> I specifically told the salesperson I didn't want wifi, and they told me it's only if you want it to operate from your phone.
Don't know where you are but in most countries that would be a valid reason to return it at any time you found it out. They lied to get your money, willfully is almost never a requirement.
Yeah, misrepresentation is basic contract law stuff that would be generally valid in the US too, but:
1. there's probably no evidence of it
2. the workers at the store will deny it
3. the workers at the store likely have no grasp of contract law and will insist on whatever their store policy is
4. hiring a lawyer to return a dishwasher is a waste of time for most anyone knowledgable enough to know that this is a valid legal issue
Most retailers just have a standard return policy, it's a good idea to choose where you purchase a major appliance where you know the return policy.
For Costco it's 90 days for a major appliance, you don't have to justify yourself as to why. Some stores have terrible return policies, some have good enough policies.
I've seen snap together flooring, the kind that does not require nails, returned to Costco full of nails. I thought that was incredibly wrong but they took it back
Yeah, good return policies make things easy, for sure. But retailers with bad policies still have to fulfill their legal requirements even if their policy conflicts.
I will never buy anything Bosch again after reading this thread. What other reason could Bosch have for hiding this functionality behind a website and user account if not to monetize it down the line or worse, bring more of the functionality behind a paywall. We already saw what happened with HP charging to print and even the recent Chromecast outage where something that should be handled locally is pinging back to Google and then working.
> pinging back to Google and then working
I still have a bricked Android phone from nonsense like that. If you:
1. Factory reset the phone while not logged in to the last Google account on the phone
2. Have the Google account invalidated (e.g., using an identity verification app on a temp noogler account, ...)
You'll never be able to access the phone again. The "factory reset" maintains some internal state despite a scary message on the screen promising everything is deleted and asking if that's really what you want, and it'll require the last working password.
Alright ... annoying, buggy (the fact that there are two factory resets and one doesn't reset the device is a problem; either fix or delete the broken one, or make the scary message scarier), but fine in my case.
It checks that password against Google's servers though instead of the local hash, and it doesn't even matter if you know the password; the fact that the account is inactive prevents you from accessing the phone.
That's an anti theft feature. Intended to make the phone useless to a thief. It doesn't work very well, thieves manage to get around it somehow (not so much with Apple's version) so it ends up annoying the users more than it does deter thieves.
Apple is really really difficult about getting these unlocked. The carriers can't do it, you have to show them proof of purchase and have an enterprise support contract. With Google the carriers can just do it usually.
I managed a fleet of mobiles at work for a while, this is how I know. It often happened that colleagues returned a phone without unlocking it.
> thieves manage to get around it somehow
There are vulnerabilities. Some years ago when this was a new feature I got an android phone to use for development for someone. I just generated a new google account on it and promptly forgot the new email and pass.
Time to return it: surprise, it wanted the previous account to log in after a factory reset. I ended up keeping it and paying for it.
A few months later, after a weekend of googling, I found instructions on how to bypass it by using some vulnerability in the browser invoked in the initial set up, got to a browser window with an address bar, used it to download and install some apk with an older version of some system service, and used that to bypass the lockdown.
Of course, it's probably much harder than that now. But it's doable.
It is a very good thing that Apple is tough about it, given the high value of the devices, and how people carry them around in public. I very much want my devices to be useless to thieves.
It's still not clear how this requires Apple to do anything or why it should have anything to do with any cloud service.
The IMEI is burned into the phone. They should definitely make it hard to change the IMEI; but they do. If the phone is stolen then the IMEI gets reported as stolen and anyone who tries to activate the phone with a wireless carrier gets caught.
Why does Apple or Google need to inconvenience people who forget their passwords or encounter the conglomerate's bugs?
Stolen Imeis aren't always exchanged between carriers, much less internationally.
Even if that wasn't the case, as long as there were at least a few decently-sized countries not plugged into the system, that's where the thieves would sell all their devices.
