Smart sous vide cooker to start charging $2/month for 10-year-old companion app
“You’ve just lost a LONGTIME and very faithful customer."
MBAs are ruining the world.
Genuinely everything. It's like a whole program on just "how to find the newest worst way to be a human being".
It's 2024 and you need a subscription to make water hot.
Just end me.
You don't need it make water hot even. Just to have recipes and guides and other useless shit that loses its novelty after 3 minutes.
Great short story called Unauthorized Bread Abt that exact thing, it's a weirdly realistic look at what a dystopian corporate future would look like
Don't buy "smart" cloud-connected appliances, ever. Even if they don't start trying to charge for shit like this, eventually the service will go offline breaking the product. (should we call this forced obselescence, somewhat different from planned obsolescence?)
We need more buyer demand for "dumb" appliances. Vote with your wallet.
I've still got my old Anova, Bluetooth one. I don't even use the app ever, I can set it up with the wheel and buttons. Still works great after like 5+ years. That said, I won't be recommending them to anyone going forward.
I am all for smart appliances, as long as they are local and work with things like home assistant
But see, then the manufacturer can't charge you a monthly rent to use the product you already bought.
Absolutely it's great if local connectivity is an option, there just isn't really an incentive for manufacturers to prioritize that.
On top of that they spy on you and sell your data
Agreed! This is just the beginning, I'm convinced this was the plan all along for most smart devices. I will make an exception for products that can be conveniently operated when an account/app is optional at least.
I like it. I'm going to start calling it that now. Why are we tiptoing around their corporate feelings? They forcing these things to become obsolete in contravention of what is best for the consumer.
Or make sure you can hook it to something like home assistant without reliance on cloud…
I used to sous vide all the things but after seeing the report on microplastics in sous vide food…
Yea, good luck with this plan
Lol fuck, they're disabling Bluetooth too?
The most bastardly thing they could do, right? The explanation is that processing costs money, so wifi via cloud only bullshit is getting expensive. Also, we're disabling the only other viable alternative, effectively bricking all remote features intentionally. Why? Fuck you, that's why.
To be honest, I have a Bluetooth kettle and it's kinda pointless, it reliably works only when I'm in the same room, at that point I can just watch the temperature on the 7digit LED display
The process: I'm on the sofa/bed and I want to know if the kettle is done. I open the app and it's "connecting... Connecting...", the spinner spins for minutes until it times out. So I need to get up the lazy ass and go to the kitchen, try again the connection, it takes another 30 seconds. If I did it without the app I would have saved 3-4 minutes of rage. Because anyway it doesn't even allow remote start (for safety, I understand), just remote monitoring. Now I just set a timer on the phone and ignore the app connection
The app is rubbish & always has been so no real loss. But this, disabling a core hardware feature!? Dick move Anova, dick move…
these apps really don't offer a lot in the first place. I have an anova and only use it's dumb features. It beeps when its at temp, it beeps when its done cooking and it beeps if theres an error, so why would I need notifications? and cooking guides are largely pointless because the process is always the same; heat water, vacuum seal food, put food in water, wait. I don't need another app harvesting my data, even if that data is just "eats perfectly cooked meat on occassion"
Not a lot of need for the app. But it's horse crap they're ALSO removing Bluetooth.
As someone who owns a bunch of their products I'm bummed that it's another company to not buy from anymore. It's like every good product gets ruined by a greedy CEO
Hot take: this is why Android > iOS. When an app developer removes offline features you just manually install an old APK and you're done 👍
"But you can sideload apps and manually renew the self signed certificate every week on iOS too" - is going to be the reply to this post. Sure, because renewing the certificate every week from my Mac is so convenient (it can't be done from the iPhone itself - unless you configure a VPN to use someone else's computer and give them your credentials)
The subscription fee will only apply to people who make an account after August 21. Those who downloaded the app and made an account before August 21 won't have to pay. But everyone will have to make an account; some people have been using the app without one until now.
Welp, time to buy a completely different sous vide cooker
companion app for 10 year olds
in no way related to the sous vide cooker
