• Gork@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    My spouse worked a bit in the appliance repair sector. A lot of the upper tier appliances share a lot of their internals with the lower tier cheaper models. You can easily see this for yourself by looking up maintenance manuals for expensive and cheaper models, many of the PCBs and spare parts are identical as it makes their supply chain easier.

    Sure, one may have a fancy LCD screen and a GUI, but why pay a premium for it when it washes your clothes with the same motor model as the cheap one?

    The entire WiFi feature set seems like something that appliance makers thought that consumers would appreciate, but I personally don’t see the use. If I’m standing in front of a dishwasher, I have to manually unload and load it so it’s pointless for me to start it with my phone when I’m literally standing in front of it.

    • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 months ago

      Yea the remote start on all of these seem weird to me. The only use case I can think of is if you’re leaving for an hour and want the dryer stuff to be done and warm exactly when you get home. But even then you shouldn’t run those appliances when the house is empty and leaving wet cloth In a confined area isn’t great either since it can stink them up.

      • If these appliances didn’t phone home, I’d probably use the wireless. I do have most things in the house hooked up to Home Assistant (all z-wave, all local), and it’d be nice (if not adding much practical value) to have appliances represented. For example, when the washing machine is done, it “sings us the song of its people,” a small operetta of which we’re both sick. Turn that off, and we can’t tell when its done and time to swap it out. It’d be a little nice to be able to hook that into HA and fully control notifications.

        The irony is that, even if I did enable the wireless, it’s only through a shitty bespoke LG app, and I’d still not be able to connect it to HA.

        But, yeah… the only thing I care about remote starting is the slow cooker, but not enough to give LG that telemetry.

        • Lem Jukes@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          100% same. Honestly if someone figured out a way to cost effectively make a retrofit kit you could wire into cheaper/simpler/older machines and then tie it all together in something like HomeKit, I would jump on it.