Stolen Apple devices are still usable for parts (which is why parts pairing is not always a bad thing), and you can sometimes phish the Apple ID credentials from the victim, which is why stealing those devices is still profitable enough.
> Even if that wasn't the case, as long as there were at least a few decently-sized countries not plugged into the system, that's where the thieves would sell all their devices.
It still limits the market where they can be sold, because even there the customer doesn't actually want a stolen device. What if that country starts blocking them, or they want to travel anywhere that does? They could even get arrested.
It also requires the thieves to have a network to transport them there, vs. individual petty thieves who would otherwise be selling them locally.
> Stolen Apple devices are still usable for parts (which is why parts pairing is not always a bad thing)
Parts pairing is still a scam. They could check the part against a stolen device list without refusing to pair with parts from third party OEMs or first party non-stolen parts from other regional markets.
> Stolen Imeis aren't always exchanged between carriers, much less internationally.
Yes these often end up in Eastern Europe where the carriers don't really care about that stuff. And most people can't pay full price for top end phones so there's much more market for this stuff.
Even on legit corporations with tens of thousands of iPhones, Apple still gives you a lot of hassle if you want to get one unlocked. Just so this won't be used as a loophole.
> and you can sometimes phish the Apple ID credentials from the victim, which is why stealing those devices is still profitable enough.
Yep, I always see "is this text legit?" posts with clear phishing URLs in iOS help groups on Facebook, posted by people who had their iPhones stolen and think it's Apple Support attempting to get it back.
IMEI blacklisting is not worldwide. The phone can still be used in other countries. Also, rogue carrier employees are selling IMEI blacklist removal as a side gig on the black market.
Isn't this the same problem either way? The enterprising criminal can take a low level job at Apple rather than a low level job at a carrier, which is presumably one of the reasons it hasn't actually worked.
And if the problem is that each country is using a different IMEI blacklist then that seems like an obvious thing to fix. There are already treaties and agreements which is how the global phone network operates to begin with, or you could have US law enforcement set up a system to submit the IMEI to each of the individual blacklists.
I trust apple to have more intelligent audit controls on their employees than the average carrier.
And the calculation for the carrier is different. There's a inherent incentive on unblocking a phone for the carrier, as this means a billable contract. For Apple there's a inherent incentive in being known as having devices hard to unblock and thus, presumably less attractive for thieves.
> The enterprising criminal can take a low level job at Apple rather than a low level job at a carrier
To my knowledge, Apple has not had any insider compromise of activation lock.
This is why criminals try to phish the credentials from the victim instead.
Yes and even companies that can request it (I worked for one in this role) have to provide extensive documentation.
A phone must be purchased for us (with invoice with serial no) originally, or it must have been enrolled in our corporate MDM before getting locked. And for a while they didn't even accept the latter.
So even if you are at a third party you won't get away with sneaking these through. Which is good, a bit annoying sometimes though when some of our vendors didn't provide serial number invoices. We now require it but during the first years of anti-theft lock it was a bit of an issue and caused a lot of e-waste for us, sadly.
> To my knowledge, Apple has not had any insider compromise of activation lock.
First they would have to get caught.
> This is why criminals try to phish the credentials from the victim instead.
Either method would be effective and not every criminal would have access to an insider, or they would have to pay off the insider for each device and then still prefer to phish the customer if possible to avoid paying the bribe.
I want to know whether this actually deters thieves. Anecdotally, from what I heard, it seems that phone stealing is very much still a thing in areas with active pickpocketing.
It is not as bad as it used to be... Apple phones are only good for parts, which isn't much. I'd guess pickpockets typically can't tell what kind of phone you have before they take it, and Androids, being the exploitable mishmash of stuff they usually are, often can be unlocked.
In the US I am not worried about people taking my phone even in sketchy areas. I'm sure they'd much rather have my wallet or other valuables.
