hckrnws

Someone on reddit [0] mentioned that they updated their device via USB and hadn't encountered any issues. If that's true, then it might actually have been the previous firmware update that silently bricked the device. Or maybe Samsung only test in a controlled lab environment without real world signal interference.

In any case, it's mind boggling how a multi billion dollar company lacks proper rollout strategies.

I have a pair of Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones, and their app constantly tells me to install the latest firmware update. After the 20th time I finally agreed - only to be met with the update instructions: I must perform the update in a place with no other bluetooth or wifi devices.

Where on earth would I even have to go to find a place without there being any 2.4Ghz signal interference?

I've never been more careful when pressing “Cancel,” making sure I don't accidentally tap “Agree and Continue”.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Soundbars/comments/1jb1ymp/comment/...

> Where on earth would I even have to go to find a place without there being any 2.4Ghz signal interference?

Unironic answer: most airports. Even small ones will have avionics shops, those avionics shops will have to test Emergency Locator Beacons, and those beacon signals are not meant to escape to the outside world during testing.

Thus, most have Faraday rooms, cages, or just small (2-3 cubic feet) boxes to block signals. I used to work for one of those teeny-tiny companies. Would not recommend working in aviation. That said, knocking on the door and offering to come back with doughnuts if they can help you out when it's not crazy busy, feels like less an insane idea than I'd have expected previously.

Sure there are places. But if you're an average consumer I doubt that you would be thrilled to book a gateway room to update your device...

> Would not recommend working in aviation

Why not?

Low pay. High stress. High responsibility. You can't report a lot of health problems(anything mental health will get your license taken away).

Aviation is expensive and shitty. The FAA is a garbage organization that covers it's own ass first.

Agreed to everything in the first paragraph - second isn't something I can speak to as a Canadian. Came back to say you forgot the boom-bust cycle and the constant layoffs that come with it. Would like to reiterate on the stress and (corresponding) responsibility too, with again, the low pay not helping.

Can't say how glad I am to be out of aviation. I will say that it can play well on dating apps though - it can be dressed up to look very nice

I also have a pair of XM4s. I installed the app briefly when I first got them so I could turn off the voice notifications on connection/mode change, and then immediately uninstalled it and have never needed it again. Why on earth would I want to update the firmware on my perfectly working headphones?

* Resolves Bluetooth security issues (17 October 2024)

* Enhances the security features of the system software

* Improves Bluetooth connection stability

* Improves the hands-free calling quality

* Fixes an issue where the headphones cannot be paired on a Windows computer

* Fixes an issue where, when there are 2 Bluetooth devices connected at the same time, the connected devices repeatedly disconnect and reconnect

* Improves general performance of the headphones

Only 5th and 6th to be believed. Every time a manufacturer says vague descriptions like "security" or "performance" fixes, be wary - they probably removing perfectly working functionality for "reasons".

If it was something that really added value to the user they would mention it specifically (like on the 5th and 6th items).

I have a Dell laptop that mentioned such vague "improvements". After updating the firmware I couldn't undervolt anymore. Luckily I was able to downgrade.

> Every time a manufacturer says vague descriptions like "security" or "performance" fixes, be wary - they probably removing perfectly working functionality for "reasons"

I have a pair of WF-1000XM3s and this is painfully true. ANC was brilliant on these until I naively updated, and whoosh - instantly and grossly degraded ANC, to the point I previously almost didn't hear people talking at distance, keyboard chatter, city traffic etc. and now I do, no matter the app settings.

I wanted to upgrade to the in-ear XM4s, but after this? NEVER again Sony. At least for portable audio. I got instead a pair of cheap QCY HT07s (then $28, now ~$20) and got quite surprised with ANC performance on these: easily beats the crap of the XM3s-on-latest-firmware, and gets close to the previous one in audio quality. Which is a lot to say about Sony "updates".

updates are malware

Actual answer: better ANC. ANC algorithm improvements are one of the more common items I've seen in headphone firmware changelogs. Also, Bluetooth upgrades. I can't remember which, but one of my pairs of headphones gained multipoint support a year or so after release via a software update.

Or worse ANC.

On the Bose 700 headphones there was quite a bit of controversy after many users reported the ANC performance getting worse after an update. This was a few years after the headphones were released, so there were theories of it being intentional degradation to get people to upgrade.

Personally I didn't notice any difference. Bose denied any wrongdoing and seemed to spend real effort on investigating the customer complains.

What if they release a firmware update that ads “immersive advertisements” to your audio? I’d hate to miss out on that.

"Want a break from the ads?"

Because a version 1.0 of anything predates power management bugs fixed in 1.28, massive connection improvement in 1.33, basic compatibility fix in 1.57, whole load of problems added in 2.00.00 and binary signature enforcement added at some point(not real world examples).

By the way, Sony wearable products make use of their proprietary NN inference library called Nnabla, with a free helper GUI app Neural Network Console for Windows that can export low-code code into Spresense board codes. It is apparently used across the brand for tiny and transparent features like on-head detection through accelerometers. Not super related, but just so you know...

The firmware update does fix/cause battery issues depends on your batch. The wf-1000xm4 changed the battery model(thus voltage) it's using. And update the firmware to match the new battery model. However the new firmware did not handle different type of battery correctly. And damaged quite a few devices with incorrect voltage setting. (Some devices are also preload with these incorrect config) There is a firmware update to correct this setting problem.

How is the audio compression codec[0] negotiated between the phone and the headphones over Bluetooth? IIRC, Sony supports higher quality codes outside of the standard BT required ones. Is the app required for that negotiation or is it all in the operating system now?

[0] There is no lossless high quality audio over BT, only a bunch of lossy codecs.

IIRC, the app isn't actively involved in bluetooth audio negotiations, but it does allow you to change settings within the headphones around what codecs it will advertise support for and prefer to use. Those settings have reasonable defaults and any changes you make persist on the headphones even if you uninstall the app.

The app enables other features like changing EQs, etc.

Yeah, I'm not sure why I'd want that on my headphones themselves. I just set it to a neutral EQ during initial setup, and now I change the EQs elsewhere in the audio pipeline (music app, mixer, etc) just like we were all doing before the advent of headphones with their own apps.

None of my headphones have firmware to update. They connect with copper (8000BCE) wires (1830CE) to a 3.5mm jack (1950CE) based on a 1/4" phone plug (1890CE). Some of them use neodymium (1885CE) magnets.

If I want equalization or convolution I apply them upstream shortly after decoding.

The EQ settings should depend on what you device you are using to listen - your headphones or your phone's internal speaker - according to their natural response curves.

I don't think major music listening apps will switch your EQ automatically settings based on your listening device. So either you are doing that manually every time you switch devices, or you set your headphone EQ directly.

In any case, the software around this is not clean, and has lots of room for improvement.

I use EQ only to get speakers to a more baseline neutral response so it makes sense to set them on the device themselves.

I’ve had to set EQ on Bluetooth speakers themselves that didn’t sound so good out of the box.

Though at that point I rather throw away the speakers and get better ones…

My girlfriend had to wear a sleep monitoring device, and the instructions also had stuff to that effect. including putting all phones in airplane mode and unplug any assistant speaker things you might have. I assume the real purpose of this is to make you actually sleep. But they claimed it was to make the data collect properly...

It’s much more just typical manufacturer trying to avoid liability. It costs them nothing to say don’t do that, and if it cuts tech support costs by 1%.

The key is to call in and ask how to put your device in airplane mode ;)

I love when I last called my cell phone carrier and they asked me to try putting my phone in airplane mode. I said "wouldn't that disconnect the call?", they went "no it will not", and guess what happened when I turned on airplane mode.

they obviously knew that was going to happen and so did you. The correct response should have been "okay I am in airplane mode now what?"

yeah, I normally use that trick for other stuff, but I guess I was just especially gullible at that moment. If it really was just some ploy to get me off the line because they just didn't want to talk to me or something, well that's hilarious honestly, I wouldn't even be mad at them for that.

I think it's a ploy. I shared your comment with a friend who works in a call center and agents have been known to resort to shenanigans to get rid of a call (or just take a break). In her specific case they had a combined support/sales line where you get commission for sales but not for support, so if someone is just ranting at you about some issue you have no power to fix, you might be tempted to unplug your phone's Ethernet cable and re-roll for a new call that might be sales instead of support. Could easily be the same thing for cell phone providers, though this was a hotel chain.

The real reason is that Bluetooth is awful for data transmission and the bitrate absolutely plummets when there's crosstalk. I live in an older building with a ton of interference on the 2.4GHz band (WiFi, BT beacons, "smart" appliances) and updating any device over bluetooth is impossible.

The new models actually handle update much better. The update is way slower (requires about 1 hour) compare to old model. But it allows you to continue using it while update. (It probably rate limited itself?)

Perhaps you could stick the phone and earbuds in a (non-running) microwave. They keep 2.4GHz in just fine, and Faraday cages don't discriminate based on direction.

You might have to line the inner walls with something to prevent the signal from bouncing back? I'm not sure.

Where on earth would I even have to go to find a place without there being any 2.4Ghz signal interference?

Inside a microwave oven.

Actually doesn't work particularly well. I suspect signal reflections destroy the signal.

You get similar problems in other larger metal boxes, eg caravans. In a caravan, short high data rate packets are transmitted properly, but bigger packets get lost because they interfere with a reflection off an internal wall.

> In any case, it's mind boggling how a multi billion dollar company lacks proper rollout strategies.

Having worked for several billion-dollar companies, I can tell you it's very common. The extremely short answer to why is "silos on silos on silos on silos". Quite often, each team rolls things out however the hell they feel like. And the teams don't have very good people on them. It doesn't have to be this way, but the people at these companies simply don't give a shit about doing it in a better way. Bad leadership ensures it continues.

a faraday cage should do the trick

If the damage is actually as bad as it sounds, Samsung is probably talking with their lawyers and is being instructed to maintain radio silence so as to better prepare for the class-action lawsuit.

Luckily for them no one can listen to their radios now.

Up until this comment I assumed "Samsung Q990D" was a Quad level SSD

> so as to better prepare for the class-action lawsuit.

I 100% guarantee everyone who uses one of these was railroaded into mandatory arbitration.

AFAIK class action cases are cheaper for corporations than thousands of arbitrations.

This is true! Funnily enough, mandatory individual arbitration can and does backfire on companies: https://www.levernews.com/how-corporate-americas-favorite-le...

We need to ban mandatory arbitration

Wouldn’t radio silence increase damages to customers and result in increased liability?

Remember when Crowdstrike crashed half the computers on the planet for a full day? Well, if you do, you're one of the few, because people are still using Crowdstrike, and the stock is still doing well overall.

It’s still one of the best antimalwares on the planet.

Thank you for reminding me of the phrase "damning with faint praise"

That’s a phrase like “the most enjoyable cancers” or “the quietest seagulls”

The only one that has 100% protection rate: indeed you can't get any malware if you can't turn on your PC.

That's fair. In fact, you might say that for a competently set up fleet of computers, nothing beats it.

Which means, people don't care. Is this a sign of a cultural shift to the idea that sometimes things don't work and that's fine?

I'm guessing there are surveillance features (I don't know) and companies put up with it for that reason.

That's logical reasoning, not corporation reasoning.

Nobody involved in the decision making cares about the customers. They only care about the potential hit to the bottom line, and if that's perceived as callous silence, they don't care. Unless, of course, they decide that appearing to care and being responsive results in less of a hit.

Silences like these are strategic and dependably predictable - engaging with customers on average costs more than remaining silent for whatever metric they've applied to the fix. If it takes longer than they thought, they might feel compelled to speak out, or they could just depend on the issue to fade into the 24 hour news cycle. Engaging with a customer runs the risk of them interacting with some threshold of people that will keep the negative story in the headlines for longer than it might otherwise be.

> They only care about the potential hit to the bottom line, and if that's perceived as callous silence, they don't care.

I don't think that is true. I think people care a lot... just not about the consumers. People care about themselves - they also don't want to be fired. So the decision is punted up the chain, all the way to executives. And executives want to mitigate the damage to themselves first, their orgs second, maybe consumers third.

Which is ultimately another way of saying they don’t care about customers and only care about their bottom line (?)

Law is not logical and rarely makes sense. I'm not suggesting at all that they are doing the morally correct thing, but there are a bunch of ways that you can legally admit liability without meaning to.

For example, little life pro-tip, never directly pay for a loan that you aren't liable for. Proxy it through the debtor, or not at all and get a lawyer if the debtor is deceased.

Depends, radio silence will cost you money compared to just fixing the problem if that's feasible but it will save you money compared to accidentally admitting to liability in a rushed press release.

Sounds like we need to increase liability for witholding information from customers when that causes damages to make the result of that equation align with consumer interests.

As soon as there is any hint of a lawsuit, it immediately switches to CYA mode: "don't apologize, don't admit guilt, keep PR on a tight leash with a legal team watching every word and punctuation".

Only if you connect the soundbar via Bluetooth /s

A few years ago, some Samsung TVs such as TU8000, had basically a factory defect. Randomly, after a few months, a "line" appears on the TV.

They knew they should have announced a recall, but they didn't. What they did was... They simply replace the TV panel, even outside the warranty, just to avoid lawsuits (After the person first try to contact them).

Yes, outside the warranty.

But one with one detail: They replace it with the same defective panel.

Unfortunately, I was the lucky one who ended up buying this TV, and I've already replaced the panel about three times in less than five years.

Even the Samsung repair technicians that came to my house to fix the TV already told "The model just have this issue, nothing we can do about it. If it happens again, report it again to fix"

i did something similar with a vodafone phone like 3 times, they just kept giving me the same model again and again.

That is at least, if their ToS doesn't contain the all-too-common provision that you are simply not allowed to sue.

Not sure about US legislation, but where I live clauses like this are void automatically, even if you agree to the contract.

Unfortunately in the US it was discovered that you could do this and now everybody does it. They're called "arbitration clauses" even though their true purpose is to stop you from being able to sue or be part of a class action.

> even though their true purpose

It’s not a secret that arbitration agreements are intended to force the parties to arbitrate their disputes.

Forced arbitration is just yet another way to limit the consequences of actively hostile business practices. I tend to think of it as the next step after modern customer service: Where modern CS is all about tiring the customer out so they don't have the energy left to raise a proper dispute, arbitration is all about preventing the inevitable occasional actually-motivated customer from receiving the publicity or having the power of a proper lawsuit. It's all about minimizing the voice of the customer, minimizing potential inconvenience for the company, and especially minimizing the company's potential liability. They want to avoid class actions for the exact same reason why Amazon wants to avoid unions, and they want to avoid lawsuits exactly because of their benefit to customers - a potential for lawsuits would wrench away some of the control that companies so enjoy using for their abuse of those customers.

While I understand that not all companies are like this... most are, especially the big ones.

So when I say the "true purpose" is to stop you from being able to sue, I do not mean that it's somehow some closely-held secret that arbitration is an alternative to suing. It's just that the widely perpetuated façade of "oh you just agree to the more convenient arbitration" is a vast oversimplification and there are much deeper and far more malicious intents behind those clauses. It is not at all the win-win that companies would have you believe; I've even unironically seen at least one company say, essentially, "arbitration is much better, and filing a lawsuit is so inconvenient that you wouldn't want to do it anyway". Yeah. It's soo inconvenient for me to cause you so much trouble. For me. Inconvenient for me. It sure is. I'm definitely the one that wouldn't want it to happen. I definitely don't like when companies pay for intentional wrongs directed at me. Definitely not.

I've been wronged by companies a lot through the years and I have exactly zero patience for exactly these kinds of terrible, anti-consumer business practices. Access to arbitration as an option is great; forced arbitration however is a trap designed to protect the company at the expense of the consumer. In other words, forced arbitration has never actually been about arbitration at all, but rather exclusively getting out of lawsuits. That is what "true purpose" means. "Arbitration" is just their "get out of lawsuits free" card; they would use any other card that would have the same effect, because it is that effect that they're after.

a TOS is not an ironclad legal agreement. Far from it.

ToS doesn't override laws

Similar to Crowdstrike failed auto update incident.

What was the need for the global instance 0->1 rollout of the firmware over the air ???????????????

could they perhaps test it on a small subset? perhaps on Samsung CEO's home system, not the customers'?

he uses apple may be...

previous used https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/12/13/samsungs-chief-st...

new one uses, but just does not tell it.

apply display is good with apple tv.

and ceo dislikes automatically installed free to play tv apps and ads. as samsung does.

https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/co5aw4/unrem... 2500 usd samsung tv with unremovable ads.

and here unwanted apps installed randomly

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ztuv0l/samsung_sma...

They did this before, about five years ago. I had to send it back to them for a fix and it came back a few weeks later.

https://hackaday.com/2020/07/19/the-real-story-how-samsung-b...

Yeah, some people say they got replacements through the warranty. The problem is, this thing is really big and heavy, so boxing it up is a real pain, especially if you've had it a while and already threw out the original box.

That's why my buddy said it's time to buy shares in bubble wrap

Nah, just be a geezer and wrap it in bin bags and then tape around. It's bricked anyway, innit.

Waste of bin bags. Just write the address on the front in marker pen.

I assume you never bought Samsung again.

'Having' (paid for) a device for not having it for weeks is not that customer friendly attitude. It is almost in the same league with how UK furniture makers exploit customers. You get into the shop, see something nice, start ordering it, casually ask about the delivery date, cancelling the whole thing and run to an Ikea after learning that it will take somewhere between 4-6 months, depending on the workload of the factory. They are insane! I mean those who actually buy this way. The manufacturers are just brazen. Thinking that someone goes into the shop for leaving behind money for the honor of using a product of theirs sometime in the unspecific mid term future, instead of like NOW!? Shameless.

