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Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update

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Re: Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update

#391

Post by mihaaly »

drlobster wrote: post #145

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...

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.

Re: Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update

#392

Post by jajko »

3np wrote: post #340
Hackbraten wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certificates expire.

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.

Re: Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update

#393

Post by SR2Z »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

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.

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

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

Re: Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update

#394

Post by Workaccount2 »

bobdvb wrote: post #205
eYrKEC2 wrote: post #39

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, disco…

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 material…

>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.

Re: Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update

#395

Post by mikepurvis »

Y_Y wrote: post #389
mikepurvis wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update

#396

Post by mschuster91 »

Mindwipe wrote: post #316
mschuster91 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update

#397

Post by withinrafael »

mystified5016 wrote: post #288
eYrKEC2 wrote: post #39

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, disco…

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 bu…

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.

Re: Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update

#398

Post by SequoiaHope »

bhaney wrote: post #372
0xFEE1DEAD wrote: post #360

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 h…

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?

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

Re: Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update

#399

Post by jajko »

reverendsteveii wrote: post #97

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?

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.

Re: Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update

#400

Post by MiddleEndian »

derf_ wrote: post #255
davkan wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
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