February 11, 2026 • 35 mins
Tech companies are constantly putting out new products to chase the hype – but they’re not all winners. Each year, nonprofit consumer advocates put on an award ceremony recognizing the lousiest of the bunch, called the Worst in Show. Dexter talks with Liz Chamberlain, who runs Worst in Show, about this year’s awards, the products that earned them (spoiler: a product featured during the Super Bowl is on the list), and what we risk when we chase the hype (read: add AI to everything).
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Read + Watch:
- This year’s Worst In Show: https://www.ifixit.com/News/115344/worst-in-show-returns-at-ces-2026-calling-out-gadgets-that-make-things-worse
- Worst In Show website: https://www.worstinshowces.com/
- kill switch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@killswitch_pod
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
So the overall winner of Worston Show this year was
the Samsun Bespoke AI refrigerator.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Liz Chamberlain is director of Sustainability and I fix It,
which is an organization that publishes free online repair guides
for consumer electronics. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, just I don't
think I had heard anybody say the word bespoke AI
refrigerator before. There's something about reading it and then hearing
it is somehow hits different.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I know what you mean. It's a lot of words
together that don't feel like they should go together.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Liz also runs something called Worst in Show, which is
a very particular kind of award show.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
The Worst In Show is a set of anti awards
that we give it the Consumer Electronics Show ces and
we point out the least secure, the least private, the
least repairable, the most fined products that we see on
the show floor. There are awards that nobody should want
to get.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
So, you know how, you can look at the oscars
for any year and you can kind of see trends.
For example, you could look back at nineteen seventy eight
and see, oh, okay, this is what society was into
back then. Well, I think you can also do that
with tech awards, especially with the Worst in Show, but
there's also a bigger picture.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
The goal is to shame the big tech companies for
the thing is that everybody is annoyed by but too
many people are just talking about how cool and new
all this stuff is and not shaming them for stuff
that really does bake the world worse.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
So today we're going to do a recap of the
winners of the Worst In Show twenty twenty six with
Liz Chamberlain from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
This is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
I'm sorry, I'm goodbye.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
The Worst in Show Awards started in twenty twenty one
and they're organized by repair dot org, which is a
nonprofit that advocates for the right to repair, which means
that they fight for independent repair shops and consumers like
me and you to be able to repair our own stuff.
So each category in the award is judged and presented
by an organization that works in that field, and the
(03:04):
products are judged based on five criteria. First, how bad
is this product?
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Second?
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Are the problems with this gadget innovatively bad?
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Third?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
What is the global impact if this technology was to
be widely adopted. Fourth, how much worse is this than
previous iterations of similar technology? And five how much do
the negatives outweigh the positives? And this year we saw
winners in eight different categories. So let's get into it.
So I want to go through this year's winners of
(03:36):
the worst than show a cees in the privacy category
who you got.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
So the privacy category is awarded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
which is a group of lawyers that fights for electronic
rights and they're really focused on stuff that makes it
easier for governments or companies or people. You don't want
to survey you so look in your home and find
(04:02):
out who you are and what you're doing and where
you're going, and what you're writing about and what you're
voting and you know all of these things. And they
gave the award this year to the expanded features of
Ring AI. So Ring is the video doorbell video camera
system run by Amazon. Been a huge player in the
video door bell security market for a long time, but
(04:25):
what they announced this year was this huge overarching AI
system that connects all of their video cameras and security
cameras and so on, and so they were advertising dog
search party. For instance, this is milow heets our family.
But every year ten million go missing, and the way
(04:46):
we look for them hasn't changed in years until now.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app
starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from
Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Your camera already recognizes your dog's face, and now if
your dog runs away, you can alert all of your
neighbors ring doorbells to look for your dog. Cool. Okay, yeah,
but that also tells me that my neighbor's cameras know
who I am and can recognize me and see me
leave in the house, see where I'm going and what
(05:21):
I'm doing. If they showed off, you can search in
your video history for green hat and pull up all
the videos of somebody with a green hat. It suggests
that they've got some really, really intense capacity to understand
what's happening in the video and connect videos across cameras.
(05:43):
They've got cameras deployed in parking lots across the country.
It's scary for a world in which we know our
governments are you know, asking major tech companies for that
data and using that data to surveil us.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
So I'm going to play the I don't know whose
advocate I am here, but I'm going to give you
a common response that I hear often when I talk
about privacy. Right, Okay, Amazon's got this new ring AI thing.
I'm not a bad person. I'm not a criminal. I
don't have anything to hide. If it knows that I'm
out working in the garden every day at twelve oh
(06:21):
five pm, what's the harm.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Yeah, I mean, as long as you're only doing things
that your government agrees with, then sure it's not a
problem for now. Even for people that are not afraid
of the government knowing that they're outside in the garden
at twelve oh five pm, they might not want to
be surveilled. In grocery stores, for instance, watch the whole
(06:47):
time they're walking around and looking at products. People are
very aware of how algorithms target you based on how
long you linger on a video or what you're doing
as you're scrolling through Instagram or whatever. Same kinds of
things are happening in AI camera systems in stores, AI
camera systems out side of stores. That data can be
(07:08):
used not just for government surveillance purposes, but also for
pretty invasive advertising practices that are becoming really really common.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
In the past, what sorts of things have won in
the privacy category.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
So last year the winner of the privacy category was
WEE Things your analysis device, that is urine analysis. It
was a little puck that sat in your toilet that
would do some basic monitoring of things and send data
to your phone about what's in your p Again, one
(07:43):
of these things were like, I can certainly see some
cool potential uses of it.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Please tell me these cool potential uses of it, because
I'm not aware of these.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
You can measure blood sugars if you're diabetic, Okay, you know,
I can tell you if you're dehydrated. I guess if
you're not attentant your pea color enough. But Cindy Cone,
the director of You Have, pointed out that you know,
it included measurement of privacy hormone and it theoretically could
(08:14):
be used to track women who are pregnant and then
try to seek abortion care out of state or something.
That was the really sort of scary use case. She
pointed out.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Because post Roe v Way, the government could specifically, law
enforcement could go to that company and say give me
your data exactly, which sounds very orwellian, whatever you want
to call it, but this is the world that we're
living in now exactly. So Historically, the privacy category awards
(08:45):
the product whose features and data collection could be used
for surveillance and tracking, like the one that we just
talked about, the urine analysis tool. Bad privacy is products
that keep too much of your data in. But then
there's bad security, which is products that do a bad
job of keeping people out, like say packers, and this
brings us to the worst in shows security board.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
The winner was Marak Treadmill. It's a smart treadmill thing
that Marac, which is a relatively small Chinese home fitness company, announced.