Even then, Apple also bind (an increasingly larger amount of) component IDs to the motherboard, so nowadays a stolen device can't (really) be used for parts either. (The display will not authenticate and Face ID & HDR won't work, in addition to a message showing that in Settings)
And to answer the obvious repair question -- yes, parts can be rebound to other motherboards etc., they just need iPhone Activation to pass first.
When five years ago thieves broke into my sons' class locker room, they stole all android phones and cash but didn't bother to take iphones. So yes it works or at least it did back then.
This isn't really consistent with the theft statistics, e.g. 68.6% of stolen phones are iPhones[1] (in the UK where they have ~44% market share). This is presumably because of higher resale value etc., but the premise that nobody cares to steal them anymore evidently hasn't panned out.
[1] https://www.loveitcoverit.com/news/changing-world/mobile-pho...
That could be because in many situations (crimes of opportunity) thieves don’t have the luxury of time to evaluate the model of a phone before they steal it. Google needs to step their shit up.
That isn't really consistent with the statistics either: If that was happening then the theft rate should approximate the penetration, but it's still higher for iPhones, implying that the thieves actually prefer them.
That makes sense if they e.g. have a higher resale value, but only if they have a higher resale value and the thieves are choosing them on purpose as a result.
I'm sorry that the reality in a locker room of a Norwegian high school is not consistent with British statistics.
Why would being in a different country change the effectiveness of the same system? The relevance of the country is that the theft rate has to be compared with the installed base for that type of phone, which is something that does vary by country.
It does because the thieves just want some cash to get a quick drug fix or whatever.
Even if they get $10 for a $1200 iPhone they are happy. And many components can still be salvaged and be worth more than that.
Yes, here in Barcelona which is pretty much pickpocket central, it's always funny to see the tourists going around with their big iPhone XL sticking way out of their back pocket.
At first I used to tell them (the way you would when someone goes around with their backpack wide open) but people were usually like 'mind your own business' so yeah. Better to let them find out the hard way then.
I get why the feature exists, but it's my humble opinion that a "brick your device" button shouldn't exist. Repeating myself, some alternatives with similar levels of antitheft whil being much more pleasant for the user:
- Don't enable that kind of reset functionality if that kind of antitheft is enabled
- Warn the user about the potential bricked device, and require an additional confirmation
- Don't require a ping to Google servers when you can verify account ownership just via a matched password hash
Antitheft is fine and dandy, but the implementation is bad.
That's Factory Reset Protection. You can turn it off in settings, if you don't want that security feature.
But yes, factory reset on Android phones only wipes the user data partition. Your phone has other things that don't necessarily get reset under a factory reset too, for instance: eSIMs (which is useful that it doesn't, in my experience)
"Factory reset" is a misnomer, a true factory reset would completely erase the internal storage and replace it with a clean copy of the OS.
If that phone is based on a Mediatek SoC, I believe a true reset is possible - look up SPFlashTool and read about this useful exploit:
https://tinyhack.com/2021/01/31/dissecting-a-mediatek-bootro...
Sounds like "Find My" on iPhones which is apparently meant as theft protection: as long as it's enabled the device will not accept activation with any other account even after a factory reset as long as the owner doesn't input their password and disable the feature.
A lot of buyers of used iPhones and Macbooks find that out the hard way, often because the owners don't even know about that. And actual thieves don't need to care about it as long as they find a buyer who doesn't know about it either.
Wow, I didn't know Android phones were susceptible to this. Apple did this to a phone I had but I assumed Google couldn't since there are so many manufacturers with varying setups.
My relatively new Bosch dishwasher has real buttons and an LED display. No wifi required
Looks like we got lucky. My unit is a couple years old and has physical buttons, a display, and no wifi. It's been discontinued. Looking at Bosch's site now, there are no models without wifi. The cheap ones (mine was in the "300 series") now lack a display, have touch buttons and require wifi.
I have button and LEDs, and it works fine without wifi for "basic functions", but for "advanced functions" like washer deep cleaning I would need to use their website.