> I assume you never bought Samsung again.

I boycotted Samsung after having similar troubles with their computer screens. Essentially, they chose a weird adapter for the screen that I can't find anywhere making the screen essentially useless.

I no longer buy anything Samsung. I can't say the same about other people as Samsung is essentially an Advertising company that happens to have consumer products.

Aren't all such?

Spending furtune on lies, then more on liers to lie about their frequent failures. Instead of spending on honest work and good products. It is petty so few boycott crap and crappy attitudes. And the masses eat up lies happily. So sad.

Also talked about here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23578920

Do you guys miss owning things and they were just...yours? Like, you paid money for them and then you had them and you had full control over them and someone half a world away wasn't able to reach into your house and break them or make them do evil things?

I drive a 30-year-old Nissan pickup truck for this exact reason. Not sure why, but I get a small sense of joy knowing that the corporate overlords aren't "watching" me drive. Of course they're "watching" me on my phone (as I drive the beater truck), but that's a different story.

That old truck is probably polluting 10-30× more than a modern one. While corporations have their flaws, they have spent time and money making engines more efficient and reducing harmful emissions.

I don't believe this.

In France, we have mandatory car checkup every few years where they test the pollution from the back of the car.

My old car, made in early 90 barely emitted more pollutant than regulation allow.

Ended up buying a Volkswagen Passat, very impressive it emitted a lot less. Then dieselgate happened... Now it's barely under what the regulation allow.

Keep your old polluting car, in the grand scheme of things it is better than buying a new one that end up polluting much more to build than what you would gain in everyday emission.

your theory assumes that everyone is lying about their emissions and then later assumes that your old car is not, in fact, lying about emissions. also that you can just keep an old car running indefinitely on a limited budget.

there wasn't much pressure from regulation to have low pollution emissions in car during the early 1990, beside the car i'm speaking about, a golf 2, has such a small diesel engine that it makes sense it would pollute very little compared to the much heavier and much more powerful passat (at least compared to the whooping 50 horse power the golf had !).

i can still remember avoiding road too steep lol.

Beside, when i am saying that keeping the older car is better for environment, i am not theorizing but speaking about things that have been studied.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13190

> Specifically, researchers find keeping older fuel efficient cars on the road longer reduces CO2 emissions significantly more than speeding up the global transition to green technology.

After seeing how much safer new cars are in crash tests, old cars don't look so good anymore.

I wish more people were aware of this. I'm often reminded of a conversation I overheard at my high school retail job:

$OLDGUY_CUSTOMER (to my coworker): "Wow, I just saw a big crash on [nearby arterial road]! The entire front of the car was smashed in!"

$COWORKER: "Oh no! Was the driver alright?"

$OLDGUY: "Yeah, he seemed fine. There wasn't an ambulance or anything." [beat] "Man, they don't make them like they used to. When I was young, cars didn't crumple like that - it was much safer!"

Ugh.

>When I was young, cars didn't crumple like that. We did.

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/1994_nissan_truck.sh... https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2024_Nissan_Frontier...

That old truck will pollute less in its lifetime than the amount of energy it takes to produce a modern automobile, let alone the cumulative energy spent to sustain a consumer base ready to sign a new lease every 36 months for the latest and greatest in aggregated conflict minerals + spyware on wheels, it just does it all over the poors someplace else instead of where you live.

Not true at all: 80% of pollution from an ICE vehicle is from driving it (fuel and servicing).

are you counting the energy that went into producing that old truck in this statement?

Don't care. They can entice us as much as they want. We will not comply. Some people love rolling coal for that reason.

(My semi-daily driver is over 50 years old.)

Some people love shooting guns into the air, why is that so bad?

that could directly cause a death

High particulate emissions directly cause deaths.

Everyone is born with a fatal disease called life.

So? Not the consumer's fault that those improvement are bundled with user-hostile bullshit. Some of it government-mandated bullshit too.

my headphones just popped up an alert on my phone that turned out to be an ad for a nascar race. that got their app uninstalled. if they ever realize that they can start shoving ads directly into my ears that's when the headphones themselves get taken out back and smashed with a hammer.

Before I bought my most recent vehicle, I did my research and figured out how to physically disconnect the modem / telemetry unit.

Is this actually feasible for some decent percentage of cars nowadays? If so, where did you research?

YouTube. I think in most cars it’s gonna be a discrete component that can just be unplugged. The big question is what functionality you lose, and whether you can live with that tradeoff.

Anecdotally, my 2023 Kia's infotainment unit is one big plastic box that I was able to access by just prying up some plastic and undoing a handful of screws.

I was applying some dielectric grease to the USB port used for Android Auto (in order to prevent intermittent disconnects while driving) but I wouldn't be surprised if one of the many other cables plugged into it led to a cell antenna on the exterior.

There are also software options; I was able to disable the "telematics" in the same vehicle by inputting a (frankly schizophrenic) combo of rolling back the date, touching random invisible trigger zones in menus, and entering a leaked PIN to access the appropriate service menu on the infotainment unit.

Figuring all that out was unfortunately quite difficult, although I imagine you might be able to get "official" help if your local dealership is friendly and willing to bend the rules. I had to settle for a lot of keyword massaging on Google.

> I was able to disable the "telematics" in the same vehicle

This is only sufficient if you trust software, which you shouldn’t. Hardware disconnects are reliable. Cut the power.

You don't understand the situation in this case. This is not some auto-update, people have to put some serious effort into updating manually... effin soundbar.

Why on earth would anybody do that? I have these speakers, exactly model D, it works flawlessly either via eArc with TV or Bluetooth with both android and apple, there is absolutely nothing to fix or improve. You have to tinker with USB key and obscure series of actions or install a dedicated app on phone to force an update - why would anybody ever need such an app in first place? I am minimizing amount of apps on my phone, and not installing every semi-unknown low quality crap just because I can. That's basic security 101.

You can tweak basses directly on remote for these. These speakers are not HiFi albeit cca fine performers, realistically you will never need more from them (and TBH that one feature is absolutely stellar idea that many much more expensive receivers don't have, when kids go sleep I lower basses since they travel easier through walls and doors).

Its like pushing unknown BIOS updates to motherboard when your PC works perfectly fine, and then complaining it isn't anymore. Its sad state of 2025 electronics in general, but it was exactly same 10 or even 15 years ago, this ain't something new or unknown.

> there is absolutely nothing to fix or improve

Turning of the dammed display would be an improvement. I don't want an animation playing telling me that yes it's still connected to the TV via eARC every time I change the volume on the TV.

Being able to disable the "microphone off" indicator LED would also be great.

A couple days ago, I was thrown by one of my Windows devices pitching an ad for a video game to me in the notifications. I immediately disabled the related setting, which was of course enabled by default. Every device you buy is rigged by default to encourage you to buy more things.

You _thought_ You disabled that setting forever.

It only takes a routine Windows Update to bring those setting back to helpful defaults.

And those updates are helpfully set to download and install by default.

Not really. My iPhone, and especially my AirPods, have gotten massive feature upgrades since I bought them, and I didn't have to pay a thing.

And I assume my WiFi router updates have helped prevent people doing evil things with my devices.

Samsung's update here is obviously a massive fail, but it's one consumer device out of tens of thousands. I think it's clear the benefits outweigh the harms on the whole. Definitely sucks if you bought this particular soundbar though.

Maybe the issue to me is that I don't get to pick. My headphones have only gotten the ability to show ads on my phone because some of the functionality is only available via an app which pops up alerts to buy more headphones. My router updates have probably improved security but they definitely keep resetting my DNS which gives people the ability to track my browsing and I don't think that's an accident. I don't get to decide that I only want the security update, or the functionality update, it comes bundled with the privacy invasion and the constant shrieking of advertisements like baby birds. These "free" updates are not without cost. Nothing is actually free, not even on the internet. I'd love to go to a model where I get to pick among features to add to my devices, but if my decision is between everything or nothing I pick nothing.

It's hilarious because I bought second hand Focal Aria 936 floor standing speakers for half the price one of these sound bars will set you back. They were only slightly more than one of these sound bars second hand!

It's not even like people don't have the option, they're just suckers for marketing and don't fully research anything. Free markets are useless if the consumers are this dumb.

You will own nothing, you will have no privacy, and you will be happy.

(Or not, of course...)

My Samsung TV got more and more unusable with every update. Over the years, saved apps, like Youtube, started to disappear every time it woke up. Then it would default to their Samsung TV app, rather than your last app. Samsung TV app happened to be on the Baywatch channel every time my young children started the stupid thing. Finally, after it took 2 minutes to load the youtube app, I factory-reset the device, disconnected the internet from it, and put a Beelink mini PC in front of it. Works flawlessly.

Samsung product life cycle support seems like planned obsolescence.

I have a similar experience with my high-end Samsung TV from 2013. The TV itself still works perfectly so I'm not replacing it soon (still 1080p, not 4K, but...), but over time, Samsung has steadily removed key features with each update. When I first bought it, it supported Skype video calls (and now the integrated webcam can't be used at all), IPTV streaming, and various third-party apps — all of which are now gone.

NEVER BUYING A SAMSUNG TV AGAIN

Microsoft removed support for Skype on TV, not Samsung.

Most apps get removed because the people writing them don't want to support them anymore. The Samsung framework from 2013 was always trouble and it doesn't support many current W3C features that you'd want as a developer. Most people I know are drawing the line at supporting 2014 or 2016 Samsung devices.

Could Samsung update their devices to ensure they still supported modern frameworks? Possibly, but they don't really get any revenue from providing OS upgrades and those devices suck in terms of RAM and CPU.

I hate this idea that software "rots" all by itself when it's just left on a device and is impossible to keep working. I would at the very, very least expect my device to work exactly as it did on day one, for the next 50 years, assuming I don't change the software. It's bits on a flash drive! It doesn't rot, outside some freak cosmic ray from space flipping a bit.

If you're saying the software stops working because the backend it talks to goes away, well that's a deliberate choice the company is making. All they have to do is have a proper versioning system and do not touch the backend service, and it also should work forever.

I certainly hate that idea as well, but I also accept a pretty decent amount of that because of interactions with the greater world outside of one company’s direct control.

For instance, suppose a streaming service starts requiring a new login method. They have to update their apps to use this new API. If there are and have been over a dozen different distinct smart television operating systems in the past 15 years, and there will be a dozen more in the next 15 years, it’s unreasonable to expect that even companies the size of say, Netflix, are going to reach far enough back in their history to update all those apps. They probably don’t have developers who understand those systems anymore.

And also, the software distribution mechanisms for each of those platforms are probably no longer intact either in order to receive an update. While it’s true that my Panasonic Blu-ray player that I bought in 2009 is still perfectly functional, and has a Netflix app, I assume it doesn’t work and that Panasonic would be hard pressed to distribute me a working updated app.

The only way things would be much different would be if technology progressed at a far slower pace, so there had been no need to adopt any breaking changes to how the app is built, how the apps and firmware was distributed, etc.

There are several examples I've seen of firmware on devices failing because of bit rot, so that's not true. We used to design devices so that the bootloader was pulled from NOR instead of NAND because of this. Then the device could be recovered using a USB stick.

Most people don't encounter it because their device was updated at least once. People should be less trusting in flash drives than they are, I recently pulled three USB flash sticks out of storage and two of the three are now unhappy.

There's a strong argument that consumer electronics should be able to be more incrementally upgraded. Including things like baseline upgrades for certificates. One of the things about TVs and these systems is that they are usually running on something like OverlayFS to avoid corruption of the base OS and enhancing security/integrity. They focus on replacing the underlying image, which is often security signed as well. If you screw something up with a device that's in a customers home then you're going to be spending a lot of money fixing it, the manufacturers have their war stories in this regard, so they're very risk adverse.

As for freezing the backend, you can't. Your API will evolve and for example if your database changes then your backend services will need to be touched. That database will change, some metadata or label will need to change. Even if you keep the API the same you'll need to maintain the legacy backend. Then you need that service running, consuming compute, for years even if there's hardly anyone using it and it's costing money. Then you need security patches for the backend service because the framework needs upgrading or the OS needs upgrading. Eventually the backend framework will be EoL/EoS and so you need to spend to upgrade. It's like saying we'll keep a Java backend running on a public facing API well beyond it's life, log4j anyone?

Certificates expire.

Google learning this the hard way with the recent chromecast outage[0]

[0]: https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Streaming/Regarding-a...

I think there is a strong argument to simply not checking certificate expiry dates in embedded hardware.

Just keep using the expired certificate forever.

Sure - that means if someone leaks the private key that everyone worldwide needs to do a firmware update to get security.

But that's probably less user harm than everyone worldwide needing to do a firmware update to replace an expired cert, and having a dead device otherwise.

1) You can't pass a PCI-DSS audit if you have expired certificates. 2) You can't always tell the CDN providers what to do with certs. 3) We've seen examples of new root certificates that mean devices don't know about things like LetsEncrypt

At the very least the user should be able to override the failing certificate check. So much "security" cargo culting is intentionally planned failure.

99% of consumers don't understand what that means and if we normalise the average consumer bypassing certificate checks that's definitely a bad thing.

So don't burn CA pubkeys into your binaries without means for user override. If the software can persist a user-specific analytics ID it can support user certs. This is a solved problem.

Yeah but how many people would do that? You, me, and maybe thousand other people here and similarly minded. That's sadly fart in the wind for such companies and not worth creating more friction and risk (ie folks hack their under-warranty tvs till they stop working and then come back asking for free replacements and tarnishing the brand).

I wish there was some trivial real-life applicable solution to this that big companies would be motivated to follow, but I don't see it. Asking for most users to be tinkering techies or outright hackers ain't realistic, many people these days often don't accept basic aspects of reality if it doesn't suit their current comfy view, don't expect much.

But we could do it for our friends and families. A repair shop could do it too. Instead of a full brick.

Here in South Korea, everyone who uses online banking has to renew and reissue banking certificates every year. While I'm not convinced the certificate process is 100% safe, using certificates is one good concept in the sh*t show of Korean online "security" malware users are required to install.

You can add as many user-defined, custom trust anchors as you want, they’re not going to make an expired server TLS certificate work.

Don’t get me wrong, allowing users to add their own trust anchors is absolutely a good thing. But it wouldn’t change anything if the vendor did what GP suggested, which is that the vendor "[does] not touch the backend service." Because one day, their TLS certificate would expire, and they would technically no longer be able to deliver security updates even if the user wanted them.

Not my problem as a buyer. Build the infrastructure to make certificates and everything else work for a reasonably long time. Service is part of the contract.

That's the point, there are no substantive contracts between you and the OS. If we want apps to be responsible for root certs that's interesting, but then the app needs some roof of trust with the OS anyway.

> Not my problem as a buyer.

Mentioning that certificates expire was directed against GP’s unreasonable demand that the vendor "do not touch the backend service." This doesn’t have to do anything with the buyer.

This is exactly why "Smart" TVs don't make any sense. My in-laws have a perfectly fine Sony TV, it's nok 4K, but the HD picture quality is amazing still. Apps have slowly started to disappear as they are no longer being updated and new one aren't being added.

I don't know how this work, but either Sony or the streaming service must be making the apps, and neither seems interested in maintaining apps for a 10+ year old TV. So when the streaming services are updating their backend, older TV don't get updated applications.

Smart TVs make absolutely no sense, the streaming service are moving to fast, so you'll need a cheaper box, or a product that is support for a decade.

100%. I think most people should probably transition their thinking from using smart TV apps being an obvious or reasonable thing to do, to viewing them like the ads you sometimes find in the box when you buy something. They’re basically just ads for streaming services, and they’re mainly there to try to trick you into connecting the TV to the Internet so that it can gather data for them.

In the event that one wants the app functionality, they’ll always be better off with a streaming stick. Even in respectable brands of TVs like Sony, the SOC’s are weaker than what you find in that $40 “Chromecast with Google TV.” so they’re pretty horrible to use even while they are current and supported.

My experience with LG wasnt any better. Thorough about a year the tv became increasingly unresponsive. You start it, after 30 seconds the sound andpicture appeared, and for about 2 full minutes it would not react to inputs what so ever (except turning off). So if you happen to turn the tv off with higher volume, you could not launch it in the evening without it blasting for 2+ minutes at night. Abhorent

LGs, while still smart TVs, are relatively competent at being dumb TVs. Your only other options these days (sans rescuing a dumb TV from e-waste) are commercial panels and projectors.

If you just use an HDMI input and attach some streaming box to it, Samsung TVs work just fine. Just never touch the remote and only interact with the source and everything works.

We have a 4K TV from Philips (really, TP Vision), which has Android TV, but you can just set it to an HDMI input and then it works as a dumb TV.

Being a Philips (TP Vision), it also has Ambilight, which is nice.

It’s a few years old though, so no guarantees that newer Philips (TP Vision) models work the same way.

Still appreciating my 2011 high end Samsung TV. I believe it's the last non-smart product year. It could stream videos from a network share but that's about it.

Judging by current trends i will have to replace the attached chromecast before the TV breaks.

what bother's me even more is that they are constantly spying on me (phone home, what am I watching, ...) and pushing advertisements to my TV. My next TV will probably not be connected to the internet.

Why wait for the next TV when you can just disconnect the darn existing box now?

I use a pi-hole to block the spying. My experience with Amazon's FireOS & Roku is they phone home a lot.

The issue is not Samsung per se, it is the smart TV crap we can't get rid of.

With luck there are some old TVs still on remaining stock and that is about it.

But you can at least for now still use those "smart" TVs as dumb displays for whatever device you want and just ignore the fact that the TV is running a full android stack or similar. There really is no need to scrounge for older devices with inferior display tech.