But what was unusual about this is in their privacy
policy said that they cannot guarantee the privacy of customers data,
(09:31):
which you know, hold on.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I appreciate that's that's real, you.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Know, Like, on the one hand, yes, it is, it's
true that they can't guarantee it. Nobody can guarantee it, right,
But just saying that shouldn't be the majority of your
privacy policy, right, you should have more to offer your
customers about how you're protecting their data than that.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
The problem with this treadmill is pri policy was that
it actually said, verbatim, we cannot guarantee the security of
your personal information end quote. For me, the only reasonable
way to read that is that they don't want to
be held legally liable if your data was hacked, which
naturally makes you wonder, all right, are y'all just not
hiring anybody to handle security? Are you expecting to be
(10:20):
hacked or something? Now, to be fair, after this award
was handed out, Marek has updated their security policy. They
deleted that line and now there's a new line encouraging
you to use strong passwords, which yo, I agree with that.
That's actually a pretty good outcome. So we might now
have an example of the worst in show having a
positive impact on the industry.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
What is it that this treadmill is even offering.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
There's some kind of AI trainer that watches your biometrics
and gives you feedback as you're working through the program.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Maybe you're sensing a theme here. This year's Worse Than
Show featured a lot of AI, and look, AI features
can be cool, but these features are also showing what
happens when you're forcing a feature because of the hype
and not because it's actually going to make your product better.
Which brings us to the winner of the next category.
It's called the Who asked for This Award?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Who asked for this? We gave this year to the
Bosh eight hundred series coffee maker with Alexa Plus. Bosh
has had this series of coffee makers for a long time.
They're really popular, countertop all in one kind of thing.
You push a button and it makes you a latte
or amoca or whatever, and they have had an Alexa
feature on this thing for a while. You can walk
(11:40):
into your kitchen and tell it to make you amoga
and it'll do it. They announced that they were adding
in Alexa Plus this year. The machine isn't out yet
with Alexa Plus, but when it is, it should be
theoretically the same thing. You walk in you ask for
a moca, but the plus adds in a large language
(12:00):
model between you and the execution of that command. And
what people who have tested the Alexa Plus feature on
this copy maker and have said is that they don't
always get the response they're expecting. They give the coffeemaker
a command and it doesn't do what they asked, or
it has follow up question it wants to have a
(12:22):
conversation with.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
That follow up questions.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
You're so right to what a latte? Can I tell
you about the history of lates?
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Exactly exactly?
Speaker 2 (12:33):
I don't know about you, but I do not need
a coffee maker to make me a latte by voice command,
let alone trying to have a full blown conversation with
me when I still haven't had any coffee yet. So yeah,
this makes a lot of sense to me as a
winner in the who Asked for It? Category, But apparently
the company itself really disagrees with that.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
This year, I got a long email from a Bosh
marketing rep and the marketing rep said he was confused
by that award because it is apparently their most requested product.
I don't know what people are asking for exactly. Nevertheless,
I really doubt that anyone was asking for the shift
that we highlighted from Alexa powered coffee machine where you
(13:15):
can walk into your room and ask for a cup
of coffee to an LM Alexa powered coffee machine, which
sometimes gets it wrong. It just introduces this layer of
like nondeterministic question mark between you and getting a cup
of coffee.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Okay, fair enough, maybe someone did ask for this feature.
It's not for me, but hey, that's okay. Spend your
money how you won. But the funny thing about a
lot of these products that win these awards is that
it kind of feels like some of them could have
won any of the categories. Like the winner of the
worst Environmental Impact Award, I also think is a pretty
good contender for the who asked for this award.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
The environmental Impact winner this year was Lollipop Star, which
is a lollipop that music when you put it in
your mount.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
We'll get into that one after the break. Okay, quick recap.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
So far, the winners of this year's awards have been
products with features that you can mostly understand. So like
the ring camera watching your every move is weird, but
on the other hand, I mean it could help you
track down a lost dog. That's kind of cool. I
get it. And the maker of that treadmill straight up
telling you that we aren't responsible if we get hacked.
That's not good, but maybe some people don't mind it.
(14:34):
If the trade off is that your treadmill gives you
workout tips or encourages you or something I don't know,
and the talking coffee maker still weird for me, but
I can see why somebody might want it, But I
genuinely cannot think of any reason why you would want
to buy the winner of the worst environmental impact, the
Lollipop Star.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
It plays sound via bone conduction, so you bite down
on it and it sends sound waves through your teeth
directly to your earbones. This concept isn't brand new. There
was a product called sound Bites back in the nineties
to this Hey, there are six new sound bites. Each
one is an amazing new experience. We make your head
a boom.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Box in case you don't remember these. The sound Bites
was basically a plastic handle into which you would insert
a normal lollipop on top, and you could press buttons
on that plastic handle and it would play generic like
rock guitar sound effects and it would vibrate through your teeth.
Another company had a product called tooth Tunes, which were
(15:36):
toothbrushes that did a similar thing. So in defense of
tooth tunes, which is a sentence that I cannot believe
that I am starting, But in defense of tooth tunes,
at least that product was made to get kids to
brush their teeth. So now imagine that there was a
product that revived that form factor but was somehow actually
worse than the nineties version.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Sound bites you could replace the battery of and Lollipop
Star has two embedded batteries still replaceable battery. On the
packaging it says up to sixty minutes. Frontime, you use
it for sixty minutes and then throw it away. That's
what they want you to do. That's what they expect
you to do.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
First off, can you choose the music you're listening to?
Speaker 1 (16:18):
No, I mean, they've got a couple different artists that
they've worked with, and I think you can choose by
buying a different Lollipop Star.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
I'm not a big lollipop connoisseur, and I'm kind of
also thinking, you know, TUTSI roll, how many licks does
it take to get to the center of it?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Totsy pop?
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Right, Like, I don't really know how long it takes
me to get through a lollipop. I don't know if
I want to listen to Acon for that long, like
stream directly into my bones. That doesn't sound like a
good time for me.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
I hadn't considered that part of it, but you're right.
That is, you know, you got to commit, and the
product requires it to be really quiet for you to
be able to hear what's going on. You know, you
can't you can't really hear if there's any noise around you.
And the show floor was way too loud for people
to hear. And so they were handing out with the lollipop,
(17:07):
they were handing out earplugs to everybody and telling you
you gotta plug your ears to be able to listen
to it.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
So I need to like go into the privacy of
my own home and sort a lollipop into my mouth
so I can listen to Acon. Yeah, this is like
the worst combination of everything that I can think of.
