LG to offer subscriptions for already purchased appliances and televisions, evolving into a provider for “Home as a Service”

There’s only one way I’d be OK with “subscribing” to use a LG fridge: I don’t pay anything upfront and I don’t need to pay for any repairs. If I don’t even get to own it, then I shouldn’t be responsible for fixing it when it dies and spoils all my food after a year or two, nor should I need to pay for a new fridge when I give up on it after those repairs inevitably fail again. Same with their TVs when the cheap capacitors die early.

If I subscribe to rent your product, the onus is on you to make it reliable enough that it lasts until the subscription turns a profit.

Since that won’t be their business model, I’m better off buying a half decent brand and then flushing $1000 down the toilet. Fuck LG appliances. (And fuck Samsung appliances while we’re here.)

LG can go fuck off.

Love how these corporate executives these days can only use tricks to increase their profits rather than building better, more reliable products which gain more customers through hard work.

I bought a $3k+ LG OLED. I intentionally never agreed to any TOS so that it would act as a dumb TV. I wanted it on the network so that I could control it through Home Assistant and Apple HomeKit so I put it in my IoT VLAN. Within a day it was trying to port scan my network! It is now fully isolated with no outgoing connections allowed.

This thing with subscriptions has become insane. You can easily spend several hundred a month getting roped into all the subscriptions companies are pushing. It's the latest way to squeeze as much money as possible out of the consumer.

I've gone into subscription boycott at this point. I had too many and said screw that. I still have Amazon Prime where I think I get my money's worth. I shop there a lot and use their streaming so it's worth it to me. Subscriptions for appliances? No way in hell.

Open your fridge once per day before the door locks with our SmartHome Basic tier. You can enjoy up to five door openings per day with SmartHome Premium, or choose SmartHome Ultimate for unlimited door openings, ability to adjust the temperature AND the light turning on automatically when you open the door! Act now to get a 10% discount for the first three months!

Sigh. Our latest TV is an LG precisely because LG did not have ads in its OS whereas its main competitors do. Once they introduce ads, they'll have completely lost me as a potential repeat customer.

Guess our next TV will just be a large monitor, with no "smart" shenanigans whatsoever.

where are those ukrainian crackers that made custom flash for john deere tractors, we're gonna need them

Enshittification is not just for social media platforms.

Home as a Service

This has triggered a Fight AND Flight response in my brain. I want to smash everything with a mallet then run to the mountains.
I hate "as a Service" so much!

Commenting from an LG phone (last one produced) next to an LG tv. Will never purchase another one of their products in my life, even before this article.

After seeing this post and the article, I just blocked my LG C1 from WAN at my router. LAN still available for automation purposes, but fuck letting that thing out to the internet now. Funny enough, it turns on faster, and no more notification splash at the bottom. Nice.

Mark my words we are soon going to have to subscribe to our toilets. You get one flush a day for free. Save money by subscribing to the flush-lite which gives you 2 additional flushes. If you choose not to subscribe, you will be charged 2.99 for each flush beyond the first one.

For just a low low price of $15.99/month you can use the freezer functionality to keep things really cold! Or, you can use our free ad tier where the freezer only unlocks after you watch a 60 second ad.

This is fucking dystopian...

So I can’t do the wash without buying a subscription for it to play Sirius XM? Like wtf is going on. This corpo greed shit has to stop. I hope every single union walks out of the job with these actors and writers. We need to bring power back to the worker a bit.

in 2022 it revealed a scheme called “Evolving Appliances For You" that promised software upgrades to home appliances. The company offered the example of a family that moves to a different home, and different climate, and upgrades its clothes drier with routines suited to local conditions.

This is fucking hilarious. Nobody, and I really do mean nobody, actually wants a dryer that you need to pay a subscription fee for just in case one day you move house so it can try to reconfigure itself.

This and this article might be a little more concise.

It sounds like more ads for smart tvs, and a subscription service for extra features for smart appliances - like a chatbot for your fridge or dishwasher or something.

It doesn't necessarily sound evil to me it just sounds completely removed. I'm all about tech making life easier but it's genuinely hard to imagine why I would want a smart dishwasher. I want a dumbass dishwasher who's actions are solely determined by the 3 buttons on it.

It will be interesting to see how the market responds to this. It's hard to imagine that really anyone will be seduced by the idea of a "smart" home with these sorts of intangible benefits.

This is fucking ridiculous! Do you have to buy a subscription in order to use the appliance? If so, it seems to me that this would constitute unfair trade practice. Some shit just does not belong on the internet. Can you imagine the serious and life threatening situation that could develop, if say, somebody hacked into a system and turned gas stoves on and a fire developed? No, it's time to draw the line at IoT!

Hard pass

If you're not paying for it you are the product...wait if you are paying for it you are the product.

I used to like LG products they were often really good quality and lasted a long time.

That's pretty much over now, not touching new LG products anymore. That's for sure!

I had an LG CRT and it was as old as me. Never died. It's a real shame the planet is suffering because of greedy business practices. They put climate change on the consumer but more needs to be done to big corporations to punish this kind of behaviour.

This is why I like dumb products. The smarter they are the more they tac on this kind of crap to them.

Their gadgets built their fame because they just worked and were built like a tank. My grandparents had their stuff (from Goldstar era) and they still keep chugging.

None of this "as a service" bs will please the lifetime customers.

I can only say !fucksubscriptions@lemmy.world

this change will solidify that I will never buy an LG product if they all have that shit

Who asked for that?

I have an LG monitor, but never again. This is absurd. If money is all they understand then I hope they have a rude awakening on account of this.

Great. Gonna have to get rid of my LG oled now huh?

Just vote with your wallets people. There are others that don't do this and nothing will turn them around after huge drop in sales. Remember when HP wanted to prevent people from recycling their toner. They had to reverse that decision. Or when Canon decided that your printer must be always online and then they had to teach people how to break their own printers. Lessons learned.

FOAAS (Fuck off as a service)

I dread replacing my 15 year old TV, i need dem SCARTS

Might as well just rent a house. lol

devolving

This little tidbit is left out:

In order to use LG's smart appliance features you must agree to allow the company to track your precise location 100% of the time via phone app.

I have 2 wifi enabled LG appliances, a refrigerator and a washer. A couple of the smart features are useful such as the end of cycle notification on the washer and a high temperature / door open warning on the fridge. Unfortunately those features don't work very well and there can be very long delays between an event (such as an end of cycle) and the app notification.

So not only is LG's implementation poorly done and not very functional, customers are expected to give up any semblance of privacy to even use them.

Fuck that. I disconnected my appliances from wifi and deleted the app.

Paying a monthly charge for the extremely limited smart features on appliances is nuts, even if you didn't have to allow LG to constantly track your whereabouts. I hope the general public is smart enough to make LG's subscription service a complete failure.

Is LG the same brand as the printer that stopped working without a subscription? I saw it recently on Lemmy, can't remember if it was LG or maybe HP or something...

it's a shame most people just don't care, this has been slowly consuming and devouring every single service online and recently offline for the past decade

My LG TV from 2017 that's not getting any updates anymore feels great this time of the year :D

Already was off LG products, now I am again!

*Hugs my old ass Samsung 40" TV

LG PowerPoint:

Problem: People buy our TVs

Real problem: People pay only once for our TVs

Solution: Make them pay money each month for their already purchased TVs

Psychopaths