It's kinda common knowledge at this point that almost all Smart TV's suck, especially Samsung. I went the Samsung route as well - the TV itself is fine, but the software is horrible.

The solution (that I hope everyone knows about by now) is to buy an Apple TV and connect it. Once the TV starts, it shows Apple TV from the get-go and not any of the Samsung stuff.

> The solution (that I hope everyone knows about by now) is to buy an Apple TV and connect it. Once the TV starts, it shows Apple TV from the get-go and not any of the Samsung stuff.

Or just connect the TV to your PC where you have the freedom to run whatever software you want. Why replace one crappy "smart" device with another.

Well I'm not sure what use you'd have out of Skype integration when Skype itself is being axed in a couple of months

Why are other apps gone?

Contrary to lots of other opinions here, I bought a 65" Samsung TV at the beginning of covid and I sincerely don't have any significant complaints. The remote is easy to use, launching apps is straightforward, connecting an ARC soundbar was no problem, nor was connecting a Chromecast and an Xbox, and it "just works". Every once in a blue moon (maybe twice a year-ish) I've had to power cycle it to fix a wifi connectivity issue, which may well just be a result of DHCP lease expiration on my network.

I have a modern Sony Bravia, too, which is running "Google TV" natively. On the plus side, the UI is just about identical to what you get with a Google TV dongle (which I also have, plugged into an old 32" monitor in front of my bike trainer), but it's also a really heavy interface that's also increasingly rich in ads. If your household is like mine, and holds subscriptions to a half dozen or more streaming services, some of which are bundled and some of which are either discounted or comped via entirely different subscriptions (mobile phone) or membership (credit card), it's really not helpful to have Google show me subscriptions I might want to add-on to my Google TV sub, nor do I appreciate seeing ads for content from things I don't subscribe to. Also, the Sony remote has about 50 buttons -- not a fan.

All things considered, I end up having to fiddle with the Sony TV far more frequently than the Samsung one, usually because of network or app issues.

We have an old Roku stick plugged into an old tv in a spare room, too, and it's almost intolerably slow. It's primary use case is to plug into our projector for backyard movies in nice weather, so I keep it around, but man is it dog slow.

> don't have any significant complaints.

Are you happy with it spying on you?

That's what all Samsung televisions do, and there is no way to turn it off. They advertise on their own web page that they monitor the content viewed on their televisions for targeted advertising.

This isn't via some sort of metadata, they take screenshots at regular intervals and upload them to very insecure hosting.

I hope you never look at any "sensitive" content on your TV!

I don't really care because I only use the TV to access other streaming apps, and I know they already see everything I watch anyway. I don't have either cable TV or a cable-like alternative (YTTV, Roku Live, Sling, etc). Periodically I'll use it to cast something to, but it's usually my kid's soccer matches from a website on a laptop.

Fwiw, to the best of my awareness, I don't receive any advertising from my Samsung TV other than perhaps the strip of suggested things to watch (half of which are "continue watching" linked to watch history in the app I'm hovering over) that lives above the app list. This is wildly different from Google TV, which has a core value prop of embedding advertising right in your face.

You sure sound sure of yourself for not knowing what you’re talking about.

It takes less than a minute to disable ad tracking and ACR on a Samsung TV.

Settings > General > Terms > disable two checkboxes.

Do you have a source for the screenshot thing?

It's called automatic content recognition (ACR). Most systems take low resolution (about 640x480 or 320x240) black and white screenshots at regular intervals, compress them do death, and upload that to big brother. That's more than enough to determine what specific kink or style of porn you're into, if you make the mistake of thinking that watching that kind of stuff in the privacy of your own home is private.

https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/home-entertainment/how...

A quick search points me to [1]. Granted, it does not contain further links but there should be enough names to find more.

1. https://eandt.theiet.org/2024/12/11/smart-tvs-take-screensho...

I never worked for Samsung, but I built TVs for JVC and LG, among many other brands. I don't work in consumer electronics anymore but a decade ago that was my field.

TVs are a wildly unprofitable business. It's astoundingly bad. You get 4-6 months to make any profit on a new model before it gets discounted so heavily by retailers that you're taking a bath on each one sold. So every dollar in the BOM (bill of materials) has to be carefully considered, and not far back the CPUs in practically every TV was single core or dual core, and still under 1GHz. Bottom of the bin ARM cores you'd think twice to fit to a cheap tablet.

They sit within a custom app framework which was written before HTML5 was a standard. Or, hey want to write in an old version of .NET? Or Adobe Stagecraft, another name for Adobe Flash on TV?

Apps get dropped on TVs because the app developers don't want to support ancient frameworks. It's like asking them to still support IE10. You either hold back the evolution of the app, or you declare some generation of TV now obsolete. Some developers will freeze their app, put it in maintenance mode only and concentrate on the new one, but even then that maintenance requires some effort. And the backend developers want to shutdown the API endpoints that are getting 0.1% of the traffic but costing them time and money to keep. Yes, those older TVs are literally 0.1% or less of use even on a supported app.

After a decade in consumer electronics, working with some of the biggest brands in the world (my work was awarded an Emmy) I can confidently say that I never saw anyone doing what could be described as 'planned obsolescence'. The single biggest driver for a TV or other similar device being shit is cost, because >95% of customers want a cheap deal. Samsung, LG and Sony are competing with cheap white label brands where the customer doesn't care what they're buying. So the good brands have to keep their prices somewhere close to the cheap products in order to give the customers something to pick from. If a device contains cheap components, it was because someone said "If we shave $1 off here, it'll take $3 off the shelf price." I once encountered a situation where a retailer, who was buying cheap set-top boxes from China to stick a now defunct brandname on, argued to halve the size of an EEPROM. It saved them less than 5c on each box made.

For long life support of the OS and frameworks, aside from the fact that the CPU and RAM are poor, Samsung, LG and Sony don't make much money from the apps. It barely pays to run the app store itself, let alone maintain upgrades to the OS for an ever increasing, aging range of products.

And we as consumers have to take responsibility for the fact that we want to buy cheap, disposable electronics. We'll always look for the deal and buy it on sale. Given the choice of high quality and cheap, most people choose cheap. So they're hearing the message and delivering.

Yeah, but is there a way for consumers to compare the compute performance of any given TV?

If OEMs differentiated their TVs based on compute performance, consumers might be able to make an informed choice. (See smartphones: consumers expect a Galaxy Sxx to have faster compute than a Galaxy Axx.)

If not, consumers just see TVs with similar specs at different prices, so of course they’re going to pick the cheaper one.

It's really hard to get these things across to consumers.

This is why we ended up with phrases like "Full HD".

The average consumer doesn't know what these numbers mean, people who read hackernews aren't the 99%. Phones have helped a little bit with widening the idea of newer = better, but ask the average person how many cores their phone is or how much RAM it has? They don't know.

Also, it's hard to benchmark TV performance as a selling point. Perhaps sites like rtings need to have UX benchmarks as well? They could measure channel change times, app load times, etc. That might create some pressure to compete.

>I can confidently say that I never saw anyone doing what could be described as 'planned obsolescence'. The single biggest driver for a TV or other similar device being shit is cost, because >95% of customers want a cheap deal.

You are literally the first person I have ever seen say this online, besides myself. I have worked in hardware for years and can vouch that there is no such thing as planned obsolescence, but obsession over cost is paramount. People think LED bulbs fail because they are engineered that way, but really it's because they just buy whatever is cheapest. You cannot even really support a decent mid-grade market because it just gets eviscerated by low cost competitors.

I was in a meeting with a senior guy from one of the top Asian brands and I said "We're getting out of TVs, we've lost $x millions and that's enough."

He said "Hah, we can lose way more than that!"

Thanks for sharing. Without insight beyond being a consumer, I do think there's room for disription (ideally from within the industry itself) vs 10y ago.

Comparing models from 2005/2015/2025, for example. Most people literally can't tell 4k from 1080 and anything new in the HD race mostly feels like a scam. The software capabilities are all there. I think to differentiate from the no-name stuff, longevity is going to become a more significant differentiator.

We tried to disrupt the market, back about 10 years ago.

One of the significant problems is that 80% of TV SOCs are made by one company, MStar (or their subsidiary). And there's only a handful of companies who make the motherboards with those chipsets. Anyone entering the market either buys those or isn't competitive. It's hard to be competitive because everything is so concentrated and consolidated. Since ST Microelectronics and Broadcom left the TV chip market it became a much less diverse market.

We were an established company who made software for STBs, we had done a ground-up build of what was probably the most capable and powerful framework for TV/DVRs. The new design was commissioned from us by a well known open source Linux distro, who then decided they didn't want to continue with the project after they realised that getting into TV OS's was hard. We then took on ownership of that project but getting investment or even commitments from buyers was impossible.

The retailers and TV brands wanted to rehash the same thing over and over because that was tried and tested. It didn't matter that we made something that was provably better and used modern approaches, it wasn't worth the effort for them. If you can't order about 500,000 TVs then you're not going to get anyone to make anything custom for you these days and you'll not make a profit.

--

It was a DVR/TV framework that was designed by people who had worked for big names in the TV business with a clean slate. It would handle up to 16 different broadcast networks (e.g. satellite, terrestrial, cable) and up to 255 tuners, even hot pluggable. Fast EPG processing and smart recording to either internal storage or USB storage. It was user friendly and allowed for HTML5 apps. We pushed it as much as we could but eventually on the brink of financial ruin the company was sold to someone who had no interest in what had been built. I will always feel that something great was lost.

The problem is getting that jank even when you buy the expensive models, though.

But then they're running on the same common platform as the models half the price. But more than 95% of the cost of the TV is in the panel itself, a fancy model is usually just a bigger model and maybe some different, higher end panel. But the CPU inside is nothing special because then they can keep costs down to compete the with the cheap 60in TV you saw while shopping for groceries.

> TVs are a wildly unprofitable business... not far back the CPUs in practically every TV was single core or dual core

Explain to me then how an Apple TV device for $125 (Retail! not BOM!) can be staggeringly faster and generally better than any TV controller board I've seen?

I really want to highlight how ludicrous the difference is: My $4,000 "flagship" OLED TV has a 1080p SDR GUI that has multi-second pauses and stutters at all times but "somehow" Apple can show me a silky smooth 4K GUI in 10 bit HDR.

This is dumbass hardware-manufacturer thinking of "We saved 5c! Yay!" Of course, now every customer paying thousands is pissed and doesn't trust the vendor.

This is also why the TVs go obsolete in a matter of months, because the manufacturers are putting out a firehose of crap that rots on the shelves in months.

Apple TV hasn't had a refresh in years and people are still buying it at full retail price.

I do. Not. Trust. TV vendors. None of them. I trust Apple. I will spend thousands more with Apple on phones, laptops, speakers, or whatever they will make because of precisely this self-defeating decisions from traditional hardware vendors.

I really want to grab one of these CEOs by the lapels and scream in their face for a little while: "JUST COPY APPLE!"

> Explain to me then how an Apple TV device for $125 (Retail! not BOM!) can be staggeringly faster and generally better than any TV controller board I've seen?

This is the result of Apple being vertically integrated and reusing components from other product lines in products like Apple TV. The SoC used in the Apple TV are from lower-tier bins of chips produced for mobile applications.

With the Apple TV, you are getting a SoC that is effectively the same as a recent-year iPhone. With most other Smart TV devices you are getting a low computational power SoC, Raspberry Pi tier, with processing blocks that are optimized for the video playback and visual processing use cases.

Apple also does this with the iPhone where the non-flagship variants will reuse components or designs from prior years.

Television/Smart TV manufacturer margins are in the single-digit percentages and the Samsung and LG tv businesses are significantly threatened since their high-volume products have been commoditized from Chinese producer competition. Most potential customers are shopping based on screen size per dollar, versus specs like peak luminance and contrast ratios. Flagship TV products like "The Wall" are low-volume halo products. Lifestyle products like "The Frame" exist because they are able to differentiate to certain segments of customers that place enough value the packaging aesthetics to buy a higher priced product with better margins for the manufacturers.

Most other hardware device manufacturers are jealous of Apple's margins. Nvidia would probably be one of the few exceptions.

Thin margins on commodity tier products drive these manufacturers to cut their BOM costs as much as possible, even if it makes the product worse in other ways. This is also the big driver for why ads are appearing as part of the Smart TV experience at the device/screen level. Vizio for example shared that they made more money from their ACR business than they did from the device sales themselves. There are companies with business models based around giving you the screen for "free" in exchange for permanent ad-space. Even adjacent products and companies like Roku have business models where they are selling their hardware at near break-even cost points because their business model is built around 'services' from having a large user audience.

Budget mobiles phones exist, and make a profit. These have 4G radios, screens, batteries, cameras, and storage.

There is no excuse for TV manufacturers when selling premium devices costing thousands of dollars.

Greater than 95% of the cost of a TV is in the panel.

TV panels must have a near 0% defect rate and a single piece of dust during the manufacture will render the finished panel e-waste. The bigger the panel the risk of a defect goes up exponentially because the surface area for any defect becomes bigger. It follows the same issue as to why chip companies introduced chiplets, the smaller die sizes improves the yield and they can throw away less silicon.

A TV panel is basically a 50in chip, and a mobile phone display is a 6in chip.

Samsung also has access to competitive mobile SoCs through vertical integration though.

In theory they do have access and should, but in practice they don't.

Samsung's flagship mobile phone products tend to ship with Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs in competitive markets, such as USA/North America, versus their "in-house" Exnyos SoC used in markets where consumers tend to have less choice (e.g. Samsung S-series phones with Snapdragon for USA, Exnyos for EU and KDM markets)

We bought a samsung tv in 2016 and it slowly became unusable by mid-2020. Fortunately it got dropped by the movers and we were able to justify buying a new TV (LG). The LG UI/UX is awful though, I wish we'd bought a sony. LG TVs don't have a way to simply select "HDMI1/2/3/4" you're stuck using it's "smart" detection system, which can only be reset by physically unplugging the HDMI cables from the back of the TV, which is never easy to get to. Apparently the solution is to buy Sony and just pay the extra price.

I have a "smart" Samsung TV in my home office but it's never been plugged into the network and has a chromecast and various networked devices plugged in to it as a "dumb tv", that has been working out great, the TV still turns on/off easily and is as fast as the day I bought it (makes sense, it's still running the factory firmware).

> LG TVs don't have a way to simply select "HDMI1/2/3/4" you're stuck using it's "smart" detection system, which can only be reset by physically unplugging the HDMI cables from the back of the TV, which is never easy to get to. Apparently the solution is to buy Sony and just pay the extra price.

Another possible solution is to only use one input on the TV. Connect an A/V receiver to that one input and connect all your other devices to the A/V receiver. Then you should only need to deal with switching inputs on the TV if you want to watch over the air TV using the TV's tuner. You can probably even get rid of that need by getting a stand-alone TV tuner and hooking that up to the A/V receiver.

Many A/V receivers have network interfaces that you can use to control them if for some reason you don't want to use their remote. Most Denon receivers for example have an HTTP server that presents a web-based interface if you browse to it from a computer or mobile device.

They also run a simple HTTP based API that is easy to use from scripts. For example here is a shell script that gets the current volume setting of mine:

  URL=http://192.168.0.xx/goform/AppCommand.xml
  cat > tmp.$$ <<HERE
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
  <tx>
    <cmd id="1">GetVolumeLevel</cmd>
  </tx>
  HERE
  curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: text/xml" --upload-file tmp.$$ $URL
  rm tmp.$$

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
  <rx>
  <cmd>
  <volume>-45.0</volume>
  <disptype>RELATIVE</disptype>
  <dispvalue>-45.0dB</dispvalue>
  </cmd>
  </rx>

But this breaks DRMs if that's something you need.

It generally should be OK if you get an A/V receiver that implements the current HDMI and HDCP and related standards.

I had a Samsung QLED TV, and still had to upgrade the firmware once. Thankfully you can do this by USB storage without connecting the TV to the Internet. The preloaded firmware had audio issues where sound would drop out, even when playing through the built-in speakers, and I haven't seen that issue happen since upgrading the firmware.

I also had the Baywatch bug. Neo QLED right?

Every time you’d start the tv it’d switch to the Samsung Baywatch 24/7 stream.

So inappropriate for the children.

>So inappropriate for the children.

The bug, or Baywatch itself?

This describes essentially all Samsung products: really cool for the first few months then progressively accelerating slide straight into the trash.

I'm never buying any Samsung products again if I can avoid it. A forced update bricked my damn phone when it forcibly restarted while I was showing something to a client.

Samsung doesn't give a shit. They'll trash the device you paid for and tell you to suck it up and buy a new one.

Yep, I stopped using Samsung products not too long ago.

Reminds me of the time when a Samsung VP (or whatever his title was) showed up at a Microsoft Build conference to promote their TVs and the shiny new Tizen .NET Framework that shipped inbox. I asked if they planned to backport it to last year’s model—which I had just purchased—so we could test with and target existing TVs in the market. He looked me straight in the eye and, with a smarmy grin, said (paraphrasing), 'No, we want consumers to buy new TVs.' I walked away disgusted and abandoned any idea of targeting that platform.

Similarly, I vaguely recall a Samsung event that had leadership--CEO?--flat out say they wanted consumers to buy new TVs every year or so. I couldn't immediately find the quote though.

I pulled my Samsung Smart TV off the network a while ago, precisely because it was getting slower and slower over time. The allegations of spying pushed me over, but the apparent belief that they own my TV would also have done it.