Like Apple Music exists, Spotify exists, band Camp exists. Like
if I want to listen to Acon, I shouldn't have
to put some of my mouth.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Yeah, you got a lot of options that aren't a
disposable lollipop.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Not to mention the fact that this disposable lollipop costs
nine dollars.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Nine dollars to a lollipop.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Someone really said, all right, yo, what if we brought
back the tooth tunes and the sound bites, but removed
all the redeeming qualities of both of those and charged
nine dollars for it. But here's why the Lollipop Star
got the worst Environmental Impact award. Lollipop Star is a
single U device and the batteries inside of it cannot
be removed.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
We are always looking for products with embedded batteries to
give Horst and show awards too, because they're everywhere and
they're a huge problem. Even if you know best case
scenario product is into a landfill, just rots and a landfill,
they've got toxic chemicals that can leach into groundwater, leach
into the soil. That's not good for the planet. But
(18:26):
also what can happen is a lot of waste processing
facilities includes some amount of moving stuff around, banging it around,
passing it through shredders, passing it through devices that separate
stuff out, and in that process batteries can cause fires.
And there are battery fires and trash trucks. If most
(18:47):
municipalities the rate of like one a week. I know,
my little town of forty seven thousand people has like
one trash fire a week, and it's usually batteries and
that's a huge problem for waste process.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Same so once again in summary, sixty minutes of acon
vibrating through your teeth and a non zero chance that
you could start a literal garbage fire. Did I mention
that it was nine dollars? I'm really not sure what
eales I can say here, So let's move on to
the next category in the Worst in Show Awards in shitification,
which is a word coined by doctor Cory doctor Rowe
(19:21):
about how as tech companies value profit and extraction over
any user experience, their services get in shitified.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Intification is basically how internet things tend to get worse
over time because when they start out, they're just looking
for users. They're looking for people to sign on and
do the thing. But over time they need to make money,
and so they find ways to reduce the services that
(19:51):
they're offering and make more money out of you squeeze
more blood from your stone and so the in Sittification
Award went this year was the Bosh e Bike app.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
The Bosh e Bike Flow app pairs to your e
bike and you can use it as a digital lock.
You can track your bike if it gets stolen, and
you can record your rides with pretty detailed stats. It
also links the bike's major components like the motor, the battery,
and the display together digitally. Each part is registered to
your bike and your account so that the system knows
(20:25):
what hardware belongs to whom. This is called parts pairing.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Parts pairing is basically, there's a little computer on the part,
there's a little computer on your bigger device. They talk
to each other, they have a little handshake agreement, and
parts pairing limits what the part can do, or what
kinds of repairs you can do, or what its capabilities are,
how it's being tracked. It really became a huge issue
with smartphones. We tracked between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty four.
(20:56):
Apple products that came out had more and more and
more parts paired to the moneyboard and would limit repair
in some way for independent repair technicians who weren't under
the Apple ecosystem. So if you wanted to replace an
iPhone battery, sure, if you're not part of Apple, you
might be able to buy a battery from I fix
It or somewhere and put it in yourself, but then
(21:18):
there would be warnings that you couldn't dismiss or there
would be some features that you wouldn't have, like battery
help metrics, for instance, They would just shut off. So
what this would mean is the little computer on your
motor has an agreement with your bike. It recognizes like,
all right, this is Dexter's bike. He bought it on
this day. And then let's say your bike gets stolen
(21:40):
and you mark your bike as stolen. Watch then links
that part. Let's say the person who steals your bike
separates out the motor, sells out the motor to somebody.
When that motor gets connected to the system again, it
gets flagged as the stolen part and it can't be
(22:00):
used again. It gets sort of locked out, and BOSCH
gets notified. You get notified where your stolen part is.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Okay, so on paper, sounds like a pretty good thing.
Why is that a bad thing?
Speaker 1 (22:11):
That piece of it not really a bad thing. The
fear and the reason it won the Ancientification Award is
that this capability allows BOSH to do lots of other things.
It allows them to turn off your bike subscription entirely
if you don't pay the monthly fee. It allows them
to shut down your motor if they want to. It
allows them to make it so that only a Bosh
(22:33):
repair tech can replace that motor, and you can't do
it yourself, or you can't take it to the bike
shop down the street. You know, you're just locked into
that system. And the more and more of our things
get tied into electronic systems that can be shut off
whenever manufacturer wants or whenever they go out of business,
the worst our stuff gets. And so my straight up
(22:55):
manual bicycle is never going to lose features because you know,
Twin is done supporting my line of bicycles. Right, Bosh
hasn't done these things yet to be cleared. Right now,
it's mostly upside, but that's the point of the Intentification award,
is to point to things where right now mostly upside,
but there's the potential here for some real nastiness that's
(23:18):
built into the way this thing is framed.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
All right, Now that we're almost through all the winners,
let's get back to that Samsung AI fridge, which is
a two time winner. This year, it not only won
the worst overall, but it also won specifically in the
repair ability category.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Samsung bespoke AI fridge with the voice activated door, the
food recognition, the ads on your screen the recommendations to
buy blueberries because it knows you're a blueberry lover and
you're running out of blueberries. It represents more points of
potential failure in a high failure product from a company
(24:00):
that has not been consistently good about repair.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Samsung has a pretty bad reputation when it comes to
repair ability. I fix it has continually criticized them for
charging prices for parts that just don't seem justified if
those parts are even made available. And then there's the
pricing for repair manuals.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
I don't have any repair technicians for Samsung in my
town because Samsung charges repair texts like one thousand dollars
a year to have access to their repair documentation, and
so a lot of appliance texts just don't do it
because it's so expensive.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Wait, it charges them a thousand dollars a year, yeah
to be able to have a manual.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Yeah yeah. Basically the online app diagnostic thing. There's a
subscription fee, and there's a special dongle you need to
connect to the fridge, and so a lot of people
just don't do it.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
A dongle and a subscription to fix the box that
keep your food cold.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Okay, all right.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
So that's why it won the repair Ability Award. It
won overall Worston Show because not only does it have
all these potential repair problems, it also has the intitification
potential of ads showing up on your screen. Samsung has
just done this with their eighteen hundred dollars refrigerators. They
started putting ads on people's screens in their homes, even
(25:24):
though you've already paid almost two thousand dollars for your fridge.
But now it's showing you ads too. And the privacy
problem of having a bunch of information about you and
your habits and what you're eating, and you know, could
your health insurance company charge you higher premiums because you've
got too much frozen pizza in your fridge.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
I have so much frozen pizza in my fridge right now.
I'm not even kidding.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
They're coming for you, dexter.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
I'm not even playing with you.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
I have I legitimately have like six frozen pizzas in
my freezer right now.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Hey. You know, when the deal's good, you got to
buy and bull that's it was.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
A good deal.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
One thing that I noticed is there's some interesting features.
You can say open sesame and the door opens, like
you can voice command open the door. How do we
feel about that?
Speaker 1 (26:15):
The image that they keep showing of this is somebody
with their hands full, got a big cast role, trying
to put it in fridge. You say open sess me,
the door opens. Okay. When the judges got together, we
talked about the chance that maybe you're in a wheelchair,
you want to be able to open the door that way.
