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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of my oven, which apparently has no setting to turn off its broadcasting its own wifi ssid. So, forevermore, all our computer wifi menus will have [LG_Oven]xyz as an option, and our spectrum will be slightly more congested. At least their customer support didn’t know how to turn it off. I wouldn’t have considered it possible that an appliance maker would ship an appliance with no ability to turn off its wifi broadcast.

Don’t buy LG appliances.

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I was able to get my LG oven to stop broadcasting it's network by downloading LG's app, temporarily connecting the oven to my phone's hotspot, then just renaming the hotspot SSID.

Now, my oven does not broadcast it's own WiFi, and instead will forever be trying to connect to a non-existent network.

lol nice, thanks for the tip! I had been reluctant to soil my phone with the app, but now I guess I have to.

Thanks for the heads up! We are in a market for a cook top and it has never occurred to me it was this bad. Are there people who want this "feature" and pay extra for it?

I'm convinced almost nobody actually wants most of the connectivity, internet of shit things they're stuffing in appliances. But these companies shove this shit in because it makes them more money, then they brand it a "feature" that salespeople can use to differentiate the more expensive and newer models to unsuspecting customers. Basically that its more about there being a "new age connectivity extensibility productivity luxury feature" than exactly what that feature _is_.

Then, the manufacturers who have switched to building mostly iot crammed models trick themselves by attributing the change in sales to the specific feature they added (that nobody asked for, wants, or cares about) rather than the fact that that's all they make anymore and thus the only thing people can buy. And some VP makes a sideshow with graphs, gets applause, a nice Bonus and shot at the big wigs job. Some middle manager gets to take credit for "spearheading the development of market fit innovations in productivity and life balance synergy". People keep patting themselves on the back for making up useless bullshit and shoving it down our throats, then interpret their back pats as a signal to continue.

That's my theory anyway

Sounds about right, only a couple of their most basic models were available without it, and we really wanted induction with physical knobs, which is apparently a rare combination. So we had to give in on our no-wifi constraint.

There's no way to disable the wifi on my LG smart TV either (any guides I've seen seem to point to a setting I don't have) although I've been meaning to pop the back panel and just yank the module which is on a card. The oven probably is more likely to have separate wifi card than my TV.

Good to know. I bought a new dishwasher recently and all the mid-high end ones have WiFi and I wondered if it would do this. Fortunately not (it's a Bosch).

Also I was initially like "pff who needs WiFi in a dishwasher" but one neat feature is that there's a customisable button and you can program it with new programmes. (Yes I'm writing that.)

I mean, it already has plenty so I haven't bothered to actually use that feature, but it is something I didn't initially think of at least. Better diagnostics would also be a good use but I'm not putting money on them having implemented that (I guess we'll find out if/when it goes wrong).

This isn't a neat enough feature to justify ramming it down the throat of consumers.

We want RELIABLE, FUNCTIONAL, DURABLE appliances. Any additional SMART integrations are overkill and there should be a base model without them. Let the people who want them pay for them.

What would turn this on its head? Requiring manufacturers to pay a subscription fee to people they collect data from, for the lifetime of the data feed.

What else would(do) you program into a dishwasher?

Mine has like 6 buttons. Hot/Cold, Air Dry or heat dry, longer wash or shorter wash, and I think a start timer function that I can click a few times to add number of hours until it goes.

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