I want a separation between my display device and the thing serving it anyhow, but that's just me in my techie world. The fact that performance got worse with each update, though, that's just over the line for everyone. I mean, if you're going to babble about how you're upgrading my experience, shouldn't you, you know, upgrade my experience instead of constantly downgrading it? My experience gets downgraded, but gee golly, it sure seems like yours is getting upgraded.

Well. It's really not that hard to not plug in the ethernet cable.

My Roku boxes have also had the same trajectory over the years. As time rolls on, they just get slower and slower with each update. Slowly, but surely. How exactly this is accomplished I'm not even sure, it's not like they're overflowing with new features or doing bold new computations for my benefit. They just get a little bit slower every effing time. But at least replacing my Roku boxes is $20-40 now. Hey, sure, OK, a $40 thing probably can't be expected to work 5 years from now. If nothing else, video codecs do march on and specs may exceed what the hardware decoders can handle. OK. My $1000+ TV does not get that grace. It damned well better be able to turn on in less than 30 seconds, even 10 years, 20 years from now. No excuses.

I had a similarly negative experience, sadly. Samsung managed to break HDMI-CEC in the final firmware update for one of their tvs, and wouldn't allow downgrading.

Which tends not to be great for a tv one wants to use with a Chromecast or similar media box...

I find it appalling that no matter how much money you spend on a Samsung TV, you'll get banner ads in the fucking source switcher. Absolute total disregard for their users.

LG still has bits that are ultimately ads, but at least they're less egregious, presented as suggested content in a Home view that already aggregates content from various sources. Not ads for fucking McDonalds and similar. At least that was the case as of a couple of years ago—I disconnected my LG from the internet the day I got an Apple TV and never looked back.

Just let me buy a large class leading display without trying to insert yourself into my life, please. I'm already paying through the nose for it.

I had a smart TV that gradually got slower and slower until it became basically useless. I figured it was just running out of RAM as apps got larger with updates over the years.

Sounds like every Android vendor, woth Google leading the pack.

(disclaimer: maybe 5-10 years ago)

Two important features I insist on for products I develop:

1. Staged rollout of firmware updates. It’s common practice for apps and software but for some reason it’s less common with firmware. Rolling out to 1% (or less, depending on scale) of devices and waiting a day is cheap insurance. Side note: Build a good relationship with customer service people so you hear about these things immediately.

2. A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state. Some sequence that resets the device completely back to the way it was when it came out of the box, firmware included, as a last resort. In conjunction, your automated tests need to confirm that every factory firmware you’ve ever released can update to the latest firmware.

> A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state.

This doesn't work if your threat model includes denying rollbacks to prevent exploiting bugs in old firmware. I'd love to be able to roll-back firmware on some of my devices to allow me to "jailbreak" them using old firmware.

In some cases your newer firmware may be blowing e-fuses that prevent old firmware from functioning. See the Nintendo Switch, for an example.

To be clear: I think this is anti-consumer and wrong, but manufacturers absolutely do it.

Edit: I also think it should be illegal, by way of consumer regulation. I don't think consumers should have option to waive their right to manufacturers not damaging hardware they own.

This doesn't get enough attention, waaaay too many of these issues are traced back to the vendor trying to "prevent" someone from using their product in a way that they don't like.

Why else would a soundbar need updates anyway? It either performs its well defined functions when you bought it or they sold you a device that doesn’t input/output sound.

Updates for these types of things always fall into three categories. Either they’re gimping some unanticipated usage, they’re trying to insert ads, or they’re trying to gather more usage data.

Sibling mentioned CEC fixes— this one is huge. CEC is lovely in concept but I ended up having to disable it completely across my setup as there was just way too many bits of weird behaviour with devices turning themselves on and then switching the TV or AVR to their input apropos of nothing.

I feel like CEC tried way too hard to be magical instead of exposing enough control for the user to be able to block certain commands from problematic devices, or even just designate that device X will always be the boss in a particular setup.

Absolutely this.

The frustration when I turn on the Steam Deck and the Apple TV goes

"Look at me. Look at me! I'm the output now"

Yup, game consoles are ground zero for this. I hit the button on the PS5 controller only to have the receiver and TV power on, then the PS4 wakes up for some reason and then switches the AVR to its input.

My Sony UHD player also seems to want to grab the input sometimes too, so maybe it's Sony that's the source of the problems haha.

And again, it's all just so maddening because it feels like it would go away if I could be like "Hey, AVR should never send power-on messages to its input devices." Because then I would just power on the device I actually want to use, it would turn on the AVR and TV, and we'd be golden.

Even better: I have some sort of Useless Machine[1] bug where turning on the TV will power up the PS5, which then puts itself to back to sleep.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine

Oh I've definitely had this one too, where the TV powers up to the "I'm going to sleep now lol" screen from the PlayStation.

> And again, it's all just so maddening because it feels like it would go away if I could be like "Hey, AVR should never send power-on messages to its input devices."

Yeah, that sounds a weird "feature" in the first place.

If I manually turn on the UHD player/Chromecast/PS5/whatever, it makes sense that the TV also turns on and switches to the respective input.

I could also sort of imagine that if I switched the TV to some input source, it might be convenient if the device connected to that input turns on. (Not by a lot, though. You need the device's remote/gamepad/whatever anyway to tell it what to do, so the one button press saved doesn't really buy you much.)

But what makes no sense for me is the TV turning on all input devices when it's being turned on itself. When would you ever want to have the PS4, the PS5 and the HD player running, let alone as the default behavior?

That sounds like a genuine bug in the TV.

(Also, you sound as if you have some sort of "2 <-> n" setup with n input and 2 output devices. I have no idea how CEC would even be supposed to behave in such a setup. Would an input device turn on both output devices?

It's a conventional setup:

TV <- AVR <- PS4, PS5, Switch, UHD

I suspect the issue is largely with the receiver (a VSX-935), as that's seemingly the component sending a turn-on signal to its inputs.

If I could, I would have probably run everything to the TV and just done all the audio over eARC, but the TV is on the other end of a 50' HDMI cable, so I definitely need the receiver as an in-rack multiplexer.

Ah, that makes sense.

I turn off CEC all the time and my tv refuses to acknowledge it if I ever unhook the device or HDMI. Always defaults back. Drives me crazy.

Highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/Lindy-HDMI-Adapter-Female-41232/dp/B0... -- I have a couple and it's solved this problem for me completely. I hate how unpredictable CEC is when things go wrong, on top of the ridiculous 3 device limit.

I have a laptop, steamdeck, Nintendo Switch and chromecast all connected to an LG TV and all the ouput switching and remote pass-through works as expected. Maybe just a lucky combination ?

> Why else would a soundbar need updates anyway? It either performs its well defined functions when you bought it or they sold you a device that doesn’t input/output sound.

Unfortunately there are soooo f..ing many devices out there that don't follow the specs, no wonder given how long and complex alone the Bluetooth specifications are, and HDMI/HDCP (which a soundbar with ARC support needs...) is even worse, and don't even try to get me started on CEC because that is an even bigger pile of dung, or stuff like GPUs that run HDMI over DVI, MHL or USB-C in DP mode and god knows what else people expect to "magically work" with a 5 dollar adapter they got off of Alibaba. And no, "audit products to follow the specs" isn't a foolproof solution either. That means that everyone has to deal with everyone else's quirks and at least the most popular devices and their manufacturers have to supply firmware updates to react upon reports of quirks.

While I agree with what you wrote

> [...] GPUs that run HDMI over DVI [...]

I thought HDMI and DVI use the same signalling (at least the 'digital part' of DVI, was it DVI-D?), just over a different connector?

In my memory only the connectors competed for adoption, and Home Entertainment industry opted for HDMI and the PC-industry opted for DVI, while the signalling was not contested (besides DVI also being able to carry analog signalling with full spin-out, and HDMI carrying audio instead). My memory might not serve me well here though.

I never thought HDMI would win :( but it makes sense I guess - Computers/their use changed :(

Even without the relative size difference of the TV and PC industries, the HDMI connector is simply more compact than the DVI connector.

Now Display Port vs HDMI is a more interesting competition and it would have been nice to have a clear DP victory here.

  > Why else would a soundbar need updates anyway?

Not because the device changes, not because the software changes, but because the world does

And the obvious solution is to isolate the device from the world. Most of my stereo is isolated from “the world”, and some parts are close to 30 years old. Why does a soundbar need contact with the internet?

That kinda defeats the point of having a device. Sure it works in some cases but we're talking about a soundbar here and that has to interact with other devices. It's whole purpose is to interact with other devices.

Even if it doesn't need to contact the internet you're still going to want it to connect through cables. There's good reason to connect through bluetooth.

But why should it contact over the internet? Well it sure is nice to be able to stream music from my NAS. There's utility in that. There's also utility in the parent company updating firmware to support new audio codecs. Or to support new algorithms. If my device is gaining more utility, that's a great thing! And of course, if it is connected wirelessly in any way (including bluetooth) I sure as hell would like updates with respect to security.

Without this, the thing becomes e-waste. The environment moves. Time marches on. No thing can exist in isolation, no matter how hard you try. Again, software rots, not because the software changes, but because the world does.

But that's not the problem here. The problem is abuse of that power. It isn't for the benefit of the customer. The problem is managers pushing to release before things are ready. The need for speed with no direction. To not even consider in the calculus of decision making the tremendous costs of when things go wrong. And how this lesson is never learned despite facing the problem time and time again. Issues like this now cost tons of engineering hours, tons of lawyer hours, and ultimately will cost tons in rebates and refunds. How many weeks of work is that equivalent to? Sure, it doesn't always result in catastrophic failure like this, sometimes it results in smaller failures, sometimes small enough they can be brushed off. But those are still costs that no one considers. That's the problem here.

In my case, my stereo is connected to an inexpensive Airplay adapter.

So I do get all the advantages of a connected device, but if the adapter is bricked, I can easily replace just that small device. And more likely, when there’s a new standard, most of my equipment is unaffected.

s/soundbar/airplay adapter/g

I believe you're missing the forest for the trees. My argument is invariant to the specific device we're talking about.

No, you are missing my point. In the same way as we do (or at least should do) when we develop software, we isolate the volatile parts from the stable ones. The loudspeakers have looked the same for decades. No revolutionary changes in amplifiers in a long time. The same with DACs. That means that when a software update bricks my adapter, or a new much better standard comes along, or I decide to leave the Apple ecosystem, I only need to replace one small part of my stereo system, not all of it.

This should be done internally to the device. I do agree that nothing you do should affect how speaker sure input is processed. But if you want those other features it's much more convenient to integrate them on device or rather place them within the housing as there's lots of empty space.

With electronics you can still isolate functionality like in software how we wrap things into functions. But like software sometimes we need to break that for optimization. Think like Apple M chips. They do it in the most annoying way, but integration is helpful. Ideally in a speaker though you should be able to fuck everything up and still allow for raw input.

As for the Apple thing, well that's a bigger issue because we really should be using open protocols and fuck walled gardens. Walled gardens are part of the problem we're talking about

Why does a soundbar need software? An active speaker with a jack plug would work just fine

At least in theory these Samsung sound bars are supposed to adapt to the listening environment to more accurately render the intended surround sound. They also have various non-trivial inputs (including wireless ones) as well as support for additional real speakers and subwoofers which again might need changes for compatibility.

Of course they could be designed to be simpler and have whatever input device is used (e.g. the TV) handle fancy features like mobile phone support.

Welcome to the world of embedded devices.

Sure, you could do everything through a static circuit and require things being fed with speaker wire. But if you add a microcontroller you're going to be able to do much more, get better sound quality, and protect your equipment. Do your speakers have batteries? Do they plug into wall? Either way you can better control power levels. Do you want to boost bass? Fix corrupted signals? Do you want to process signals from anything other than a bare wire?

Sure, you don't need a microcontroller in a speaker. But we also don't need them in our cars. You don't need them in your fucking kettle. But personally, I find them useful and considering how cheap they are it's worth the basically $0 increased price.

See my other argument. The issue isn't that there's a microcontroller in the speaker. The issue is bricking the device. Don't confuse the means in which a bad actor operates with the bad actor themselves. You'll never stop the bad actor by just banning everything tool they abuse. You'll end up with nothing.

>get better sound quality

That just isn't true though, is it? How would a microcontroller add sound quality?

Imagine your signal comes in degraded. Some extra noise on the wire because it is passing next to a faulty wire in your walls or something. You can then do a FFT (example) and pull out the noise and rebalance the signal. Maybe an easy way to think of this is with radio since you're very used to dealing with static in that domain but fundamentally there's nothing different than signal coming through a wire other than the technicalities of the medium through which it's transmitted.

There's much more signal processing you can do besides FFT btw and many can improve signal quality and thus sound quality. Even something like a built in equalizer. Sure, you can do this all with hardware by creating all the right filters but you can do more in a smaller package with a computer

Innocuous product features like streaming music, integration with Alexa/Google, connecting to TV and other speakers via wifi. Oh and collecting analytics data and selling to ad networks...

Modern soundbar are bugged Bluetooth enabled, also with ship with interfacing protocols, while legacy bluetooth/wifi drivers are ok, protocols just break

Just because you want to keep using old tech doesn't mean everyone else wants to.

I prefer to choose myself when I buy new stuff, not let the corporations decide that for me when they decide to brick my old stuff.

Also, time-to-market pressures can result in initial shipments having (minor but not showstopping) firmware bugs. Post-sale firmware upgrades can be beneficial for the customer.

Maybe a new codec? New streaming app support? New wireless protocol? CEC bugfix?

Yes, all of those are in the realm of possibilities, but has it ever been the norm?

In my experience, products like this are only get updates when the company finds a way to extract more money:

- add more ads

- add more ads that pretend not to be ads

- to remove functionality, so it won't cannibalize sales of more expensive product

It’s the norm because people rather buy one single product that does it all.

The alternative to an all-in-one sound bar is having regular 5.1 speakers, a nice receiver, a nice streaming box, and maybe a dumber TV and you will have absolutely the best setup but it’s a lot of putting pieces together, more space usage, and either money (if you want it right away) or a lot of waiting (if you want to get it used).

Even dedicated receivers have software updates now. My Onkyo receiver had an update that added Dolby Atmos support, for example.

I had a Yamaha that had a dtsx firmware addition upgrade after it shipped. Not sure if it wasnt ready at product ship, or some way to avoid licensing fees, but I dont know how they would track who upgraded as it wasnt network enabled.

Sennheiser Max has a full computer and os running inside, they can upgrade it quite a bit. Biggest limitation on the device is HDMI 2.0 preventing 20gbps video passthrough of hdmi 2.1, however they should be able to add new audio codecs.

I actually picked up a Samsung soundbar for my mom this past Christmas and there were quite a few negative reviews. Usually around the soundbar dropping its connection. However diving deeper on them seems to revealed that the issue was resolved with an update. It's not super smart though and needs a USB drive or phone app to update. So it has prevented this situation from happening.

Considering the soundbar connects to a TV, console, phone, etc that are constantly releasing new versions and upgrades it makes sense to build in the function to something as simple as a soundbar to fix bugs and compatibility issues.

Samsung doesn't have the greatest track record with updates though so obviously you don't want to jump the gun on these. Hopefully not a Galaxy Watch 4 situation where they need to be mailed to Samsung to be reset because they didn't think about this during the design phase.

More hardware is sold at cost or at a loss, compensated with ads. I don't like the model either, but that's how it is.

If price isn't the only factor for some, it is for many who would otherwise not buy these things. Sellers picked up on that long ago.

Other comments wish to see regulations, they can't outwit those marketing tricksters. For profit enterprise can, and will offer more alternatives with bigger stamps about privacy, ad-less certified and whatnot.

While I agree with your broad statement, I have a TCL (with built-in Roku) TV that has a bug in the sound processing. Either it becomes very quiet, drops out completely, or comes in and out with a lot of stuttering. Happens irregularly, typically though not always weeks apart (though on no schedule I've identified), solved with a reboot of the TV (which of course can't just be done by turning it off and back on - you have to select "restart system" from the menus).

I owned it for at least six months before this occurred the first time.

In theory, I could do a USB update of the firmware and hope that fixes it. In practice, they want my serial number to let me download it. No thanks, I'll pass, even though it's never been connected to WiFi or Ethernet and never will be. I'll just reset it every once in a while.

> they want my serial number to let me download it.

Out of curiosity, why is that a problem to you? Granted, it is strange; I went through the process for my TCL Roku who's wifi stopped working (still not fixed, and now a second, 3yo TCL Roku has bricked itself. nice!)

I don't care in principle, but it's not just that. You have to give your serial, you have to boot the TV to the update, which then sends a challenge-response to their servers that must be correctly answered (you use your computer for this, so the TV isn't actually on the internet) for the upgrade to proceed.

I don't know what's in that data. And if I don't know what's in it, I'm not inclined to proceed; you might need my serial number to know if you're giving me the right software, but you don't need challenge/response for that. They sold me a cheap TV in hopes of collecting info on everything I watch, whether via Roku or just screen analysis. No thanks, and I have no interest in making it easier for them to break into my WiFi. I'm sure it would connect itself automatically to an open WiFi.

It's a little paranoid, but they really are out to get us (or at least our data).

A lot of consumer products ship with half-baked software and/or firmware. I wish Polk would fix the bug(s) that cause my soundbar to freeze and need a reboot several times per week. But it's an old product that's not longer sold, so I'm probably SOL.

To install an AI update you didn't ask for, do not need and cannot turn off?

> Why else would a soundbar need updates anyway?

Because for free you only get the first 15 levels of volume. If you want to get to 25, you need to pay a subscription.

I thought it was obvious... how does the seat heating work in your car? /s

Upvoted, but I'd pay a subscription to restrict a neighbor to the first 15 levels of volume out of 25 sometimes :)

We've solved long ago mass manufacturing challenges. Today's problem is to sell.