I recognize that some of the time this might be
a useful feature, but it just introduces so many more
(26:35):
points of failure. There's now the automatic door opening that's
built into the hinge of the door mechanism. That is
yet another complicated part that you can only get a
Samsung or pairtech to the service, and it again adds
an LLM between you and opening your fridge. And that
they were showing it off on the show floor and
(26:56):
it was so noisy in there that the people demoing
it had to get really close to the door and
sort of shout it into the microphone of the fridge.
And I'm imagining at a party or something, you know,
the music's play loud, people are talking like shouting at
the fridge to get it to open or.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
You got kids yelling in the background and you try
to like, you know, I'm trying to get to the fridge.
I need to drink, Like what are we doing? Also,
does this thing have handles? I'm looking at a picture
of this.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
It doesn't have a handle on the front like normal,
and you can't open it manually from underneath. But it
worsens the normal amble experience.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
And just to be real here for a second voice
command to open a fridge on paper sounds like it
could be really helpful for someone who's disabled and needs
help opening the fridge door sometimes. But if something goes
wrong and they need to fix the door, now you're
looking at a really expensive repair. But if you live
in a rural area without one of those Samsung certified technicians,
(27:55):
then what you just can't open the fridge door at all?
What are you supposed to do? Moving on, though, there's
one more winner from this year that we didn't get to,
the lapro Ai Soulmate, which was the winner of this
year's People's Choice. So it's advertised as quote You're always
on three d Ai Soulmate. Basically, it's an anime girl
and a cylindrical tube with the camera on it, and
(28:17):
essentially people were unsettled by a camera that's marketed as
being always on.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
I get it. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Anime girl and a signallogrical twobe I've seeing that almost
a decade ago in Japan doesn't really move the needle
from me, but I get it. So those are this
year's losers or winners. And remember what I was saying
earlier about awards shows telling us about what people like
or where society is at a certain point in time.
That's where I think the Worst in Show is a
little bit different in that it's actually self aware of that.
(28:46):
But on top of that, it also can maybe give
some hints on how we as just regular people can
push back against stuff that we don't like. We'll get
into that after the break. I feel like I hear
a lot of people saying I don't want this AI
(29:09):
in my coffee maker. You know, a couple of years ago,
it would have been why do you got to put
NFTs in my whatever?
Speaker 3 (29:14):
App? Right?
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Why is it the companies keep making this stuff if
there are people who are saying that they don't want it,
I mean, are people like me and you are we
just weird? And everybody else does want it or what's
happening here.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
I mean, yet they are making it because it sells, right,
They wouldn't make it if it didn't sell, So I
think that's part of it. I think there's a lot
of AI being introduced in places where it doesn't need
to be. But I think what we give up in
a lot of that introduction is that now all of
(29:51):
our stuff has microphones on it and cameras on it,
and there's all this always on data that's being collected
about us room of our home. You know, if you've
got the Bosh coffee maker that's listening to you all
the time, and your refrigerator is watching you and watching
your food, and your doorbell out front is watching all
(30:12):
the neighbors. It's kind of mind boggling how dramatic the
increase in surveillance of us and our stuff and our
habits has been in technology in the last couple of years.
And we'll only know over time what that means for
our independence and our freedoms.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
But there are other trends that are happening in the
opposite direction, that is trends coming from us, the consumers.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
I see two things that make me hopeful. And one
of those things is that there is this rising public
pushback against this kind of new every year thing. And
I see the growth of the refirm marketplace back market.
They're growing hugely, They're getting bigger and bigger, and I
(31:03):
think a lot of people are saying, you know, I
don't really need the brand new phone. I'm fine with
last year's model or the year before that, and why
don't I buy it used? I can save some money
and help out the planet a little bit. There is
a cultural swell of pushback against why does all tech
have to be new and new every year? And that
makes me hopeful. And then there's also globally some legislation
(31:27):
that is helping the sealed in batteries thing. I think
in January twenty twenty seven, I am expecting there be
a major difference at CEES because in twenty twenty seven,
the EU Replaceable Batteries legislation goes into force. So this
is a law that's passed in the European Union that
(31:50):
says that by twenty twenty seven, all portable products sold
in the EU must have user replaceable batteries.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
User replaceable so anybody can pop in batteries to replace
it exactly.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Really okay, you should be able to change your phone
battery yourself, change your laptop batter yourself. There are some
exceptions battery power tooth brushes, for instance, anything that's supposed
to be used in a quote unquote white environment isn't covered.
But something like smart rings, they're gonna have to figure
out an answer or stop selling in the EU. And
that's a huge market.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
Wow, okay, I'm looking forward to that. Shoot me too. Well,
what do you think the awards will look like next year? Then?
Speaker 1 (32:31):
You know, I would love to have a Worst in
Show where we don't give a sealed and battery award.
I would love for there to be so few things
on the market that it's not worth pointing to.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
If we're to take one thing from this year's Worst
and Show Awards or the Worst in Show awards in general,
what do you think it would be.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
I would like people to be less bought into the
hype cycle. I would like people to win something breaks
than about whether they can fix it, not bollow it.
It's time for me to upgrade anyway. I think if
people recognize that upgrade is a you know, it's brainwashing.
(33:12):
By manufacturers to some extent, manufacturers have trained us all
to look for next year's model, look for what are
the new features out on the market today, And for
those of us that love technology, it's a it's really
effective brainwashing, you know it. I work in repair, I
work for a repair company. I say this stuff every day,
(33:33):
and I still have that thought at first when something breaks,
like oh well, I should just get a new one.
But I think it takes all of us sort of
pushing back against that sub boutine in our own heads,
you know.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
And that's it. There we have it.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
So I'd actually be curious to see what you thought
about this year's Worse Than Show Awards.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
Did you agree with the results?
Speaker 2 (33:55):
I mean me personally, I'm not really sure how an
AI companion beat out the Lollipop Star for People's Choice,
But you know what, that's what award shows are for
seeing the results and then vehemently disagreeing with them in
the comments section online.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
So if you got your own take, you.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Know what to do, and I'd love to see what
you think. Thank you one more time to Liz to
Prepare dot org and to everyone who participated in the
Worst and Show Awards and thank you so much for
listening to kill Switch. You can email us if you
want at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC or on Instagram.
We're at kill switchpod and if you like the show,
hopefully you do, you know, think about leaving us a review.
