Has anyone actually used those smart fridges?

I bought one and it just tells me I

Haven't tried one yet but I keep seeing them in stores. Worth it or just a

I have one of the Family Hub models from 2019 and honestly I use it for exactly two things that matter and everything else is just theater, which is what smart home tech tends to be when you dig past the glossy marketing—the screen on the door is great for writing down a quick shopping list while you're literally standing in front of an open fridge and bad at multitasking otherwise but the camera feature is useless because I already know my milk hasn't expired, it just tells me things I can see with my own eyes. There was this time last summer when my brother visited from Denver and he kept trying to get me to use the voice interface for recipes which was hilarious because the only thing that fridge has ever successfully done via voice command is play jazz music at 2 a m. And it made me think of this one birthday party I went to about six years ago where everyone brought these elaborate gift baskets with bottle openers and coasters and there were about four people there who actually used them, which was ridiculous because nobody had any bottles open except the host's uncle who just wanted a beer. That whole night is burned into my brain for no reason at all but it always comes back when I see gadgets marketed as essential — the marketing makes you feel like your life would be fundamentally broken without this specific piece of hardware and in reality it just adds one more surface to wipe down on a Saturday morning, which is what most smart appliances boil down to. Anyway yes get the fridge if you want a screen for handwritten notes but skip anything that costs extra money for software features nobody uses.

My cousin had one and it was basically just a very expensive screen for his beer inventory, which is fine if you're into that kind of thing but honestly I think the whole smart appliance movement has been overhyped to sell hardware nobody needs because why on earth would I want my refrigerator to send me notifications about its internal temperature when I can just open the door and see whether it's cold or not, which is what fridges have done for eighty years without issue. That reminds me of this time in college when we had a mini-fridge that apparently became sentient because every night around 3 AM someone would hear something moving inside and my roommate swore there was an alien civilization developing in the crisper drawer, and honestly I'm not entirely opposed to the idea right now given how absurd everything else feels. Anyway the smart fridge has a camera so you can see what's inside while at the store which sounds useful until you realize your milk is probably expired because no one cleans out their fridge properly and the screen just shows you an organized digital version of chaos, plus the price point means you could buy like five regular fridges instead, or a very nice vacation, or anything else that doesn't involve Bluetooth connectivity in your kitchen.

Not really worth it tbh

They're fine for what they do but I wouldn't call them revolutionary and honestly my experience with them has been pretty mixed — the touchscreen freezes constantly, the camera inside is glitchy and half the time it shows me a blurry image of an avocado from three days ago instead of what's actually in there right now which defeats the whole purpose of remote checking. My brother got one last year for his bachelor apartment and he hated it within a week because the software updates kept breaking the water dispenser and then he had to call tech support every time he wanted a glass of cold water on a Saturday night when nobody was working, which is ridiculous. He eventually just put up paper notes on the door with what needed eating before expiring which is basically how my mother has managed her kitchen for forty years without any help from Silicon Valley and honestly it's probably more reliable in the long run because technology ages faster than appliances do and you don't want to be married to a firmware update schedule just to open your refrigerator. That reminds me of this time back in college when I bought an early generation smart speaker and it used to misinterpret my voice commands so badly that one night at 3 AM it started reading aloud the entire Wikipedia page for 'Anxiety Disorders' while I was trying to sleep because I had said something about feeling stressed about a midterm, which is still hilarious to look back on but also kind of traumatizing in a way. Anyway point is don't spend two thousand dollars on an appliance that has its own personality and your fridge shouldn't have one it should just keep food cold which is what refrigerators were designed for in the first place before people started trying to make them do things they weren't meant to do, like display photos of your grandkids or sync with a calendar you can't actually read on that tiny screen anyway.

Not been through with one yet but my brother got his and says it's cool for the inventory list but he does complain about the glare in a dark kitchen lol

Honestly I'm skeptical too — what exactly does the screen do that my fridge can't already manage and why would anyone pay a thousand dollars extra for it, but then you think about the inventory tracking feature which sounds fine on paper until you realize the camera just shows you eggs in low light at 2 AM. My brother got one last summer because he was obsessed with this idea of efficiency and I went over there to visit and spent forty minutes watching him stare at a picture of half an avocado that had already gone bad three days ago, which is probably exactly what people spend their time doing — the marketing makes it sound like you'll never waste food again but in reality you just have a high-resolution record of your failure to eat things before they decompose. The user interface on those models looks atrocious too if you actually see any photos -- all grey buttons and a font that feels aggressively corporate, which is kind of funny because the refrigerator is arguably the most mundane appliance in existence so why does it need to look like it was designed by someone at Meta? I'd rather just write my groceries down on a piece of paper. My grandmother had this system for forty years and she never wasted anything -- you know how she used to put every leftover into jars lined up alphabetically in the cupboard, which is basically an analog version of what smart fridges are trying to do but it worked because people actually engaged with it instead of letting technology create a new form of procrastination.