The problem usually aren't vendors. The problem usually are rightsholders - the movie/TV series industry still didn't get the Spotify memo, and the console game industry... well it's hard to say they don't have a point insisting on serious DRM given how rampant piracy becomes once there's an easy-enough root method available.

This is an undersold part of the story

It's not only media companies with DRM

IoT integrations like Alexa come with numerous security requirements that are often good ideas in theory but lead to hacky workarounds to meet certification requirements

Is this the Spotify that is a broadly unprofitable business, which is why it's so desperate to enter into new ones, or the Spotify that has DRM?

Spotify made 1 billion $ of profit in 2024. Hard to call that unprofitable.

My point is, it (and Youtube) killed piracy for the most part when it comes to music. Trading CDs full of mp3s used to be a sport in school a decade or two ago, these days why would anyone even want to invest the time when Spotify has everything anyway at a price point school kids can afford it?

Netflix used to become the same thing for movies, but the greed of studios killed it and now it's more expensive to have the large stream services than cable TV.

> the movie/TV series industry still didn't get the Spotify memo

I'm not sure that's really a memo I'd like them to get. We don't need more subscription services where you don't get to own you content and everything can be taken away at any time.

The massive success of Steam points otherwise.

Steam is a very convenient and beloved marketplace but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a solid DRM and anti-cheat measures built in.

Steam's DRM is a joke. Removing it is as simple as replacing a library.

It also doesn't cause (intentional) incompatibility problems like HDMI DRM does.

In what way? Console makers wouldn't gain anything by weakening DRM and making devices rootable. It's not like they are making that much money from device sales.

Of course then you have MS which basically just turned XBox into a cheap but totally locked down gaming PC (since there are very few Xbox exclusives these days).

Exactly. If your company's threat model considers its own customers as attackers, you're the baddies.

Not always. There's a time and a place for including end users in your threat model. These would include scholastic and carceral settings, where in both cases the end user may, as an example, desire access to resources that have been deemed inappropriate.

I disagree that a software in a school setting should see students as adversaries. Cheating is a much higher level problem that is better dealt with education and negative reinforcement. After all, those students will need to become participants in a society where we definitely don't want this level of mutual distrust around every corner.

But in any case, students are usually NOT the customer here even if they are the end user.

> scholastic and carceral

Same thing.

> deemed inappropriate

Ooh! Deeming! Can I deem too? Huh? Can I? I have a number of candidates.

Yup! Depends on what's a higher priority: Preventing catastrophic destruction of the device, OR, "protecting" some IP from ultra-small-scale piracy, even though ultimately anyone bent on piracy will be able to pirate anyway.

Clearly the latter is heavily preferred by most companies.

even with that "requirement" add special minimal recovery that can be booted with special buttons sequence by bootloader and allows some form of flashing signed firmware.

this should be especially trivial when your device have some usb ports.

you can keep all requirements of only newer or the same version of firmware to flash, with all refuse checks.

if you mess up, you can allow consumers to flash fix using regular pendrive

Sometimes they do it because it’s contractually required if they want to get access to proprietary standards, for example to allow them to play copy-protected content.

Copyright and patent have morphed into evils that drive anti-consumer and anti-competitive behavior, and have driven a “subscription” model that allows rent seekers to achieve their wildest dreams.

This is a good reason for manufacturers not to deny rollbacks, and a good reason not to have e-fuses.

Blow the fuse after its confirmed working. Or always allow a one version rollback.

Im not a fan of firmware lockdowns but I understand other people may value security over moddability.

At very least, it should be two partitions: previous firmware and current firmware.

Big part of the UBNT vs Cambium dispute. IIRC UBNT won in court, but just to prevent the Cambium firmware being installed on their hardware the next few firmware versions fixed it so that it cant be easily reverted.

Whats worse is that a lot of the affected hardware was near or EOL anyway, so Cambium was simply helping rescue devices headed for the scrap heap.

Blowing efuses is a destructive action and it should not be legal for a company to destroy parts of your electronic device that you paid for

I think the correct way to do this is to allow a rollback to the immediately previous working version. Before updating, write current firmware to failsafe data storage, then do the update. Then a firmware reset sends you back to the last good version. I'm pretty sure this is already done by many hardware and software manufacturers, such as me.

Is that applicable here? We're talking about speakers. For most/low security devices, a firmware rollback, or a firmware-download mode, are fine. In this case, it would probably have prevented millions in losses, with the risk being a...jailbroken speaker?

This practice should simply be illegal or at least make the manufacturer liable for a full refund plus interest. We shouldn't let manufacturers brick devices that we own.

Yes it does work… with an A/B update system.

Android systems can do this today. After an orderly shutdown of new software, then it can mark the new stuff as good and not allow older software to boot.

The funny part is the Samsung update that bricked a10 phones was a update to smart things, so it couldn't use the Android A/B capability to roll back lol

Yes, they do it, but usually in devices where it's basically part of DRM. I don't think engineers put that much though in security of soundbars.

But then at least have backup firmware of the one you want to update, so you can go one step back in case of errors.

Most companies don't do this because it's not one of their organizational priorities to have reliable updates. The infrastructure is usually custom built and maintained by a couple of folks who have a dozen other responsibilities they're told are more important. Testing is usually limited by hardware availability and release velocity. "One of every board revision we've ever produced" simply isn't available and waiting two days to run through every firmware version before you release updates is a conversational non-starter with the PMs.

There are commercial offerings (like mender.io, never used) that basically specialize in providing rock solid update infrastructure, but that again takes investment and organizational priority that doesn't exist for non-feature code.

I'm working on embedded systems and I've seen and heard some horror stories just on the device's side. Piles and piles of pre- and post-reboot shell scripts filled with race conditions against the system's services and themselves. When these break, if you're lucky a factory reset is enough to fix the system, if you're unlucky they become field bricks.

I'm trying to buck the trend though and on the new embedded system I'm working on, I've specifically designed the upgrade system to be as reliable as I can make it. It goes something like this:

- The new firmware is downloaded to the secondary application slot.

- Just prior to rebooting, the entire state data of the system is serialized as a document and stored on a flash partition.

- The upgrade flag is set, the system reboots and MCUboot does its thing.

- The new firmware finds out a upgrade happened, clears out all the data partitions, restores from the document and then clears out its partition.

The system is basically sanitized and restored after each upgrade. It's also the same codepath that handles saving and restoring the system's configuration by the end-user as well as settings management. If the document schema is for an older version, run the N-to-N+1 schema upgraders on it prior to applying instead of trying to patch the system in-place. If something goes horribly wrong, flip a jumper to trigger the heavy-duty sanitization that nukes the entire external flash (internal flash only contains the bootloader, primary application slot and factory parameters so it's essentially read-only once the application boots).

It might be hubris, but I hope it's good enough that I'll never see a bricked card that can't be resurrected by a factory reset with this project (assuming no hardware damage, no internal flash corruption and no bricking firmware getting signed with production keys seeping through the cracks despite all the checks in place).

That's a strong start, but be careful if your system ever evolves beyond a single logical processor. You'll need additional orchestration to have reliable updates in a distributed system with semi-independent processors. The update on one might succeed, while another fails. Depending on when the old images were produced, the new images might not be able to talk to each other. Depending on their relative roles in the system (e.g. one sets up the power supply or network for the other, or acts as the time master to do certificate validation) this may or may not be an easily fixable issue even if each system locally thinks it's okay.

This sort of functional interdependency has become increasingly common in embedded these days with heterogenous SoCs.

One thing I've seen before is to separate downloading from rebooting, broadcast the manifest for the updates between all the independent processors (all updates need a declarative manifest for so, so many reasons) to check locally, and only proceed when they all agree. Rollbacks are initiated if they can't see everyone with their expected versions afterwards.

Still isn't perfect either.

Fortunately, it's a single no-frills MCU running the Zephyr RTOS. It does communicate with another system, but they are so very loosely coupled to the point that we really don't care whatever is running on the other side.

I won't get into details, but in some of the horrors stories I've heard the distributed system happened to be entirely software in nature. There are plenty of creative ways to mess up an upgrade on a uniprocessor system.

add a watchdog timer to reboot automatically on failed upgrade as well.

We already have a watchdog timer. We could automatically trigger a factory reset after N bootloops following an upgrade, but it's up to the end-user to decide to flip the switch so we won't go there.

I kept the summary short and simple, partly because that product isn't out yet and also because I don't want to bury the lead with a lot of extraneous details that we do take into consideration, but are irrelevant to the big picture idea of an upgrade method that factory resets the card and restores its state with a codepath shared with the end-user save/reset and configuration mechanisms.

Different industry, but I (a long time ago) worked in a place that built scientific instruments.

> "One of every board revision we've ever produced"

The, ah, "special" people we had running engineering didn't even put in the work to be capable of the software querying the board rev. We had to play games like running certain motors past a position limit and seeing if there were limit switches there (or not) to guesstimate board revs.

I'm guessing stories like this are common.

I completely agree with both points and would add a third: design for offline use first (maybe treat every OTA update as - this might be the final version this device ever receives). Products should work perfectly fine without an internet connection, heck that's how they worked until 5-7 years ago. Core features should never depend on cloud services, and updates should be opt-in, not forced.

Offline first approach respects user autonomy and creates a natural safety net against bad updates. Plus, it means your product keeps working even when servers change or get shut down years later or a nuclear war happens. Sure, connectivity has benefits, but a speaker's main job is playing sound, not phoning home. Building offline-first also forces better engineering decisions about longevity and graceful degradation.

It's so hard to find any offline-first apps/devices nowawdays, which is sad to see in a world of algorithms and AI.

This whole situation reminds me of this: https://programmerhumor.io/linux-memes/thats-the-attitude-sa...

But you see, the problem with offline use is the manufacturer can't claw back value in the future. How will you keep shareholders happy if you can't arbitrarily push ads, hobble existing functionality, or impose a new subscription service?

Exactly - that's the flaw in trying to extract infinite growth from finite products. We've turned durable goods into rental services without consent, all to please quarterly earnings reports.

The tragedy is that "respecting customer ownership" is now seen as leaving money on the table rather than building lasting brand loyalty through quality.

I get the sense that #2 is viewed as a risk for DRM, given all the work that goes into preventing firmware downgrades to potentially insecure firmware. Specifically thinking of the Nintendo Switch[1] that goes so far as to blow fuses on each firmware upgrade!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23534793

eFuses were already on the Xbox 360/PS3 generation. Smartphones also use them to lock out proprietary photography algorithms if you unlock the bootloader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFuse

Sonos completely missed the boat on these two simple concepts as well.

See their new app debacle which coupled a non-reversible firmware update that made the hardware incompatible with the old app.

Great points! As an addendum to this, if #2 becomes untenable for whatever reason (such as a vulnerability in the factory firmware image), then this #3 would be good to strive for as well:

3. have a set of conditions to mark the running firmware image as "safe" and have it become the new fallback firmware image for this scenario. That way you can have a recently up-to-date firmware version constantly trailing the new ones

IMO this is a terrible idea for many reasons but the most important of which is: As a consumer I should have the right to have my device revert any b.s. update and get my setup to how it was the day I bought it.

So many companies have begun rolling out updates that makes the device I purchased call home before allowing any user functions and if/when that server goes down my device becomes a brick. This behavior essentially invalidates my ownership of the product and renders it to a service, provided at will by the manufacturer.

Your idea ensures my device will one day become a brick as soon as the manufacturer decides to mark their update requiring internet check-ins “safe”.

If you think I’m exaggerating check out Louis Rossmann‘s YouTube channel.

FWIW, my background is in B2B hardware and that's the perspective I am coming here with. Out of curiosity though, how do you weigh your value of control vs. security vulnerabilities? Modern speaker systems allow some form of wireless connectivity, so there is bound to be something and not all consumers will be savvy enough to keep up with security updates on their own.

My thoughts on security vulnerabilities is that they exist on any out of date firmware and that should be expected. I’ve never rolled back to factory settings and assumed that this device is now exposable on a DMZ.

Specifically I’m talking about consumer devices, which are almost always behind a NAT config + firewall. If your soundbar has a vulnerability it’s pretty much irrelevant if someone has already breached your network.

If we’re talking about enterprise networking equipment, I still stand by my concerns that the the owner should be able to revert back to stock but the burden of responsibility is on the technician configuring this device, not the manufacturer.

It seems to me the mentality has become that since end users tend to be bad at system administration, they shouldn't be allowed to do it, for their own good.

I reject this mentality. I don't think it's necessary or desirable to make it impossible for people to do things that have negative consequences for themselves. Put a "here there be dragons" warning on the firmware rollback, bootloader unlock, or similar dangerous operation and let people take responsibility for the outcome.

In the case of consumer devices, most people won't even try those things; those who do risk further problems for the chance of a better outcome. In the case of enterprise networking equipment, there's an IT department that, in theory has the skills and resources necessary to make good decisions about technology.

There will always be security issues, so "but security" is not a reason to prevent a consumer from doing whatever they want with a thing that they purchased from you (I'm of course just speaking morally/ethically here since there's no legal provisions preventing that in most places).

If I pay you for a product, you have no moral right to tell me what I can and cannot do with that product, up to and including messing with the firmware, installing known-bad firmwares, wiping it and building my own firmware, whatever I want. It's mine, I paid for it, stop violating my private property rights.

I think I agree with you generalle but just from a logics perspective, this is a bad argument:

> There will always be security issues, so "but security" is not a reason to prevent a consumer from doing whatever they want with a thing that they purchased from you

Just because there will always be security issues doesn't mean you shouldn't try to take care of the low hanging fruit.

Not the person you replied to, but I'm literally pulling wire again to avoid dealing with that dichotomy. And hardware developers that think OTW firmware updates are a neat idea >:(

Unfortunate you'd need to weave that all the way through the whole product stack in order not to end up in a state that looks like it's working at first glance but actually isn't doing what it is supposed to - like everything running but not showing an image, or everything running except networking is dead (-> also no further updates possible), or (remote) input devices, etc etc

From the manufacturer's point of view, a sufficient "safe" state is "can receive and apply a firmware update" -- worst case scenario you can always push out a new re-signed and renumbered version of the older working version.

Network connectivity would need to be in the set of checks to determine if an update was successful. Also, there should hopefully be QA. If you only have one smoke-test for a firmware image it should be whether or not it can upgrade/downgrade a new image from that one.

This is what everybody wants, but almost nobody does. Time to market, etc.

You need to have the firmware equivalent of a platform team.

It's common now for medium and large companies to have some variant of a cloud platform team: People responsible for shared practices, infrastructure, and processes in the cloud.

Smart hardware companies have done the same for decades. You have a firmware platform team that handles things like update protocols, recovery protocols, testing checklists, on-device OTA update architecture, and other critical functions.

When you're a company like Samsung that continuously releases and develops products this actually increases your time to market rather than decreasing it. You let each product team focus on the parts of the firmware that make their product valuable and free them from having to roll their own update systems

Samsung has multiple such teams. In my experience with the broader industry, platform teams are usually less than a dozen people who own millions of lines of mostly-external code. You don't usually get the luxury of careful deliberation and comprehensive testing because you're doing too busy putting out fires and chasing down manufacturer errata.

Samsung might be one of the good ones, but sadly most hardware manufacturers treat firmware and software like just another line item on the BOM. Like a screw or a silicon gasket: Source it from some "supplier," spoon it into the product somewhere on the assembly line, and then never touch it again. I've seen a hardware manufacturer that doesn't even use source control or branching. When they have a new hardware product, they take the software that is closest in functionality, hack it until it works with the new hardware, and then set the software back on the shelf until next time.

It's almost exact same thing as purchasing an insurance.

If the management folks have personal health insurance, surely they must understand the concept and the need. And this is a much better deal because unlike actual insurance this is more like "invest once, enjoy forever" type of thing. And multi-stage boot chain, recovery partition and staged rollouts are not some rocket science that needs some serious expertise.

Yet, here we go. Humans are not really rational actors after all, and collective humans are even less so.

I suppose the closest equivalent would be motherboards with dual BIOS.

There if something goes wrong during an update, you always have a backup BIOS with the previous version (not necessarily factory settings). If the system fails to boot, it automatically switches to the backup BIOS and restores the main BIOS to the last working version.

For this $1500 street price soundbar, I'm wondering whether they consciously decided not to invest in BOM cost or software effort that would help avoid bricking.

I'm not sure I understand various industries' conventions...

While interviewing for a principal engineer job, I was meeting individually with a bunch of team leads and managers, and one engineer asked how would I design firmware updating for the company's product (which was more critical, complex, and expensive than a soundbar).

I assumed they were probably trying to see whether I would throw in some robustness/resilience (not oversimplify it). So I sketched it out, while hitting notes like diffs, downloading and assembling in staging space, imperfect networking, having at least two firmware "slots", backing out upon boot loop or failure soon after boot, gradual deployment to installed base, contrasting with some less-critical consumer product firmware update practices, etc.

(Either that was a bad answer, or they got distracted thinking about something I'd said, because I was getting odd subconscious backchannel cues, and they were unresponsive when I tried elicit more requirements or guidance about what they were looking for. Maybe there was some standard embedded systems programmer canned answer that I was supposed to recite (analogous to the Web brogrammer 'system design' interview), and they couldn't think of how to nudge me towards the shibboleth without saying it?)

#2 has been a godsend in the custom/HEDT PC market. Many expensive motherboards now come with a "dual BIOS" system that gives you an older known working image to boot from, in case flashing a new version broke something that can't be easily undone.

Another amazing feature is the ability to flash a BIOS from an unbootable system. You insert a flash drive with the firmware file into a USB port, press a hardware button and the BIOS gets updated, even without a CPU socketed.

