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/...
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.
* 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
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...
[0] There is no lossless high quality audio over BT, only a bunch of lossy codecs.
You might have to line the inner walls with something to prevent the signal from bouncing back? I'm not sure.
Inside a microwave oven.
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.
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.
I 100% guarantee everyone who uses one of these was railroaded into mandatory arbitration.
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.
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.
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"
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'?
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.
and here unwanted apps installed randomly
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ztuv0l/samsung_sma...
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/19/the-real-story-how-samsung-b...
'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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Or not, of course...)
Samsung product life cycle support seems like planned obsolescence.
NEVER BUYING A SAMSUNG TV AGAIN
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 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.
Judging by current trends i will have to replace the attached chromecast before the TV breaks.
With luck there are some old TVs still on remaining stock and that is about it.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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).
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>Every time you’d start the tv it’d switch to the Samsung Baywatch 24/7 stream.
So inappropriate for the children.
The bug, or Baywatch itself?
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.
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 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.
Which tends not to be great for a tv one wants to use with a Chromecast or similar media box...
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.
(disclaimer: maybe 5-10 years ago)
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.
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.
Clearly the latter is heavily preferred by most companies.
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
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.
Im not a fan of firmware lockdowns but I understand other people may value security over moddability.
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.
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.
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 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).
> "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.
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...
See their new app debacle which coupled a non-reversible firmware update that made the hardware incompatible with the old app.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?)
https://tweakers.net/reviews/10334/het-einde-van-de-high-end... (Dutch)
I think it usually takes a big rollout for these big companies to actually "hear" their users.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
#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.
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.
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).
Isn't this about the most condescending thing they can start with?
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 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.
I bought a couple of Chromecasts for that reason but they're supposedly discontinued now.
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.
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.
- 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.Ahh! But you are just leasing the software!! Samsung is technically the owner!!
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.
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...
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.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.
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!
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.)
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.
DNS over HTTPS is going to render this method ineffectual eventually. Smart devices are going to stop trusting anything on the local network.
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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've done my share of embarrassing mistakes and each time I've felt awful. Nothing on this scale though.
*.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.
I am moderately surprised that they even update their firmware on some models.
This will bite us again and again in general.
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?
Other than the slow boot (takes about 5 seconds to switch to Apple TV after pressing power button), I have no complaints.
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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.
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.
> Have you tried to factory reset your soundbar?
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.
It is bad engineering on Samsung's part to even be able to brick their product with an update.
Most people aren't techies. They buy the thing, and use it as instructed.
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...
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.
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.