(34:33):
It helps other people find the show, which helps us
keep doing our thing. And once you've done that, did
you know that kill Switch is on YouTube? So if
you want to see video of any of the weird
products that we talked about today, you can check us
out at YouTube dot com, slash, kill Switch, Underscore pod
or you can find a link for that in the
show notes. Killswitch is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas. It's
(34:55):
produced by Sheena Ozaki, Darluck Potts and Julian Nutter. Our
theme song is by me and Kyle Murdach and Kyle
also mixes a show from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are
Oswa Lashin, Mangesh Hatigadur, and Kay Osborne from iHeart. Our
executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki e.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
Tour.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Catch on next week.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Goodbye
So the overall winner of Worston Show this year was
the Samsun Bespoke AI refrigerator.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Liz Chamberlain is director of Sustainability and I fix It,
which is an organization that publishes free online repair guides
for consumer electronics. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, just I don't
think I had heard anybody say the word bespoke AI
refrigerator before. There's something about reading it and then hearing
it is somehow hits different.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I know what you mean. It's a lot of words
together that don't feel like they should go together.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Liz also runs something called Worst in Show, which is
a very particular kind of award show.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
The Worst In Show is a set of anti awards
that we give it the Consumer Electronics Show ces and
we point out the least secure, the least private, the
least repairable, the most fined products that we see on
the show floor. There are awards that nobody should want
to get.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
So, you know how, you can look at the oscars
for any year and you can kind of see trends.
For example, you could look back at nineteen seventy eight
and see, oh, okay, this is what society was into
back then. Well, I think you can also do that
with tech awards, especially with the Worst in Show, but
there's also a bigger picture.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
The goal is to shame the big tech companies for
the thing is that everybody is annoyed by but too
many people are just talking about how cool and new
all this stuff is and not shaming them for stuff
that really does bake the world worse.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
So today we're going to do a recap of the
winners of the Worst In Show twenty twenty six with
Liz Chamberlain from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
This is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
I'm sorry, I'm goodbye.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
The Worst in Show Awards started in twenty twenty one
and they're organized by repair dot org, which is a
nonprofit that advocates for the right to repair, which means
that they fight for independent repair shops and consumers like
me and you to be able to repair our own stuff.
So each category in the award is judged and presented
by an organization that works in that field, and the
(03:04):
products are judged based on five criteria. First, how bad
is this product?
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Second?
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Are the problems with this gadget innovatively bad?
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Third?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
What is the global impact if this technology was to
be widely adopted. Fourth, how much worse is this than
previous iterations of similar technology? And five how much do
the negatives outweigh the positives? And this year we saw
winners in eight different categories. So let's get into it.
So I want to go through this year's winners of
(03:36):
the worst than show a cees in the privacy category
who you got.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
So the privacy category is awarded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
which is a group of lawyers that fights for electronic
rights and they're really focused on stuff that makes it
easier for governments or companies or people. You don't want
to survey you so look in your home and find
(04:02):
out who you are and what you're doing and where
you're going, and what you're writing about and what you're
voting and you know all of these things. And they
gave the award this year to the expanded features of
Ring AI. So Ring is the video doorbell video camera
system run by Amazon. Been a huge player in the
video door bell security market for a long time, but
(04:25):
what they announced this year was this huge overarching AI
system that connects all of their video cameras and security
cameras and so on, and so they were advertising dog
search party. For instance, this is milow heets our family.
But every year ten million go missing, and the way
(04:46):
we look for them hasn't changed in years until now.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app
starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from
Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Your camera already recognizes your dog's face, and now if
your dog runs away, you can alert all of your
neighbors ring doorbells to look for your dog. Cool. Okay, yeah,
but that also tells me that my neighbor's cameras know
who I am and can recognize me and see me
leave in the house, see where I'm going and what
(05:21):
I'm doing. If they showed off, you can search in
your video history for green hat and pull up all
the videos of somebody with a green hat. It suggests
that they've got some really, really intense capacity to understand
what's happening in the video and connect videos across cameras.
(05:43):
They've got cameras deployed in parking lots across the country.
It's scary for a world in which we know our
governments are you know, asking major tech companies for that
data and using that data to surveil us.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
So I'm going to play the I don't know whose
advocate I am here, but I'm going to give you
a common response that I hear often when I talk
about privacy. Right, Okay, Amazon's got this new ring AI thing.
I'm not a bad person. I'm not a criminal. I
don't have anything to hide. If it knows that I'm
out working in the garden every day at twelve oh
(06:21):
five pm, what's the harm.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Yeah, I mean, as long as you're only doing things
that your government agrees with, then sure it's not a
problem for now. Even for people that are not afraid
of the government knowing that they're outside in the garden
at twelve oh five pm, they might not want to
be surveilled. In grocery stores, for instance, watch the whole
(06:47):
time they're walking around and looking at products. People are
very aware of how algorithms target you based on how
long you linger on a video or what you're doing
as you're scrolling through Instagram or whatever. Same kinds of
things are happening in AI camera systems in stores, AI
camera systems out side of stores. That data can be
(07:08):
used not just for government surveillance purposes, but also for
pretty invasive advertising practices that are becoming really really common.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
In the past, what sorts of things have won in
the privacy category.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
So last year the winner of the privacy category was
WEE Things your analysis device, that is urine analysis. It
was a little puck that sat in your toilet that
would do some basic monitoring of things and send data
to your phone about what's in your p Again, one
(07:43):
of these things were like, I can certainly see some
cool potential uses of it.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Please tell me these cool potential uses of it, because
I'm not aware of these.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
You can measure blood sugars if you're diabetic, Okay, you know,
I can tell you if you're dehydrated. I guess if
you're not attentant your pea color enough. But Cindy Cone,
the director of You Have, pointed out that you know,
it included measurement of privacy hormone and it theoretically could
(08:14):
be used to track women who are pregnant and then
try to seek abortion care out of state or something.
That was the really sort of scary use case. She
pointed out.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Because post Roe v Way, the government could specifically, law
enforcement could go to that company and say give me
your data exactly, which sounds very orwellian, whatever you want
to call it, but this is the world that we're
living in now exactly. So Historically, the privacy category awards
(08:45):
the product whose features and data collection could be used
for surveillance and tracking, like the one that we just
talked about, the urine analysis tool. Bad privacy is products
that keep too much of your data in. But then
there's bad security, which is products that do a bad
job of keeping people out, like say packers, and this
brings us to the worst in shows security board.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
The winner was Marak Treadmill. It's a smart treadmill thing
that Marac, which is a relatively small Chinese home fitness company, announced.
But what was unusual about this is in their privacy
policy said that they cannot guarantee the privacy of customers data,
(09:31):
which you know, hold on.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I appreciate that's that's real, you.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Know, Like, on the one hand, yes, it is, it's
true that they can't guarantee it. Nobody can guarantee it, right,
But just saying that shouldn't be the majority of your
privacy policy, right, you should have more to offer your
customers about how you're protecting their data than that.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
The problem with this treadmill is pri policy was that
it actually said, verbatim, we cannot guarantee the security of
your personal information end quote. For me, the only reasonable
way to read that is that they don't want to
be held legally liable if your data was hacked, which
naturally makes you wonder, all right, are y'all just not
hiring anybody to handle security? Are you expecting to be
(10:20):
hacked or something? Now, to be fair, after this award
was handed out, Marek has updated their security policy. They
deleted that line and now there's a new line encouraging
you to use strong passwords, which yo, I agree with that.