This is a requirement for any motherboard I purchase now. I have enjoyed the ability to use AMD CPUs that are slightly outside of the generational support or enable features I am not promised.

Without the ability to flash from USB without a CPU doing this requires keeping spare CPUs that will work just to flash.

HEDT = High-End DeskTop, which (until 2022) referred to CPUs with more cores and separate sockets compared to ‘normal’ consumer CPUs, apparently.

https://tweakers.net/reviews/10334/het-einde-van-de-high-end... (Dutch)

As a user/customer, if I'm part of that 1% with an issue and get the same sort of "canned" response you see on the mentioned thread, I feel like me as a user doesn't matter. I guess the next step is calling customer support and then having the person on the phone making me go through their checklist of things I've already tried and again, feeling like this is of no use.

I think it usually takes a big rollout for these big companies to actually "hear" their users.

The second point is the really important one here. Mistakes happen, having a factory reset that actually works is crucial to avoiding extremely expensive recalls.

I'm reminded of the time a random NPR station accidentally bricked the infotainment systems on thousands of Mazdas and because there was no factory reset feature they had to spend millions replacing head units. That's just bad design.

Indeed a golden factory firmware version that will be booted automatically if all else fails and that provides minimum connectivity is crucial.

I wonder if that opens a threat vector from a security point of view? If an attacker knows that the golden firmware has some critical vulnerability which they can exploit easily, they can activate it at will by bricking the device and waiting for it to restart.

They could, and that's been a way for attackers to "jailbreak" devices and load custom firmware in the past. Though for the sake of reducing eWaste and enabling device repurposing and reuse, I do think this is the best path for firmware-updatable devices.

Attackers aren't usually in a position to reset firmware, and if they are they might as well do a whole host of other things like replace the device with a compromised one. I don't think there is much of a point to trying to protect from that.

The golden firmware should reset to the old/first firmware of the device and nothing else. Keep it as simple as possible and restore the customer device back to an operational state.

The problem comes in if that old firmware has security holes, particularly if the device is network-connected.

The reset would be done physically. If there was some danger of the device being exploited after being reset, advice could be included for those performing the reset to prevent this. For example, to not connect it to a network and to manually perform an update to the latest version with some physical media.

> will be booted automatically if all else fails

I prefer to keep the factory firmware reset to a manual process that requires user intervention.

For example, holding down the reset button for 10 seconds after plugging the device in.

In my experience, it's not a good idea to have a device automatically roll back firmware and erase user data after failed boots. These mechanisms get triggered too easily during certain power outages (power comes on then goes off just long enough to cause multiple failed boots) or when users are doing simple things like rearranging their power cables.

Ability to reset to original out of the box firmware is not only about failsafe. It's also a protection from "bug fixes" taking away features you had out of the box.

I'm still pissed off about LG removing record to disk option from our TV after an upgrade. I've only connected it to internet & upgraded assuming some of those bug fixes resolved few dlna issues otherwise it's always on internet block list.

The important feature here I would insist on is to let the user decide when to do a firmware update. Not the other way round. That's the way to build a good consumer relationship.

Why on earth a sound bar needs to update its firmware? Why firmware needs to be in a couple of tweeters and a woofer? It should basically output audio from an input source.

Another good one is; please always split any security updates from feature changes (and backport the updates per whatever versioning policy you have for those lagging the latest).

After many years of being burned I always delay system level non-security -related updates at least several days after launch to mitigate the risk.

> 2. A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state.

Do you mean like a physical button? That could work, though I'm not sure I've ever seen it. Holding down power for 10 seconds (or whatever) usually just erases user data, but doesn't reset firmware. Are you aware of any device that does this? But does it require some meta-firmware to roll back the firmware? What if that meta-firmware has a security flaw and needs to be updated? And that update is faulty?

If you're talking about a code sent from your servers to devices to reset, that seems like asking for the impossible. If a firmware update bricks the device, that may very well brick its ability to receive codes at all.

In both situations, it starts to feel like a problem of infinite regress...

Reverting to factory state seems riskier than last known good state. You could run into things like TLS root authorities not being recognised, deprecated cipher suites, etc. Just because that version worked a decade ago, it doesn’t mean it’s compatible with the world today.

> Reverting to factory state seems riskier than last known good state.

Reverting to factory state is the last resort. You don't have users do it unless there is no other good state to return to on the device.

> Just because that version worked a decade ago, it doesn’t mean it’s compatible with the world today.

That's why I said you have to include this in your test procedures.

When you're planning for the long term you can accommodate for these things on your servers.

> > Just because that version worked a decade ago, it doesn’t mean it’s compatible with the world today.

> That's why I said you have to include this in your test procedures.

You can’t test the world. Even if your servers can correctly respond to requests from old software, it doesn’t mean that the network between you will too.

Networking surely does introduce complications especially when TLS is now basically considered required and cert lifetimes are being limited for 'security' reasons. However most consumer devices have functionality, often their primary/most important function, to which network connectivity isn't even needed. For instance, a speaker producing sounds.

In the factory reset state, things should have a USB flash drive firmware install route which could be used to bring back working root certs, etc.

Of course again this depends on whether the mfg is worried about DRM bypass hacks that are found later on in the factory firmware.

I'd support legislation to issue stiff fines for devices that can't be factory reset at any time, with the only exception being for directly-consumer-benefitting anti-theft (so, iCloud lock is okay).

But can’t you? Sure, factory firmware from many years ago might have issues, but should still work well enough to allow you to fully offline upgrade to a newer working version.

I think all the OP was saying, is: Suppose you’re releasing firmware version N for some widget you make. Now, for all versions V in (0..N-1), verify that applying N to V works correctly.

> 2. A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state. Some sequence that resets the device completely back to the way it was when it came out of the box, firmware included, as a last resort.

That's a nifty mechanism that also allows downgrade attacks, so it has cybersecurity implications that may or may not be acceptable. Furthermore, it might not be practical or even be possible to restore the system to factory condition due to technical reasons.

The team next door allows its systems to downgrade to a previous minor version with a mandatory factory reset. It however refuses downgrading to a previous major version because it implies the bootloader was upgraded or the storage was repartitioned and they really don't want to rollback that.

Except when it comes to firmware, downgrade "attacks" are not attacks at all but just owners making use of THEIR devices. The real attack is the company trying to retain control over something they have sold.

But .. but then they can escape the extortion to a working state..

This is the de facto playbook for one of the Mega-Evil Corp.'s CPE firmware (Gateways, IPTV receivers, etc...).

New firmware is pushed in phases 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%, 50% then full scale.

Each stage has some delay incorporated for acquisition/application and then for telemetry (including support contacts from affected accounts) to determine impact and allow for regression fixes.

The other reason they would phase launches is because of firmware builds being used across multiple CPE models and hardware revisions, where only a small subset of hardware could wind up being problematic, but not discovered until deployment.

When you have millions of devices deployed, even a fraction of devices having an issue can create a shit storm on the support side of things.

It all seems so obvious once you know to think about it.

> "A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state"

A failsafe firmware reset back to a safe and secure state yes. The factory state is not necessarily that, so no.

I think devices should keep a last known good state firmware but keeping a full factory state immutable firmware would be irresponsible for many usecases.

What hardware reset typically does, in my experience, is to reinstall the last firmware you installed. Many don't even have the space to keep some original and/or safe image in addition. I'm working on one device where we delete much of the existing system to make space for even downloading a new firmware image. It's wild.

iirc for computers doesn't gigabyte have some kind of patent on dual bios design (active vs backup bios chips). I'm sure there are other ways to implement it but I think thats true.

I bet, but I'm talking about devices where the manufacturer tries to shave off every cent to price their products competitively. And then you have big meetings where you have to push back on storage being reduced by a further 2 MiB. At least that's something I've seen working in the embedded space. Storing an additional firmware image, be it only a few megabytes, is unfortunately often off the table there.

> 1. Staged rollout of firmware update

Especially if there is an internal testing stage before actually rolling out to production. It's possible that the users seeing the bricked devices are in fact limited to the initial wave, but the damage is already done.

> A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state.

Or perhaps to the very first released firmware version. This way they don't have to support updating from any version to the latest, just from the first one.

Also a dev or dogfood population of devices used by employees

Both are very reasonable features, of course. Here are (some of) the real-world challenges to their implementation:

#1: Requires competence, and/or management that isn't too focused on velocity and features to listen to their engineers' warnings about exactly the sort of problem being discussed here.

#2: Many firmware updates explicitly and specifically want to strip away features that the hardware shipped with (by introducing DRM, paywalls, etc.), so see the comment about management above.

[dead]

I made the mistake of connecting my bose noise cancelling earbuds to the phone app so I could disable autoplay. They updated without any warning and now they won't charge properly and the noise cancelling sucks. It used to be amazing. Never connect anything and never take updates unless you need a specific fix.

I swear AirPods in general are just less reliable than they used to be too. I feel like I need to be doing incantations for them to work sometimes, whereas I recall them feeling like magic compared to BT headphones I've used in the past, the way they would seamlessly pair, start/stop music when you pull one out, etc.

It reminds me of some discussion I was seeing the other day about how the dynamic island on the newer iPhones is way buggier than it was at launch. Someone suggested that this happens because the S-tier engineers are tasked with building these things to blow everyone out of the water at launch, and then B-tier developers are tasked with maintaining them for the following years, at which point stuff starts regressing.

Build quality too.

My iPhone XR that I am deliberately keeping on lower iOS for jail breaking reasons that when comparing the thunderbolt port to the iPhone 13.

The quality lacks so much that I am unable to listen to music with a wired headphone adapter.

Any slight jiggle of the adapter will cause it to disconnect. I don't want to use BT headphones.

Lightning ports very rarely fail or get loose - it’s more robust than usb-c in that regard, which is already a high bar - it’s probably dust in the port

Not at all. I've cleaned, air-dusted it. The phone is six months old. I've taken it to the Apple store and they won't do anything.

And now that they've disconnected the thunder-bolt adapter too.

I know the quality is less than my XR. I own both and I have a box of three thunder bolt to audio cables, all have the same issues.

FYI: The Bose app also phones home with your media metadata by default. There's an option to disable it tucked away on the same screen as the Privacy Policy.

"never take updates unless you need a specific fix"

Weirdly, serious groups, among them Signal seem to be clueless about this rule. In Signal, in their security concious context, this is a bit of puzzle to me why. They have updates every few days sometime, but no more than 2 weeks pass by without their update banner appears in the most prominent spot in their desktop app: above all of your recent chats, with background higlight to pop out even more, if someone would miss in important messaging. Like if this was the most important thing for everyone around - so much that it is made not possible to turn off -, to keep their software very very fresh, the freshest possible! It is generously allowed not to download updates immediatly, but that's it. The alert is always there.

But there are so little changes between updates. Once I checked the history, dominantly marginal things. Yet, the prime spot in their UI is occupied with these marginal things too, all the time (it must not be critical update in every few days because that frequency of security risks would be too worrysome for an app like Signal!).

And this is just one of the examples out there, there are too many similar ones (serious or marginal use apps alike).

Looks like software engineers lost sense throughout time, thinking the central spot of the user's mind is occupied like their own with the maintenance and state of their precious product. Not the task at hand where some whatever tool should help, without grabbing the attention away from the task all the time (also with all those frequent 'helpful' pop-up tips many software employ - I am looking at you Teams as prime perpetrator - for self advertisement, that is an other senseless narcissistic attitude).

"We understand how frustrating an unresponsive soundbar can be."

Isn't this about the most condescending thing they can start with?

Hyperbole and condescension is the mainstay of corporate-speak. Everything is "incredibly <rosy_adjective_for_subject_of_condescension>", "nothing more important than <thing_they_are_guilty_of_not_doing>" and "hearts go out to <people_suffering_due_to_their_actions>". Makes me want to puke.

The made the “difficult decision” to reduce headcount. It’s “not a reflection” on individual performer’s merits.

It smells like corporate communication training. "Affirm the customer. Express that you hear their concerns and empathize"

Does this actually work on anyone though. It just always feels so artificial that it's off putting.

"... and that's why we did it!"

I hate smart TVs. Why put all the functionality in one device when a small part of it is going to become obsolete real soon while the TV part will continue to work for a decade or more. I buy dumb TVs and a separate "smart" component like Roku that can be replaced as easily as a shoelace.

My strategy is to buy cheapest TV on the market (which is usually an ad loaded Crapware like hisense) and then never ever connect it to the internet but use HDMI to plug into a dedicated computer.

Basically all I need in a TV apart from the display is an HDMi. It works amazing, been using like this over 10 years now.

I have a Hisense, and the one that I got (65U8G) isn't full of crapware and has a great picture. I played the panel lottery and won.

They do, of course, sell some very low-end sets.

> My strategy is to buy cheapest TV on the market

Unfortunately if you're a stickler for image quality this isn't an option. You can still not connect it to the internet of course, but if you're buying a high end TV there's no way to avoid all the other modern TV bullshit.

Namely needing to change the settings on every input for every source type. The first few days of a new TV is a regular trip into five layers of menus as you watch a new source combination for the first time (HDR Blu-Ray, Dolby Vision streaming movie, high framerate game) and have to turn off motion smoothing, turn off sharpening, turn the whites back down from basically blue to 6500K. I mean christ, there are still TVs out there shipping today that turn on overscan by default. Analogue TV broadcasts ended in 2012 here!

Yes I’m always very surprised that people deal with the awful software that are on the TVs.

I use an Apple TV which, while a relatively expensive solution, has a clean interface and integrates well with the rest of my hardware. Plus rarely are there ads being shoved in your face in the OS/Home Screen. Apps can still do as they like of course.

The software on mine is pretty good, but I find myself using a PS5 for media streaming these days.

This post is about a soundbar, not a smart TV.

Do you find dumb TV software (dynamic backlight controls for example) and hardware on par with smart tvs?

I go for smart tv's that can be dumb. As long as it reliably uses my input each time it starts and doesn't try to overlay anything, that's all I need.

Once or twice a year I'll go trough firmware update notes, connect it to the internet if there's things that can improve my "dumb" usage (fixes/improvements to refresh rate, Dolby xyz, etc.), then disconnect it from the internet again.

Same.

I bought a couple of Chromecasts for that reason but they're supposedly discontinued now.

They're discontinued and a week or so ago a certificate expired and millions of Chromecast V2 aren't working.

I lump modern TV bullshit (crappy "smart" features, motion smoothing, horrible default settings) in with modern car bullshit (huge touchscreens everywhere, the near total death of real physical controls).

Everyone you speak to at best is ambivalent and at worst vehemently hates it. And yet there's no sign of it slowing down. It's baffling.

Samsung sucks. Their customer support is a joke. And this is across the world. Right now I am back in Brazil, just got a new samsung product. It was delivered non-functioning. Hours since I submitted a ticket. No answer. Talking to a real human being is impossible.

reclameaqui.com.br is usually helpful.

Their hardware is technically great. It is the software that sucks.

It seems that way. The camera on the S24U seems to be a decent piece of engineering which is totally hosed by awful software and a sensor that can't be accessed at full res by third party apps.

hard disagree, i gave my anecdote as a top-level comment, but they have an across-vertical problem in their company, but why fix it if they make money

It was a dishwasher, without any smart capability. Probably just a very simple micro-controller.

Their phones are alright but everything else they make sucks

I have a samsung "smart" TV, and a few years back it started interrupting the DVD I was trying to watch every 15 minutes or so to tell me to check my internet connection. My internet was fine, but whatever server it was phoning home to had apparently gone down.

I ended up factory resetting the TV to make it forget my wifi credentials, and I just haven't put it back online since then. I haven't regretted it at all.

I think mine is compatible with the SammyGo custom firmware, so I might install that one of these days, and then maybe I'll reconnect it to my network. But, for now, I just have a PC connected to it and manage everything there.

Should be codified by law:

  - If a firmware can be updated, it must keep a minimum ROM feature so it can be recovered. 
  - No device should be updated without the *owner* explicit intention to do so.
  - Full docs must be released if the vendor stops supporting it.

> - No device should be updated without the owner explicit intention to do so.

Ahh! But you are just leasing the software!! Samsung is technically the owner!!

  - if the manufacturer retains some form of ownership after "sale", it is obligated to provide free repairs/replacements for the duration of the contract

If it's a lease maybe it should cost money, nobody would buy these stupid pieces of shit if they all had $1 / year peppercorns attached

In EU, Cyber Resilience Act requires automatic updates, so the second point is moot.

Most owners want just plug and play, so it makes sense.

Even third point is pretty moot. We don't do that for hardware, why for software... A component is no longer manufactured? Tough luck, hopefully you stockpiled it.

Um, that's not what "moot" means.

> No device should be updated without the owner explicit intention to do so.

I want to be able to opt-in to updates of my devices with official updates without the fear of them being turned into useless e-waste...

Your second condition practically guarantees proliferation of exploitable IoT devices.

> No device should be updated without the *owner* explicit intention to do so.

That point has practical issues, because most consumer electronic customers are technically dumb.

Consequently, you end up with a long-tail of deployed device firmware versions, which makes support a nightmare (fix this external integration that broke... across 20 different versions).

I'd phrase it more in terms of:

   - Every device must include an option for owners to disable automatic firmware updates.

>That point has practical issues, because most consumer electronic customers are technically dumb.

It's a speaker that worked fine until Samsung unilaterally broke it. I don't think the customers are the dumb ones here.

The original comment and the reply are talking generally, not specifically about this one case.

Customers will gladly use an outdated browser or OS with known exploits to access their most sensitive information. Automated updates are necessary evil. Even a smart speaker with a vulnerability could end up as part of a botnet.

