Samsung is taking AI out of phones and laptops and placing it directly into the kitchen. At CES 2026, the company plans to unveil refrigerators and other appliances powered by Google Gemini, using cameras and cloud intelligence to track food, manage inventory, and suggest actions. While some design upgrades solve real problems, the deeper push toward cloud based AI inside everyday appliances raises new questions about control, longevity, and whether consumers actually want this level of intelligence watching what they eat.
I’m really struggling to understand what’s the point of a “smart” appliance. And these moves don’t make my doubts go away, they rather power them up.
What the hell do you need it for? What does it do for you that you can’t do by yourself by simply… using your brain for a split second?
One of the selling points for an oven we were looking at was that you could start preheating it while you were driving home from the grocery store.
I’m sure someone thinks it’s a good idea to start a hot box up targeting 400° without anyone home. But to me that just screams fire hazard.
Oh, and helpfully it can also do firmware updates over wifi… I don’t want my oven to have firmware.
We ended up buying the best “dumb” oven we could find, but pretty much every one of the higher end ones had internet connectivity.
That’s stupid. My oven isn’t internet connected and I can set it to preheat at a certain time. It takes slightly more forethought to use but it does the same thing. Still though, there’s prep work that needs to be done before throwing something in, and the oven is mostly heated by then, so there’s doubly no point.
They want to make you authorize your bread