That's actually a pretty good outcome. So we might now
have an example of the worst in show having a
positive impact on the industry.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
What is it that this treadmill is even offering.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
There's some kind of AI trainer that watches your biometrics
and gives you feedback as you're working through the program.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Maybe you're sensing a theme here. This year's Worse Than
Show featured a lot of AI, and look, AI features
can be cool, but these features are also showing what
happens when you're forcing a feature because of the hype
and not because it's actually going to make your product better.
Which brings us to the winner of the next category.
It's called the Who asked for This Award?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Who asked for this? We gave this year to the
Bosh eight hundred series coffee maker with Alexa Plus. Bosh
has had this series of coffee makers for a long time.
They're really popular, countertop all in one kind of thing.
You push a button and it makes you a latte
or amoca or whatever, and they have had an Alexa
feature on this thing for a while. You can walk
(11:40):
into your kitchen and tell it to make you amoga
and it'll do it. They announced that they were adding
in Alexa Plus this year. The machine isn't out yet
with Alexa Plus, but when it is, it should be
theoretically the same thing. You walk in you ask for
a moca, but the plus adds in a large language
(12:00):
model between you and the execution of that command. And
what people who have tested the Alexa Plus feature on
this copy maker and have said is that they don't
always get the response they're expecting. They give the coffeemaker
a command and it doesn't do what they asked, or
it has follow up question it wants to have a
(12:22):
conversation with.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
That follow up questions.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
You're so right to what a latte? Can I tell
you about the history of lates?
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Exactly exactly?
Speaker 2 (12:33):
I don't know about you, but I do not need
a coffee maker to make me a latte by voice command,
let alone trying to have a full blown conversation with
me when I still haven't had any coffee yet. So yeah,
this makes a lot of sense to me as a
winner in the who Asked for It? Category, But apparently
the company itself really disagrees with that.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
This year, I got a long email from a Bosh
marketing rep and the marketing rep said he was confused
by that award because it is apparently their most requested product.
I don't know what people are asking for exactly. Nevertheless,
I really doubt that anyone was asking for the shift
that we highlighted from Alexa powered coffee machine where you
(13:15):
can walk into your room and ask for a cup
of coffee to an LM Alexa powered coffee machine, which
sometimes gets it wrong. It just introduces this layer of
like nondeterministic question mark between you and getting a cup
of coffee.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Okay, fair enough, maybe someone did ask for this feature.
It's not for me, but hey, that's okay. Spend your
money how you won. But the funny thing about a
lot of these products that win these awards is that
it kind of feels like some of them could have
won any of the categories. Like the winner of the
worst Environmental Impact Award, I also think is a pretty
good contender for the who asked for this award.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
The environmental Impact winner this year was Lollipop Star, which
is a lollipop that music when you put it in
your mount.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
We'll get into that one after the break. Okay, quick recap.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
So far, the winners of this year's awards have been
products with features that you can mostly understand. So like
the ring camera watching your every move is weird, but
on the other hand, I mean it could help you
track down a lost dog. That's kind of cool. I
get it. And the maker of that treadmill straight up
telling you that we aren't responsible if we get hacked.
That's not good, but maybe some people don't mind it.
(14:34):
If the trade off is that your treadmill gives you
workout tips or encourages you or something I don't know,
and the talking coffee maker still weird for me, but
I can see why somebody might want it, But I
genuinely cannot think of any reason why you would want
to buy the winner of the worst environmental impact, the
Lollipop Star.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
It plays sound via bone conduction, so you bite down
on it and it sends sound waves through your teeth
directly to your earbones. This concept isn't brand new. There
was a product called sound Bites back in the nineties
to this Hey, there are six new sound bites. Each
one is an amazing new experience. We make your head
a boom.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Box in case you don't remember these. The sound Bites
was basically a plastic handle into which you would insert
a normal lollipop on top, and you could press buttons
on that plastic handle and it would play generic like
rock guitar sound effects and it would vibrate through your teeth.
Another company had a product called tooth Tunes, which were
(15:36):
toothbrushes that did a similar thing. So in defense of
tooth tunes, which is a sentence that I cannot believe
that I am starting, But in defense of tooth tunes,
at least that product was made to get kids to
brush their teeth. So now imagine that there was a
product that revived that form factor but was somehow actually
worse than the nineties version.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Sound bites you could replace the battery of and Lollipop
Star has two embedded batteries still replaceable battery. On the
packaging it says up to sixty minutes. Frontime, you use
it for sixty minutes and then throw it away. That's
what they want you to do. That's what they expect
you to do.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
First off, can you choose the music you're listening to?
Speaker 1 (16:18):
No, I mean, they've got a couple different artists that
they've worked with, and I think you can choose by
buying a different Lollipop Star.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
I'm not a big lollipop connoisseur, and I'm kind of
also thinking, you know, TUTSI roll, how many licks does
it take to get to the center of it?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Totsy pop?
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Right, Like, I don't really know how long it takes
me to get through a lollipop. I don't know if
I want to listen to Acon for that long, like
stream directly into my bones. That doesn't sound like a
good time for me.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
I hadn't considered that part of it, but you're right.
That is, you know, you got to commit, and the
product requires it to be really quiet for you to
be able to hear what's going on. You know, you
can't you can't really hear if there's any noise around you.
And the show floor was way too loud for people
to hear. And so they were handing out with the lollipop,
(17:07):
they were handing out earplugs to everybody and telling you
you gotta plug your ears to be able to listen
to it.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
So I need to like go into the privacy of
my own home and sort a lollipop into my mouth
so I can listen to Acon. Yeah, this is like
the worst combination of everything that I can think of.
Like Apple Music exists, Spotify exists, band Camp exists. Like
if I want to listen to Acon, I shouldn't have
to put some of my mouth.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Yeah, you got a lot of options that aren't a
disposable lollipop.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Not to mention the fact that this disposable lollipop costs
nine dollars.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Nine dollars to a lollipop.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Someone really said, all right, yo, what if we brought
back the tooth tunes and the sound bites, but removed
all the redeeming qualities of both of those and charged
nine dollars for it. But here's why the Lollipop Star
got the worst Environmental Impact award. Lollipop Star is a
single U device and the batteries inside of it cannot
be removed.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
We are always looking for products with embedded batteries to
give Horst and show awards too, because they're everywhere and
they're a huge problem. Even if you know best case
scenario product is into a landfill, just rots and a landfill,
they've got toxic chemicals that can leach into groundwater, leach
into the soil. That's not good for the planet. But
(18:26):
also what can happen is a lot of waste processing
facilities includes some amount of moving stuff around, banging it around,
passing it through shredders, passing it through devices that separate
stuff out, and in that process batteries can cause fires.