Then we should strive to improve computer literacy. I think technological solutions should still ultimately empower their users.

I can only assume you’ve never worked in desktop support if you think that is something the general populace is remotely interested in. Smartphones are a step in the right direction for the tech illiterate and uninterested. There is zero reason to give lay users enough rope to hang themselves with despite that being the opposite of what I or most users of this site would like for ourselves.

I actually did work with customer support in my very first job :) We had a limited IT crew, so programmers on-site would often go to the users' office to help with software and hardware issues.

My anecdote is the opposed of yours: they were interested in knowing why something wasn't working, but only as long as you're willing to be patient, talk slowly, and explain any unknown concepts to them, if required.

Insulting them, or just telling them it's their fault something wasn't working would be a sure way to get a negative reaction instead.

Fair enough. Many of my end users were indeed eager or at least willing to learn as you say. A non-insignificant portion were not though, and those are the ones I'm speaking of. But that was also a professional environment. Your interested users had some obligation to the company and the support of professionals like yourself to guide them.

Additionally, I don't think these people are stupid, and I'm not demeaning them. They simply do not care to know and that's perfectly fine. I wouldn't demean someone for not understanding how their car works, or even failing to get their oil changed. The computer is a tool to file taxes and shop on amazon for most people, they have a million other priorities in their lives that come before making sure windows is up to date, let alone actually considering its security. It's the job of these companies to ensure their technology can be used safely without consideration by the end user.

> I don't think these people are stupid, and I'm not demeaning them.

Sorry if it sounded like I was implying you thought that, or called them stupid, I didn't mean it that way. That statement wasn't trying to 'refute' anything you said either - it was just expanding on my anecdote of what I saw that it worked or not, whether in a professional environment or somewhere else.

Now, replying to your recent post,

> It's the job of these companies to ensure their technology can be used safely without consideration by the end user.

I think we just hard disagree here. I believe ultimately the user is/should be on control of how their own computer is used.

No worries, I agree with you in principle and for my own usage but, in practice I don’t want my grandma to have to think about security at all and I’d prefer if there were very few ways she could be social engineered to circumvent what security is there.

Beyond that I think total control can still be achieved in the realm of hobbyists who can run Linux or flash alternative firmwares etc.

I think this is completely rational given a realistic threat model. As a customer, I've had my browser hacked exactly never, but examples of feature downgrades from vendors abound. Vendors are a much more serious attack vector than a random hacker.

Also the number of times I want my speaker or TV to go online is zero, while Samsung apparently wants that number to be greater than zero for both products. So it is frequently the companies that put us in this situation in the first place.

I would assume your browser automatically applies security updates in the case of 0day exploits, no?

Like I said, automatic updates are an evil. But the general populace will absolutely defer every security update until the end of time so long as they don't have to spend five minutes waiting to get to their desktop.

Obviously vendors enshitify their products via firmware updates and potentially brick devices or introduce new vulnerabilities but, it's ludicrous to pretend that the general populace are good stewards of their internet connected devices or that they ever will be. They simply do not care, they never will, and its up to the rest of us to design products for the lowest common denominator if we want protect end users and have a safer internet.

> Customers will gladly use an outdated browser or OS with known exploits to access their most sensitive information.

Because the alternative is worse. It's up to companies to provide security-only updates that customers can trust and will CHOOSE to install.

[dead]

A law? As an engineer, I really don’t want a bunch of technologically-inept congressmen telling me how I have to build software, firmware, or hardware.

As if engineers actually get to make decisions about software, firmware, or hardware. Ha! That is truly hilarious.

I would rather have a bunch of mildly responsive legislators setting the boundaries of what is acceptable than a bunch of middle-managers trying to justify their salary to their private equity overlords.

An aside: I'm seeing an uptick of class-awareness in HN and that's worth celebrating. It seems "all it took" was the mass-layoff apocalypse.

As an engineer you should be familiar with laws and regulations. Try creating health care software without regarding HIPAA, for example, should make for lots of fun and lawsuits!

>As an engineer

Construction, hardware, radiation, dam and wastewater engineers are highly regulated professions. Do you take responsibility for bugs in your technology? Do you have insurance for your mistakes in professional work? Are you an engineer or a coder? Are you certified to do your job or just passed a boot camp?

As an end user I don’t really care what you want. I want the thing I paid money for to keep working after you’ve disappeared. Otherwise, in my estimation you’ve stolen from me.

Prison time is an appropriate remedy for theft.

Found the guy who wants to talk about traffic lights without a license.

https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...

Not a good year so far for Samsung. Just under two months ago on a large number of their TVs with voice control it started only recognizing commands in Russian. It took them several days to get that straightened out.

It was educational. I learned that I completely suck at trying to speak Russian. I could type "channel 4" into Google Translate on my iPad, press the Mic button on my TV remote, and press the speak icon on Google Translate and the channel would change.

But no matter how many times I listened to Google Translate say that in Russian I could not manage to match it close enough the TV to accept it.

Assuming English is your first language, I can probably guess which specific parts of the "channel 4" Russian pronounciation gave you trouble. I'm sure your effort was valiant, but the language is just so different compared to English

List price $2,000. What was the update supposed to improve/fix?

Probably some new AI/tracking/ad delivery features

It's a speaker system. It plays sound. Why could it possibly have AI, tracking, or ad delivery?

> It's a speaker system. It plays sound. Why could it possibly have AI, tracking, or ad delivery?

To recognize what you listen to, build a profile, feed it back to Samsung, which will use it in deciding what crap to display on your Samsung TV (and any other devices) associated to the same profile. For all we know it's even listening to your conversation in the room, I mean, it's Samsung - they literally do this:

https://entertainment.ie/trending/yes-your-samsung-smart-tv-...

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/samsungs-warning-our-smart...

How much benefit could that bring versus burning reputation and losing it all? These companies are so big and powerful but time and time again they keep on forgetting that they can't exist without the users and when users start leaving it's hard to reverse that trend.

Burning Reputation?

It's so out in the open if you know, or more likely, worked in media advertising.

Their competitor, Vizio, owns iSpot[1] which is, in my opinion, the best in the space.

Samba TV[2] is it's nearest competitor and they have their hooks into 24 Smart TV brands globally[3]. These brands are listed on their website as Philips, Sony, Toshiba, beko, Magnavox, TCL, Grundig, Sanyo, AOC, Seiki, Element, Sharp, Westinghouse, Vestel, Panasonic, Hitachi, Finlux, Telefunken, Digihome, JVC, Luxor, Techwood, and Regal.

[1] https://ispot.tv/

[2] https://www.samba.tv/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_TV#Customers

There is no reputation to burn, they're well known to do this kind of stuff by anyone bothering to look it up, and nearly nobody looks it up anyway.

It's a pity because I liked some of their hardware in the past (an NX camera I still have, hard disks back in the IDE stone age, 3 LCD screens back from when they were a novelty - they only had a VGA connector) but I just stay away from them now. But 0.01% of their customers staying away is completely insignificant when they consider the profit opportunity of violating our privacy.

The idea of people getting upset at their tech spying on them is almost laughable at this point.

Come on, did you read more than just the headlines?

> Samsung's spokeswoman continued: " Should consumers enable the voice recognition capability, the voice data consists of TV commands, or search sentences, only. Users can easily recognize if the voice recognition feature is activated because a microphone icon appears on the screen."

So it is not like it was listening without your knowledge. Only when you use the voice features is the data being sent over. Like with every other online service. As much as I don't like samsung, this is a bullshit reason to hate them.

And why provide two links basically saying the same about the same story?

Their competitor, Vizio, owns https://www.ispot.tv/ which is used for ad delivery tracking.

It's much more reliable and precise than the familiar Nielsen ratings: since you know the total audience of X% TV households in a zipcode (which you know demographics of race/income/household size based upon), and Vizio TVs account for Y% of all TVs sold for households with incomes between A and B, and C and D you can get a confidence interval of how many people ACTUALLY saw your TV advertisement.

Samsung was/is probably trying to do something similar: All sound in your TV pipes through their home theater system, so they can "Shazam" whatever media you're watching, regardless of the source (OTT, OTA, hell even YouTube or a Downloaded Torrent on your laptop hooked up via HDMI) and phone home.

Broadcast high frequency tunes in the background for other devices to pick up to identify you.

Dogs hate this one simple trick

on android you can install SoniControl Firewall to "see" the ultrasonics in your house. Try it with all tvs and things off, then try it with the TV on, youtube videos, and so on.

Pixel tracking works better if the TV is connected to the internet. I remember samsung as one of the companies, where, if your TV was not ever given a wifi connection, it would attempt to connect to any open network to do what it needed to do. This sounds unlawful, so i don't know the veracity, but anyhow - if the TV is online, it can just send a half dozen pixels at known locations back home and there is a database of "content pixels at timestamps" and they match the half dozen pixel values to the database and know what you're watching to some degree of certitude.

but for things like dumb panels older TVs and the like, ultrasonics still work.

Insert ads into the music the customer is playing, using AI to find pauses, and track what songs they're playing for data gathering?

> using AI to find pauses,

You can just use regular math to do this. We've been doing it for 30 years now. You don't need a trumped up overpriced garbage LLM to do anything for you here.

Yeah but why would anyone actually buy that then?

You are asking the right question, but to the wrong person.

You're not thinking like a true capitalist.

Sure, you got your $2,000 out of the customer. But what about the money you could be making between now and the next time the customer buys something?

You're giving up on tens of dollars a year by not tormenting the people who gave you money already and might do so again.

Use the speakers as a microphone! WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY!

They usually already have mics to do automatic EQ calibration

Didn't know that, thanks. Then speakers are actually a pretty big data source. I bet most people don't assume their speakers can be listening. I wonder if you can get internet connection over bluetooth aux or what'd be the best way to get someone to let you send data home on a speaker.

i did some cursory digging, but i don't really want to read the A2DP or AVRCP specifications to see how much data is allowed in the non-audio payload. Besides, PAN exists, but i imagine you have to do something on your phone to allow it.

Most of these expensive things also have wifi, though, don't they?

> Connect your devices and control everything with our soundbar that integrates your favorite voice assistants and smart services like Built-in Alexa², Chromecast³, Airplay 2⁴ and more.

> 802.11ac

https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/home-the...

yeah, they have wifi, so they don't even need bluetooth hacks.

Because customers love AI! /s

Few things over the past few years have infuriated me as much as tracking and advertising being introduced at the OS level, especially on TVs. I'm looking at you, LG! I will gladly pay more for a TV that doesn't try to advertise Roku's streaming service to me or track my kids' watch history. Seems like they are few and far between, though.

The best thing we have been able to come up with is leaving the TV itself disconnected from the WiFi and using an Apple TV for smart features/streaming. I'm sure they're still gathering data but it's at least not as blatant. It's a real crapfest for the consumer at the moment.

This is sound advice for keeping yourself free from malware as well. Many of these TVs end up running super vulnerable junk that doesn’t get updated and has known exploits.

I’ve had two devices end up with malware like this. A Sony blue ray player that was uploading 2gig a month before I caught it and a Samsung tv.

It’s worth mentioning you have to block or change WiFi credentials. The device with malware may attempt to connect to any known wifi even if you disable it on the device. I get 45000 auth attempts a day from my tv.

> I will gladly pay more for a TV that doesn't try to advertise Roku's streaming service to me or track my kids' watch history. Seems like they are few and far between, though.

Plug in an Apple TV?

This just swaps one locked-down company for another. You're still at the mercy of a giant corp, and worse it's unlikely to work well with my linux laptop and Android phone whereas at least Samsung tries (and often fails). A better solution is needed. I buy Sceptre TVs when I can, though for a "big screen" there aren't great options.

That's... not a TV, it just has TV in its name.

Apple TV is just as bad (and in the context of the OP's statement, would be the same as a Roku box or an Amazon Firetv).

Yeah, we do use Apple TV because at the very least if they are collecting our data, they're not using it to advertise directly to us on the same device. My parents have a Roku TV and the number of ads it serves up directly on the device leave me feeling nauseous.

Anyone who uses smart tv features and connects one directly to the internet is insane.

Id extend that to all smart TVs and all 'smart' devices as such.

Isn't the answer always "bugfixes and increased stability"? :)

Bricking a device does make it really stable and bugfree. Sadly also featureless.

The TOS probably has a line about no features being guaranteed somewhere so that's fine.

The laziness that's become now-standard for release notes is insane.

It's not laziness, it's a tactic.

You don't want to provide more info than absolutely necessary, that could be bad from security and legal perspective.

Also, if you don't include more info, people tend to ask you less questions to clarify.

Isn't that a bit insane for a soundbar? How can those things produce any decent bass without volume?

They come with (shitty) subwoofers (crossover probably something hilarious like 100Hz).

Someone's promotion packet?

All the bugs they had no time to fix to bring it to market faster ;)

I just snapped after 2014. Used to be a Samsung consumer with their TVs, galaxy phones, security cams, etc... Their hardware wasn't that bad. It was the software update either buggy or bricking my devices that threw me off. I swear never to allow another Samsuck (my little girl coined that) device in my home and family lives again.

My Samsung printer is ok. Thankfully it doesn't get updates. My only Samsung product. After that HP bought them and turned them to the dark side.

I have been boycotting samsung since ~2014; because of my experience with two, brand new, ~$1000 samsung devices, neither a phone. Their customer service blew me off, because both devices had intermittent issues. I tell people to avoid the company and its products.

both devices were malfunctioning within the first month.

1) 4k60 32" monitor, the power button always flaked and it would randomly shut off, thus necessitating unplugging and plugging it back in, 2-3 times a day. customer service: "unplug all monitor cables and plug just power in. what is on the screen? oh, then it's fine. have a nice day!"

2) Refrigerator. Intermittent fan issues were the reason i called. i ended up having to replace, for cause, the heating elements in the refrigerator side as well as the fans due to ice damage to the impellers; then the ice machine started leaking inside the freezer door somewhere, and that leak would freeze on the bottom of the freezer and push the door open, letting water just drip on my floor for hours, nearly damaging the subfloor. I also had to replace the motherboard. So now i have a water-less, ice-less refrigerator.

i could go on about how their SD cards are quite fast but don't last long if you have them in outdoor devices (like dashcams, trail cams, security cameras) - the only raspberry pi i've ever had to throw away had a samsung SD card in it that overheated to the point of contact burns - i went to unplug it to reboot it and received a welt from the SD card for my troubles.

I'm just one person, but read enough anecdotes and you can ignore them all!

I had to stop getting Samsung Pro Endurance microSD cards after three in a row failed after a few months (write speed dropped below 2 MB/s). This was after the update to the blue and white color scheme (and higher endurance figures, hah); the older black, red, and white ones worked great and I fortunately got over a dozen of them.

Sometimes you have to hack their support script to get a replacement or a refund. After the first support call if you don't get what you want and it happened again, Call back to open a new support ticket. Pretend to walk through their steps but not do anything, and when they asked what was on the screen I would say it's blank and not turning on.

or - and this is gunna sound crazy - I don't compromise my ethics and lie to a company to get "service". Instead, i'll loudly tell everyone that Samsung is a crappy company that doesn't care about their customers.

If they sell you a defective product, and the support is also defective, then you need to take a different route.

i'm the "SME" / tech support everyone asks before they buy expensive things, so if someone's looking for a new fridge or whatever "don't buy samsung" has cost samsung more money than i could cost them by lying to them, even if, by all rights, they ought make me whole.

They had their chance to deal with my legitimate grievances, now they can deal with me badmouthing them.

I don't feel ethically obliged to go along with shitty customer support.

See you on Louis Rossman later today!

One of the first things I thought of when reading the title.

Good motivation for a PSA:

This happens more and more often, and there is a fairly easy + popular workaround (which also comes with 99% ad blocking as a bonus). Just either set up pi-hole locally OR use a hosted DNS service that does essentially the same thing.

Main idea: Ads, updates, etc. typically (not always) need to resolve hosts before connecting to servers. Simply resolve these hosts to 0.0.0.0 instead of a real IP.

Arguments for pi-hole or other local solution: Free. Private.

Arguments for hosted solution: No set-up headache, no local raspberry pi or other machine to maintain. Overall a bit simpler.

Guide for blocking updates after the service is set up (I just went through this a month or two ago to block updates to my LG TV):

Step 1: Search around for servers that correspond to updates for your device.

Step 2: Test these lists; realize that they are often incomplete.

Step 3: Shut your device off. Open pi-hole like service, and watch queries live. While doing so, turn on your device (and if you have the option, check for updates).

Step 4: Put all of the queried hosts you see into your block list.

Step 5: Later, you may encounter broken functionality. When this happens, look at your logs, and see which server(s) were blocked at that moment. Remove only those from the blocklist. (And cross your fingers that the manufacturer doesn't use the same hosts for typical functionality and updates.)

> Step 5: Later, you may encounter broken functionality. When this happens, look at your logs, and see which server(s) were blocked at that moment

Eventually you end up with advertisements being served because the application refuses to show the content without the advertisements.

So let me cut back to your main idea:

> Main idea: Ads, updates, etc. typically (not always) need to resolve hosts before connecting to servers. Simply resolve these hosts to 0.0.0.0 instead of a real IP.

Better solution: resolve these hosts to an address you control on your network. You could even resolve it to a "public" address and add a static route to your router.

You can then choose to serve no-content from that address.

Maybe that worked 10 years ago but nowadays they figured out ssl certificate pinning

Even easier: just don't connect it to your network. Everything connected to my network runs free software that I control. If you absolutely must have something on your local network then have it in a VLAN that has no internet access and can't access your main LAN.

