely ambient temp and had to toss everything.

If we had a mobile alert on our phone, we could have turned around and closed it just fine, or asked our neighbor to.

Some people have family or close friends who have copies of our keys to deal with just such a scenario (or to water our plants when we're away on a longer holiday).

Friends and neighbours? Turn around? My wife works 15 minutes drive from home?

It's a lot more common that you didn't close it properly Just Now (and haven't gotten very far, and are maybe still in earshot) then the door spontaneously opening, especially with the slight negative pressure and magnetic gaskets.

(of course, where they're really useful is as office fridges, when the perpetrator wanders off oblivious but someone else gets driven mad by the just-barely-audible-beeping and hunts it down...)

Yes? But that still isn't a case for saying avoid it... I didn't say it was earth shattering life changing feature... if it has it, it's "handy". Not something that would make me buy it but useful if it does.

Doesn’t a beep from the fridge suffice? That’s an old solution that’s existed for a very long time.

If you're home or not upstairs asleep it's sufficient... it's not a feature that would make me choose the fridge but it's handy when it has it.

At least you apologised in advance <3

You make the perfect argument for a physical alarm. I agree, that makes perfect sense, and is a cheap addition that significantly improves quality of life.

Will you be woken up by a midnight phone notification that the fridge is open? I tend to sleep stuff like that.

Does a once in 40 years mistake justify carrying an app around that does god knows what else, and the extra expense and hassle of a fridge that might or might not spy on you?

Do we need to therefore instrument our stoves, ovens, baths and basins to insulate ourselves from the other common domestic nightmare scenarios?

Also, you talk about intruder alarms? I thought we were talking about "smart" wifi connected fridges? That's a completely different scenario, and I fully agree with you. I pay a security company to monitor my alarm, and they visit my house within 5 minutes of the alarm triggering. But my fridge can stay as dumb as it gets, thanks. Literally the only thing its allowed to do is go brrr.

>Does a once in 40 years mistake justify carrying an app around that does god knows what else, and the extra expense and hassle of a fridge that might or might not spy on you?

>Do we need to therefore instrument our stoves, ovens, baths and basins to insulate ourselves from the other common domestic nightmare scenarios?

Exactly. There are a lot of things that could go wrong in daily life.

Let's say you are sleeping and one of the bed slats bends or breaks (this has actually happened to me). It's messy, especially because you wake up and putting the bed slat back is not easy. So what do you do? You either ignore the fact it may happen, or you say "well if it does happen, I guess I'll sleep on the couch or something". No one that I know, even among the most "smart home" obsessed people, has a bed which automatically beeps or sends a push notification if the slats are about to break.

Ok, now you wake up and nothing bad happened so far. You have breakfast (maybe you have a smart fridge which ensures you're not running out of yogurt or whatever). Then you go dress yourself. But then you realize your favorite shirt has a stain you didn't notice. Do you have a drawer that automatically beeps if your clothes have stains? Probably not. You either remember to watch closely your clothes and wash them properly, or say "whatever, I'll go with something else and I'll wash that later".

And so on. Life is full of minor inconveniences. That doesn't mean you should necessarily fill your life with sensors and beepers for every possible scenario. I might be getting too philosophical, but part of life is also becoming aware that things happen and you can't always be 100% safe in any possible scenario.

And since you can't always be 100% safe in any possible scenario, NFPA, airbags, seatbelts, and the EPA are just ludicrous extravagances conceived by fools who don't understand the inevitability of death?

No but the impact (in terms of risk assessment) of a car crash is much worse than the impact of "hey, I forgot to completely close the fridge door"

There's a similar differencen in impact between picking up a second shirt in the morning and $100+ of food spoiling, but that didn't seem to bother you.

$100 of food spoiling in a decade vs picking up a second shirt maybe every month. They are different, but not that much.

And you're ignoring the first example about falling from your bed which, if things go wrong, can cause bone fractures which, especially in the US, could cost a lot more than $100.

My point about the alarm is that I have neighbours or friends who are willing to pop around and sort shit out.

People are taking this waaaayyyy out of context. I said it was handy. I didn't say it was a must feature or even one that make me choose a particular model or pay more for. But the fact my current fridge/freezer does it is a nice handy extra... I already have a billion things that spy on me, gather data so no I'm not particularly worried about what my fridge knows about me, the cameras all over the country I cannot avoid know far more already.

The number of times my fridge door has popped open (yes it has happened to me as well) is not worth making it a smart appliance that talks to the internet. It plays a physical alarm. That's it.

It's not the end of the world if some stuff inside goes bad. Again, not worth making it talk to the internet.

I too really have no idea how to reply to this without sounding like an ass so apologies in advance.

Well, our parents, and for the younger, our grandparents too, and us, have managed to do fine for like 60+ years of using fridges without an fridge door alarm.

Fun fact: for an alarm for when you are away for days, and you want to know if the fridge power went off and back on in between, you can freeze a jar of water in your freezer, put a coin on top, and leave it there.

If you find the coin in the bottom of the jar at some point, the fridge power/temperature has been off for a while.

They did fine for many years without mobile phones, cars, aircraft and computers... your point is irrelevant. It's just a handy extra to have I really don't see why people find my phone pinging me if the door is left open so offensive :-D

>They did fine for many years without mobile phones, cars, aircraft and computers... your point is irrelevant.

Nah, rather it's the comparison that is off.

Without cars, for example, transportation was slow and constrainted, affecting commerce, work, and lots of other things. Whether good or bad (since there are negatives too) the introduction of the car was a huge change.

Network connected fridges? The incovenience they solve is so rare and small that most people don't give a damn about, not to mention the incovenience from their assorted crappy controls, the privacy issues, and other such factors, can be even higher and more constant.

Might as well compare the invention of fire with the Shake Weight.

And without open door alarms, food would sometimes get spoiled and cause waste.

Why are you fighting the guy over this feature? Everybody here is in agreement that network-connected fridges are not particularly useful but you're trying to make a point about open door alarms.

>Why are you fighting the guy over this feature?

I'm not fighting anybody. I'm stating my opinion, which happens to be different than his. Isn't this the purpose of a forum?

>Everybody here is in agreement that network-connected fridges are not particularly useful but you're trying to make a point about open door alarms.

The context here is the fridge sending you online messages about the open door.

Base open door alarm is just an annoying beeper that goes on some 30-45 seconds into the door being opened.

Today, we call such tricks "life hacks". For when the defaults don't work well enough, even if they probably should. This is indeed a cool life hack. But it kind of feels like something that should've been built into the goddamn fridge.