And there are battery fires and trash trucks. If most
(18:47):
municipalities the rate of like one a week. I know,
my little town of forty seven thousand people has like
one trash fire a week, and it's usually batteries and
that's a huge problem for waste process.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Same so once again in summary, sixty minutes of acon
vibrating through your teeth and a non zero chance that
you could start a literal garbage fire. Did I mention
that it was nine dollars? I'm really not sure what
eales I can say here, So let's move on to
the next category in the Worst in Show Awards in shitification,
which is a word coined by doctor Cory doctor Rowe
(19:21):
about how as tech companies value profit and extraction over
any user experience, their services get in shitified.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Intification is basically how internet things tend to get worse
over time because when they start out, they're just looking
for users. They're looking for people to sign on and
do the thing. But over time they need to make money,
and so they find ways to reduce the services that
(19:51):
they're offering and make more money out of you squeeze
more blood from your stone and so the in Sittification
Award went this year was the Bosh e Bike app.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
The Bosh e Bike Flow app pairs to your e
bike and you can use it as a digital lock.
You can track your bike if it gets stolen, and
you can record your rides with pretty detailed stats. It
also links the bike's major components like the motor, the battery,
and the display together digitally. Each part is registered to
your bike and your account so that the system knows
(20:25):
what hardware belongs to whom. This is called parts pairing.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Parts pairing is basically, there's a little computer on the part,
there's a little computer on your bigger device. They talk
to each other, they have a little handshake agreement, and
parts pairing limits what the part can do, or what
kinds of repairs you can do, or what its capabilities are,
how it's being tracked. It really became a huge issue
with smartphones. We tracked between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty four.
(20:56):
Apple products that came out had more and more and
more parts paired to the moneyboard and would limit repair
in some way for independent repair technicians who weren't under
the Apple ecosystem. So if you wanted to replace an
iPhone battery, sure, if you're not part of Apple, you
might be able to buy a battery from I fix
It or somewhere and put it in yourself, but then
(21:18):
there would be warnings that you couldn't dismiss or there
would be some features that you wouldn't have, like battery
help metrics, for instance, They would just shut off. So
what this would mean is the little computer on your
motor has an agreement with your bike. It recognizes like,
all right, this is Dexter's bike. He bought it on
this day. And then let's say your bike gets stolen
(21:40):
and you mark your bike as stolen. Watch then links
that part. Let's say the person who steals your bike
separates out the motor, sells out the motor to somebody.
When that motor gets connected to the system again, it
gets flagged as the stolen part and it can't be
(22:00):
used again. It gets sort of locked out, and BOSCH
gets notified. You get notified where your stolen part is.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Okay, so on paper, sounds like a pretty good thing.
Why is that a bad thing?
Speaker 1 (22:11):
That piece of it not really a bad thing. The
fear and the reason it won the Ancientification Award is
that this capability allows BOSH to do lots of other things.
It allows them to turn off your bike subscription entirely
if you don't pay the monthly fee. It allows them
to shut down your motor if they want to. It
allows them to make it so that only a Bosh
(22:33):
repair tech can replace that motor, and you can't do
it yourself, or you can't take it to the bike
shop down the street. You know, you're just locked into
that system. And the more and more of our things
get tied into electronic systems that can be shut off
whenever manufacturer wants or whenever they go out of business,
the worst our stuff gets. And so my straight up
(22:55):
manual bicycle is never going to lose features because you know,
Twin is done supporting my line of bicycles. Right, Bosh
hasn't done these things yet to be cleared. Right now,
it's mostly upside, but that's the point of the Intentification award,
is to point to things where right now mostly upside,
but there's the potential here for some real nastiness that's
(23:18):
built into the way this thing is framed.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
All right, Now that we're almost through all the winners,
let's get back to that Samsung AI fridge, which is
a two time winner. This year, it not only won
the worst overall, but it also won specifically in the
repair ability category.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Samsung bespoke AI fridge with the voice activated door, the
food recognition, the ads on your screen the recommendations to
buy blueberries because it knows you're a blueberry lover and
you're running out of blueberries. It represents more points of
potential failure in a high failure product from a company
(24:00):
that has not been consistently good about repair.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Samsung has a pretty bad reputation when it comes to
repair ability. I fix it has continually criticized them for
charging prices for parts that just don't seem justified if
those parts are even made available. And then there's the
pricing for repair manuals.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
I don't have any repair technicians for Samsung in my
town because Samsung charges repair texts like one thousand dollars
a year to have access to their repair documentation, and
so a lot of appliance texts just don't do it
because it's so expensive.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Wait, it charges them a thousand dollars a year, yeah
to be able to have a manual.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Yeah yeah. Basically the online app diagnostic thing. There's a
subscription fee, and there's a special dongle you need to
connect to the fridge, and so a lot of people
just don't do it.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
A dongle and a subscription to fix the box that
keep your food cold.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Okay, all right.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
So that's why it won the repair Ability Award. It
won overall Worston Show because not only does it have
all these potential repair problems, it also has the intitification
potential of ads showing up on your screen. Samsung has
just done this with their eighteen hundred dollars refrigerators. They
started putting ads on people's screens in their homes, even
(25:24):
though you've already paid almost two thousand dollars for your fridge.
But now it's showing you ads too. And the privacy
problem of having a bunch of information about you and
your habits and what you're eating, and you know, could
your health insurance company charge you higher premiums because you've
got too much frozen pizza in your fridge.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
I have so much frozen pizza in my fridge right now.
I'm not even kidding.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
They're coming for you, dexter.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
I'm not even playing with you.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
I have I legitimately have like six frozen pizzas in
my freezer right now.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Hey. You know, when the deal's good, you got to
buy and bull that's it was.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
A good deal.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
One thing that I noticed is there's some interesting features.
You can say open sesame and the door opens, like
you can voice command open the door. How do we
feel about that?
Speaker 1 (26:15):
The image that they keep showing of this is somebody
with their hands full, got a big cast role, trying
to put it in fridge. You say open sess me,
the door opens. Okay. When the judges got together, we
talked about the chance that maybe you're in a wheelchair,
you want to be able to open the door that way.
I recognize that some of the time this might be
a useful feature, but it just introduces so many more
(26:35):
points of failure. There's now the automatic door opening that's
built into the hinge of the door mechanism. That is
yet another complicated part that you can only get a
Samsung or pairtech to the service, and it again adds
an LLM between you and opening your fridge. And that
they were showing it off on the show floor and
(26:56):
it was so noisy in there that the people demoing
it had to get really close to the door and
sort of shout it into the microphone of the fridge.