> This happens more and more often, and there is a fairly easy + popular workaround (which also comes with 99% ad blocking as a bonus). Just either set up pi-hole locally OR use a hosted DNS service that does essentially the same thing.

DNS over HTTPS is going to render this method ineffectual eventually. Smart devices are going to stop trusting anything on the local network.

why connect the junk to the internet to begin with? it’s a TV. I can buy a better streaming box and plug it in. People really over complicate things sometimes IMO.

Perhaps a stupid question, but why they don’t test the firmware updates internally before releasing them?

Today a tech lead with admin role on GH opened a PR, approved it for himself and merged it, because he could override GH rules. The PR had failing unit tests. It went straight to prod and caused 20 minutes downtime of one functionality. We do test things, sometimes you're just not prepared for all the permutations of the idiocy out there...

This is more common than you think. Only a few days HP update bricked their printers https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/firmware-update-bric...

Similar thing happened to Hisense https://old.reddit.com/r/Hisense/comments/18xnmz9/the_latest...

Samsung phones: https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/galaxy-s10-phones-smar...

The answer seems to be that things get tested, but the results often get ignored.

Human error, don't worry, we will be getting rid of these pesky humans soon

They almost certainly do, but there's always ways that the test jig differs from the units in the field, for example:

- The test jig is probably pristine, so no hundreds of hours of telemetry data clogging up the internal storage.

- The test jig might be on ethernet whereas a lot of users would be using wifi.

- The test jig probably targets specific A -> B upgrades rather than testing progressive upgrade across every version that's ever existed.

- The test jig can't cover every permutation of config options.

- The test jig probably only does a bare minimal smoke test after the install, so if the problem takes a bit to kick in, it might not show up.

Not to say that it's certainly any of these, but all are possible contributors. In the coming days it'll become clearer what particular pattern the affected devices follows, and/or clever people with JTAG dongles will reverse engineer the problem and spill the beans.

The test jig should be in expected conditions. We have simulated tests, and we have tests that run on the devices on my desk, but we also have a real world setup for consumer devices in a separate building that could be mistaken for the real deployment environment. That's not feasible for every company, but it's certainly feasible for Samsung. It doesn't mean you'll catch everything, but it does address some of your points.

There's no question about what it should be, but without technical leadership up the chain that understands and insists on this, it's easy to see how it could atrophy over time with cuts and staff turnover.

Like once upon a time, someone established a lab with twenty different units in different states, and put in place a process for validating the releases on it, but that person is long gone, and parts of the lab haven't worked quite right in years, but the parts that do still give a green checkmark, and who wants to stick their neck out and block a release over some baroque process no one even understands, right? It's not like the lab ever seems to really catch a major issue, does it? Just send a :ship: emoji to the slack channel and wait to be assigned your next ticket in the sprint meeting.

You dont need a testing team when the users can do all the testing for you.

so what are the users for? /s

This is one of those cases where I am glad I don't have my soundbar connected to the internet...

True, that would be preferable, but alas Samsung is bent on making their products as big of a pain in the arse as possible.

At least with my Samsung soundbar, the remote can change the volume, the subwoofer volume and change between modes (standard, surround, game). But if I want to enable night mode, I have to use the SmartThings app. There's no way to enable it using the remote. What's worse, the app often hangs when connecting to the soundbar, requiring me to force stop and restart it. So sometimes toggling a feature that should be a single button on the remote takes me over a minute.

Samsung is right next to HP on my list of brands I will never ever buy in my entire life.

Side note, it's frustrating that this link tries to open in an app on my Samsung phone.

I installed the GitHub app a long time ago, and that had similar behaviors that kept me from the web-based experience I know & love & which is more URL based. Finding that disappointing, I uninstalled the app. But still, GitHub results in Google don't show the URL, they just say "app installed" where the URL would be. What a colossal regression.

More to the topic, we are on day 4 of Google Chromecast Audio & 2nd generation being broken. Supposedly an expired cert. Amazing neglect, ya'll.

Looking at /r/Chromecast, it seems the problem got fixed very recently.

Samsung should merge with Sonos, they are all doing a really great job :)

I loved my Sonos soundbar. It sounded amazing. But it required me to use their terrible app. That's why I got rid of it (the app was REALLY bad!) - luckily, before they started bricking customers' devices.

I have my sonos integrated nicely inside Home Assistant and can control all core and most extra features nicely without using the app.

Samsonos? Sonosung?

I got a good deal for an S90C + Q990C combo. It was 50% off off their regular price which was already quite a bit cheaper than the comparable LG/Sony counterparts.

After 1 year, I am 100% sure that I will never again buy a Samsung product, no matter how cheap it is.

Just look at the first sticky here: https://www.avsforum.com/threads/2023-samsung-4k-s95c-s90c-s...

Ah, well, the S95D on the other hand ......... uh.

I got one hoping it works be great but they add bugs to each release.

The video decoding macro blocks around dark objects at certain illuminations.

The TV complains it's running out of space (wth) after I installed only 6 TV streaming apps. 4gb of storage is the cause and when it gets to 1gb it complains, daily.

It makes power on off sounds, "bling", when off, and when on. Surprise!

The apps all have bugs, because Tizen OS is unpopular and difficult to develop well on.

I mean it's all the same garbage. LG and Sony is where it's at.

I'm planning on selling mine as soon as possible, as I can't stand the judder on 24fps content as well.

Not to mention other quirks like limited passthrough support

My Q990C requires factory reset about once a week. It's maddening.

It's the WPA3 encryption. It needs to be set to WPA2 only for it to not shit itself.

Wow, thank you, that is amazing news. Can I ask how you found this fix? I turned up nothing after scouring reddit on this one for a long time.

EDIT: just checked, my router doesn't even support WPA3... I think it's typically the 5GHz network that upsets it, but I suppose I'll just continue resetting it for now.

It's on 5ghz on my end, and switching the UniFi lite AC to WPA2 from WPA2/3 fixed it.

The thing is that the 2.4ghz wifi from the S90C (they both need to be on the same network for some goddamn reason to work in SmartThings) interferes with my DualSense gamepad.

Why connect the sound bar to the Wifi at all???

Because I want to listen to Tidal on full quality and control playback via my phone. Bluetooth quality is garbage.

I don't want to turn on my TV to listen to music (and Tizen only allows up to a certain quality), or use my nvidia shield, as it also turns on the TV via CEC.

Other platforms also don't support full quality like FLAC or Atmos mixes.

Thoughts and prayers for the poor soul that owns the bug.

I've done my share of embarrassing mistakes and each time I've felt awful. Nothing on this scale though.

I made the mistake of updating my HIKMICRO mini thermal camera. Before it worked as a normal UVC USB webcam with any app or camera/video program on the PC. After it just has weird green coloration with hardly any variation, and only works properly in their Android app. I contacted company but they didn't care, nor provided any way to "downgrade" the firmware to the original version.

I’m currently away from home but can deny list domains on the dns level. Anyone knows the domain this update is using? Blocked samsung.com

To prevent automatic firmware updates, ads, and any other spying I'm not aware of, I block these in DNS:

*.samsungcloudsolution.com

*.samsungosp.com

*.samsungqbe.com

*.samsungcloud.tv

*.samsungads.com

The first one gets the most hits.

I also don't connect my Samsung displays to Wifi anymore. Unless I notice a problem that I have to search to fix. Then if there's a firmware update that fixes the issues, I'll do it.

NextDNS and ControlD are helpful for blocking this sort if thing, or Pi-Hole if you want to set it up yourself.

My samsung was so noisy that I went to forget the wifi network... but it couldnt. So I ended up blocking its mac at the router. Prior to that it was always the #1 blocked device on my pihole.

Thanks, blocked! Fingers crossed it didn’t fetch it yet

I am looking to get a new monitor in the next year or so and have been considering ultra-wides. During my research the proportion of people that had horrible experiences with Samsung monitors, typically right after warranty expired, was enough to deter me from the entire brand in the future.

Ironically the 2022 Samsung soundbar model I have hasn't gotten a single firmware update since January 2023. I bought it new from Samsung after that day.

I am moderately surprised that they even update their firmware on some models.

This is one of the reasons why my home theater system is built from discrete parts (not an all-in-one soundbar), with a high quality receiver that never talks to the internet, doesn't have an ethernet cable and has no wifi access (it works fine as a bluetooth sink when I want to play something from my phone into it), separately purchased 5.1 speaker system, and roll of 16awg stranded copper speaker cable from monoprice.

Software crisis. The more you build the less you understand, the more you can affect, the less control you give to people etc.

This will bite us again and again in general.

For those with mild dyslexia: The system did not brick after suffering through 1020 updates. 1020 is the update version label.

I never update any device firmware these days unless there is a specific problem I'm trying to solve. Even if the update is not outright buggy, chances are it comes with unwanted "improvements" like ads or similar "features".

With "AI".

I recently replaced all my kitchen appliances with matching mid-scale Samsung-branded ones. The first thing I did after powering them on for the first time was disable the WiFi. For this reason.

Also, it's entirely unclear to me why I need WiFi or a remote server for my dishwasher or refrigerator in the first place. What possible value-add is there?

Probably so the appliance can let a server know to have your phone notify you that your appliance is done doing what it was doing.

its crazy that the fridge and coffeemaker needs to talk to the internet

Nothing that needs wifi or an app is allowed in my kitchen.

I have the same Samsung sound bar and absolutely nothing works. We need to hard reset it every day because it refuses to work, switching between programmes in Netflix causes a horrible loud crack, the latest one is having speakers out of sync. Really bad. Unfortunately the rtings reviewers didn’t seem to test any of these things.

Samsumg did not bring THEIR home theater systems, they bricked CUSTOMER theater systems that did not belong to them.

I got tired of constant updates/apps on home screen/lag and all on my Samsung TV and finally bought a Sony. Everything I do is through Apple TV and Xbox now, Sony is not connected to the internet.

Other than the slow boot (takes about 5 seconds to switch to Apple TV after pressing power button), I have no complaints.

I always really enjoy these community forums. They are total garbage.

Hello, I am Rene, a community expert on the Hacker News Experience Forums. I see you are having trouble with an auto-flagged post. I will try to help you with your auto-flagged post. Have you tried turning off your kitchen tap and turning it back on again?

It bothers me that many devices are so easily remotely bricked and that keeping them offline is the only way to avoid such issues.

Automated updates were supposed to give us peace of mind instead of having us worried about what bug or enshittification will follow.

I’d wager that, for most Internet-connected appliances, keeping them offline or disabling autoupdates have way more pros than cons.

If you think about it, keeping them offline is a huge security improvement even without the risk of bricking update, so in ways an automated update regime that convinces you to keep your device offline is giving you peace of mind. In a way.

If it allows anyone to remotely execute arbitrary code on a device without the user's consent, it's called an RCE vulnerability. About as serous as software vulnerabilities go, needs to be patched yesterday.

But if it only allows the manufacturer to remotely execute arbitrary code on a device without the user's consent, it's called an automatic software update mechanism and most people somehow consider that it's totally fine.

Automated updates are a way for companies to push updates on you without having to first convince you that the updates are good.

Also allows them to ship unfinished/buggy and poorly tested software and "fix it later OTA."

Damaging or removing features should reopen the return window. Then they will be more careful about what they change.

I agree but it's a headache even if you are able to return.

  > Have you tried to factory reset your soundbar?

When will someone build a good theater system with an open source OS? That would be great!

Just get a receiver and some standalone speakers. It doesn’t need an OS, and there’s no reason for it to talk to the internet.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Yeah. I too got into the same problem. But the thing is, I just bought Q990D on Feb 22 and I got into this situation on Mar 8. The soundbar stuck into the mode that I was using and it becomes unresponsive.

Doesn’t sound good. If at all.

If you want your devices not to belong to you, connect them to the internet.

Many devices these days are required to be connected to the internet, which is bizarre, but here we are.

Yeah like these "cheap" HP printers, which have to be connected to the internet so that they can force you into a subscription, use their own inks only etc. They do not belong to you either.

I think it hasn't even been a year since Samsung bricked bunch of their phones with firmware update. They really must have no proper engineering team behind update process.

This is why you phase release of updates to 1% of customers, then 2%, then 5% over a period of hours... while watching the help desk queues. Because testing is never perfect.

Sony bricked my WF-1000XM4 by overheating its batteries. Some users reported things melting. $250,00 of my work straight to the trash bin. Thank you Sony...not.

I own one Samsung product, a very expensive fridge freezer, and it's been garbage since the day I bought it. I'll never buy a Samsung product again.

A lot of folks in this thread say rollback to a known firmware version is required. Where are they getting all this microcontroller ROM?

Just an ex-CoreOS person stopping by to smile and say "someone should really figure out how to do that safely."

Why does a sound bar need a firmware update?

Really glad I never connected mine to wifi

My bluray player has an ethernet port on the back, but I never ever connect it to the internet.

Reminder to myself to not auto update anything or manually update to the latest version.

Reading this makes me glad that I didn't give my TV the WiFi credentials.

I will never understand why people are willing to connect so many of their devices to the internet for minimal features. I went out of my way to build a network that prevents even the things I want to have local wifi access from being accessible to the internet.

Jokes on them: I tried and failed to connect it to wifi and gave up.

Why are these things connected to the internet at all?

One more reason to never allow a tv on the internet.

Unplug the soundbar and listen to the sound from the TV while you wait until Samsung fixes their shit. What's the problem?

The question is if it still works "enough" to update to a working firmware, or if it's so broken that it can only be fixed by flashing the EEPROM directly.

I have those, desperately checking if they don't auto-update... whfff, luckily no.

I never patch such devices as long as they work, the only exception is phone and desktop. Those idiotic phone apps to tweak some minor stuff - thank you but I couldn't care less, I install maybe 1 new app to my phone a year and no, it won't be due to buying some effin' loudspeakers.

There is simply 0 real gain for me and always non-zero risk. Even those I hate updating, but grokking they are too important to leave some known hackable surface open.

Sigh, another day, another consumer product without fault tolerant update systems. SpaceX has a white paper on doing this with their satellites for Starlink. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5...

It is bad engineering on Samsung's part to even be able to brick their product with an update.

I have one of these systems. Not sure why anyone would ever leave it connected to the internet though.

>Not sure why anyone would ever leave it connected to the internet though.

Most people aren't techies. They buy the thing, and use it as instructed.

Also the vendors increasingly push you to put them online to use devices. Samsung tries really hard to make you think that your TV setup needs a mobile app on your phone running in the background with high precision location tracking, and 99.9% of buyers are going to leave that setup so they’re not blamed for problems in the future.

Sometimes I wonder if HN folks are purposefully obtuse or so deep in their bubble that they don't understand how 99% of people think and operate. The average user will always favour convenience over some invisible concept like privacy.

If you don’t know how to operate some piece of technology you shouldn’t be using it. Same as you wouldn’t operate a car without knowing how to drive.

This is an absolutely ridiculous take, on multiple levels.

I'm not familiar with this product but it would make a lot of sense if it supports direct streaming for Chromecast/Google Cast.

Airplay (and presumably Cast) support require a WiFi connection. I explicitly blocked external connections to mine.

There's a feature to make every connected speaker in your house play the same Spotify song at once which is kind of fun.

thank God mine is before they decided to add smart features to a speaker

why would a soundbar need a firmware update?...seems like a solution looking for a problem... what's next my toaster needs a firmware update?!?!

On forced updating: "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord."

LOL. Lord giveth patch updates, e.g., mRNA vaccines, startup blogs, work from home...

Yet another reason why I don't connect appliances to the internet. My TV is plugged to an Nvidia Shield, and that's the device that gets online, since it was designed for that.

vibe coding

Just more evidence that buying something smart is dumb.

...nervously looks over at my Bambu X1-Carbon...

So glad everything's connected to the internet \s.

[dead]

[dead]

This will be really interesting to follow. Especially with respect to Tesla’s love of pushing updates to clients. Could this be a harbinger of “you don’t really own your property” by way of so many companies going down this route that enough collapses result in litigation and a massive readjustment? Time will tell.

HN title is editorialized. I assume "bricked" is a lot worse, i.e., permanent.

Comments show that there might be resolutions and potential for firmware patch. [0] Bad updates happen.

[0] https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Home-Theater/Samsung-Q99...

"bricked" usually means bricked for most people - those of us with EPROM programmers wouldn't count.

They did this with their Blu-Ray players about five years ago:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/18/samsung_bluray_mass_d...

Each device had to be shipped to a repair center because they needed to directly re-flash the flash storage. The issue with the Blu-Ray players was that an update caused it to get in to a state where it would boot loop before it even got to a point that anything could be done, manually or otherwise.

What we don't know yet with this issue is whether the devices are booting enough to apply another firmware update. It may be possible to do this, fixing this issue. If that's the case "bricked" would be technically incorrect, but for now, it's not a wholly inaccurate term.

> "bricked" usually means bricked for most people

This is too circular for me. Google "bricked" and you get the Oxford Languages definition, which says "...typically on a permanent basis."

e: HN headline has been corrected

Unfortunately those "solutions" don't work, the person who had a potential solution was able to at least go through the inputs, this is not the case here, you can't even go through the inputs.

I've tried all the potential solutions this morning. It seems permanent unless Samsung somehow finds some magic to fix it, especially since the soundbar won't connect to WiFi/internet and doesn't do anything with the USB plugged in.

Bad updates happen, but companies with good development practices don't ship catastrophically bad updates. Source: I worked at Samsung

A soft brick is still a brick.

Yet, as you note, still different.

I'll take a chance on a hardware update if the forums say "soft brick." If people are saying "brick," then I'm only moving forward if I'm prepared to write off the device.

edit: HN headline has been corrected