I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud

Is this just an american thing/model?

I have a Bosch Series 6 dishwasher here in Australia. It has physical buttons for all the stuff he mentions - Machine Care (self-cleaning), HalfLoad, Eco, and Delay start.

I did connect it to wifi which allows me to ... do the same stuff from their app. It's next to useless in my use pattern of "load the dishwasher, run the dishwasher". Literally all it adds is the ability to more easily set the machine to run later, which I don't care about.

I love Bosch stuff and will continue to buy it, certainly their series 6 and 8 stuff that's made in Germany - great quality and reliable IMHO.

Honestly it seems like there's just been a poor design decision here, to export the full set of controls to an app rather than on the machine, rather than some sort of fundamental sin. It certainly raises questions of what happens if/when they drop support, but another poster below mentions that the app works locally after initial cloud setup. Maybe just avoid this model...

I work on embedded appliance software at my job. A few comments:

It's quite easy to find yourself having non-zero boot times for some unfortunate reasons. At least in my org, the software as a whole is RAM/ROM constrained rather than speed constrained. Even when you're this close to bare metal, devs tend to write over-abstracted code riddled with inefficiencies. And of course most people don't profile the application at all. This is a symptom of the software being under-tested imo. I have personally written tooling to integration test the whole application for a few appliances, and for one appliance initializing the application 56 times took over 1 second. On a modern machine it should take milliseconds. After profiling I found that 99%+ of our time was spent servicing a subscription tied to all events, that really only needed to subscribe to just one or two.

Along with that there are other reasons for long apparent boot up times:

- Waiting for other boards to connect and talk to each other. Your UI can't do anything until it knows the state from the main control.

- Randomized delays to prevent current surges after a blackout. You'll see this on ACs or other appliances that might have hundreds of identical units in a building.

- Waiting for flash memory to be readable

All of this adds up to seconds of boot time. Yet ultimately none of this matters to the business people because we're an appliance company, NOT a software company. Our software is mostly incidental to having a functioning product, and boot times could go way higher without the business being worried. Though recently yes, we have entered the data market hence the push for smart features. Word to the wise, avoid any appliance with Android in it if you don't like the idea of forced connected features!

I unfortunately don't have any solutions to most of the problems presented in the article. All I can do is continue to try writing bullet-proof software and push back against forced connected features.

My five year old GE dishwasher has WiFi and a "Smart HQ" app, which also connects to my GE ovens. I used it for a while, and then it stopped working and required an update, and re-authorization. I never re-authorized, and I don't really miss the "smart" connectivity. The most annoying thing (for me) about all of this is that the GE ovens have a nice easy-to-read digital clock, but the clocks use a low-quality reference oscillator (apparently not the 60Hz line frequency), so they drift. After spending some time researching, I was able to get the oven clocks to use NTP via (isolated vlan) WiFi, without needing to use the app at all. Unfortunately, the clocks still need to be manually updated twice year when DST kicks on and off.

I did try all of the configuration possibilities with regard to DHCP:

dhcp-option=option:ntp-server,132.163.96.1

dhcp-option=option:time-offset,0xFFFF8F80 #(Standard time)

#dhcp-option=option:time-offset,0xFFFF9D90 #(Daylight time)

dhcp-option=option:posix-timezone,'PST8PDT7,M3.2.0/02:00,M11.1.0/02:00'

I've never actually found any IoT device that recognizes or correctly uses these.

I've no idea if the newer GE products are still this bad, but I'll be shopping for "dumb" appliances on the next appliance refresh cycle.

I’ve heard this but I’ve never actually heard of any popular brand of TV that integrates cellular. I keep my LG and Sony TVs off the network and I’m 99.9% sure they have no way of accessing the Internet.

Miele has some home dishwashers that are not too different from their commercial models.

Really spartan and silent. A knob and two buttons, or a couple of buttons and a led display. The price is also not too bad, around €750.