And I'm imagining at a party or something, you know,
the music's play loud, people are talking like shouting at
the fridge to get it to open or.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
You got kids yelling in the background and you try
to like, you know, I'm trying to get to the fridge.
I need to drink, Like what are we doing? Also,
does this thing have handles? I'm looking at a picture
of this.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
It doesn't have a handle on the front like normal,
and you can't open it manually from underneath. But it
worsens the normal amble experience.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
And just to be real here for a second voice
command to open a fridge on paper sounds like it
could be really helpful for someone who's disabled and needs
help opening the fridge door sometimes. But if something goes
wrong and they need to fix the door, now you're
looking at a really expensive repair. But if you live
in a rural area without one of those Samsung certified technicians,
(27:55):
then what you just can't open the fridge door at all?
What are you supposed to do? Moving on, though, there's
one more winner from this year that we didn't get to,
the lapro Ai Soulmate, which was the winner of this
year's People's Choice. So it's advertised as quote You're always
on three d Ai Soulmate. Basically, it's an anime girl
and a cylindrical tube with the camera on it, and
(28:17):
essentially people were unsettled by a camera that's marketed as
being always on.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
I get it. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Anime girl and a signallogrical twobe I've seeing that almost
a decade ago in Japan doesn't really move the needle
from me, but I get it. So those are this
year's losers or winners. And remember what I was saying
earlier about awards shows telling us about what people like
or where society is at a certain point in time.
That's where I think the Worst in Show is a
little bit different in that it's actually self aware of that.
(28:46):
But on top of that, it also can maybe give
some hints on how we as just regular people can
push back against stuff that we don't like. We'll get
into that after the break. I feel like I hear
a lot of people saying I don't want this AI
(29:09):
in my coffee maker. You know, a couple of years ago,
it would have been why do you got to put
NFTs in my whatever?
Speaker 3 (29:14):
App? Right?
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Why is it the companies keep making this stuff if
there are people who are saying that they don't want it,
I mean, are people like me and you are we
just weird? And everybody else does want it or what's
happening here.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
I mean, yet they are making it because it sells, right,
They wouldn't make it if it didn't sell, So I
think that's part of it. I think there's a lot
of AI being introduced in places where it doesn't need
to be. But I think what we give up in
a lot of that introduction is that now all of
(29:51):
our stuff has microphones on it and cameras on it,
and there's all this always on data that's being collected
about us room of our home. You know, if you've
got the Bosh coffee maker that's listening to you all
the time, and your refrigerator is watching you and watching
your food, and your doorbell out front is watching all
(30:12):
the neighbors. It's kind of mind boggling how dramatic the
increase in surveillance of us and our stuff and our
habits has been in technology in the last couple of years.
And we'll only know over time what that means for
our independence and our freedoms.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
But there are other trends that are happening in the
opposite direction, that is trends coming from us, the consumers.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
I see two things that make me hopeful. And one
of those things is that there is this rising public
pushback against this kind of new every year thing. And
I see the growth of the refirm marketplace back market.
They're growing hugely, They're getting bigger and bigger, and I
(31:03):
think a lot of people are saying, you know, I
don't really need the brand new phone. I'm fine with
last year's model or the year before that, and why
don't I buy it used? I can save some money
and help out the planet a little bit. There is
a cultural swell of pushback against why does all tech
have to be new and new every year? And that
makes me hopeful. And then there's also globally some legislation
(31:27):
that is helping the sealed in batteries thing. I think
in January twenty twenty seven, I am expecting there be
a major difference at CEES because in twenty twenty seven,
the EU Replaceable Batteries legislation goes into force. So this
is a law that's passed in the European Union that
(31:50):
says that by twenty twenty seven, all portable products sold
in the EU must have user replaceable batteries.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
User replaceable so anybody can pop in batteries to replace
it exactly.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Really okay, you should be able to change your phone
battery yourself, change your laptop batter yourself. There are some
exceptions battery power tooth brushes, for instance, anything that's supposed
to be used in a quote unquote white environment isn't covered.
But something like smart rings, they're gonna have to figure
out an answer or stop selling in the EU. And
that's a huge market.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
Wow, okay, I'm looking forward to that. Shoot me too. Well,
what do you think the awards will look like next year? Then?
Speaker 1 (32:31):
You know, I would love to have a Worst in
Show where we don't give a sealed and battery award.
I would love for there to be so few things
on the market that it's not worth pointing to.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
If we're to take one thing from this year's Worst
and Show Awards or the Worst in Show awards in general,
what do you think it would be.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
I would like people to be less bought into the
hype cycle. I would like people to win something breaks
than about whether they can fix it, not bollow it.
It's time for me to upgrade anyway. I think if
people recognize that upgrade is a you know, it's brainwashing.
(33:12):
By manufacturers to some extent, manufacturers have trained us all
to look for next year's model, look for what are
the new features out on the market today, And for
those of us that love technology, it's a it's really
effective brainwashing, you know it. I work in repair, I
work for a repair company. I say this stuff every day,
(33:33):
and I still have that thought at first when something breaks,
like oh well, I should just get a new one.
But I think it takes all of us sort of
pushing back against that sub boutine in our own heads,
you know.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
And that's it. There we have it.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
So I'd actually be curious to see what you thought
about this year's Worse Than Show Awards.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
Did you agree with the results?
Speaker 2 (33:55):
I mean me personally, I'm not really sure how an
AI companion beat out the Lollipop Star for People's Choice,
But you know what, that's what award shows are for
seeing the results and then vehemently disagreeing with them in
the comments section online.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
So if you got your own take, you.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Know what to do, and I'd love to see what
you think. Thank you one more time to Liz to
Prepare dot org and to everyone who participated in the
Worst and Show Awards and thank you so much for
listening to kill Switch. You can email us if you
want at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC or on Instagram.
We're at kill switchpod and if you like the show,
hopefully you do, you know, think about leaving us a review.
(34:33):
It helps other people find the show, which helps us
keep doing our thing. And once you've done that, did
you know that kill Switch is on YouTube? So if
you want to see video of any of the weird
products that we talked about today, you can check us
out at YouTube dot com, slash, kill Switch, Underscore pod
or you can find a link for that in the
show notes. Killswitch is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas. It's
(34:55):
produced by Sheena Ozaki, Darluck Potts and Julian Nutter. Our
theme song is by me and Kyle Murdach and Kyle
also mixes a show from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are
Oswa Lashin, Mangesh Hatigadur, and Kay Osborne from iHeart. Our
executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki e.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
Tour.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Catch on next week.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Goodbye
kill switch News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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