I just bought one and yes, mine also comes with WiFi but it's 100% optional: all features are available in menus or physical buttons too. (Including the infamous rinse cycle the blog post mentions)
It's a European model ("SMV4HAX48E", I'm in EMEA) so it might differ by markets.
Same, my mum got a new Bosch Series 4 last year and it doesn't have wifi at all. Everything is on the control panel.
I think this is annoying, but given that the basic functionality works, it personally wouldn't be a dealbreaker for me. I don't normally do anything fancy with the settings on my dishwasher, I just want it to wash the dishes. I'd rather have a dishwasher that puts delay and eco mode behind an app, than some shitty dishwasher that doesn't clean the dishes well on the "normal" setting.
This reminds me of the EU regulations, which not only:
1. _require_ dishwashers to have an Eco mode, not locked behind anything, but also
2. _require_ Eco mode to be the default. If you buy a dishwasher in the EU and turn it on, and press "start", it'll be on Eco mode, the mode that uses the least water/power.
If you don't care about the dishwasher other than to turn it on, and it works for you, then everybody wins. If it doesn't wash as much as you'd like, or takes longer thank you'd like, you can still have all the other dishwasher modes (express, intensive, etc.).
The whole point of the regulation is to make the default mode the most energy efficient. I find it absolutely crazy that a German company, when given free rein in the USA, would actually paywall Eco mode. It's just mind-boggling.
The weird thing about eco modes is that they often don’t use less water or power. I live off grid, and just as a function of my setup I know exactly what consumes what. My Bosch dishwasher, on a normal 70C dish cycle, uses about 4.5L of water and 1.6kWh. On eco mode, it uses 8L of water, and 1.8kWh. Takes twice as long though.
Similar with my AEG washer - a 40 degree cotton wash uses marginally more water than a 40 degree eco wash, but less power - and is 25% quicker.
Honestly, it’s not clear what the economy is supposed to be. Intensity of demand? Except on each appliance the heater runs at the same rated wattage when it’s heating - just different patterns of usage on eco mode, more off and on.
That's a really weird thing. In the EU, not only is Eco mode mandatory, and must be the default mode, and you can't label any other mode "default" or "normal" to sway the consumer to use that instead... but it's also how the appliance's energy rating is calculated, and it's displayed prominently on every device sold. It would be madness for a company not to put their most efficient settings on Eco mode.
https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/product-list/...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:...
You can also see there that they're tracking the effects of their regulations and measuring how much less electricity and water is used. The regulations also set minimum standards for cleaning, drying and energy usage so you can't sell products that look efficient but require everything washed twice, nor can you even include a resource hog mod.
And it mandates the availability of spare parts for a certain number of years, and access to repair information, so you don't just junk the whole object.
I can only imagine "Eco" mode being worse than other modes in some place where there's not good market regulation.
I just checked my own dishwasher, and its Eco mode uses 9L of water and 0.83kWh per cycle. Other washing modes use 9-17L water and 0.9-1.5kWh per cycle... so it does conform to the regulations.
Just as an anecdote - that's not my experience, and I have a smart power plug to measure it too. On my Bosch Series 6 dishwasher, Eco Mode comes consistently in at 1.2kWh per cycle, while the intensive 70C cycle is around 1.6kWh. I have no way of measuring water usage though, but in terms of energy the ECO mode is really the most efficient.
Is 70c normal? Wont that mess up plastic items?
Yes, it's normal (should be above 65C, anyway). Yes, even "dishwasher-safe" plastic items often warp or discolor in a normal hot dishwashing cycle. I wouldn't put anything plastic or fragile in the dishwasher, but virtually everything in the kitchen is ceramic, glass, or stainless steel, so.
Why would a German company apply feel-good but ultimately counter-productive regulation to customers where they don't have to?
> counter-productive
The opposite, actually. Productive. Millions of litres of water and terawatts of power saved per year. End users collectively saving €1.3 billion on water and electricity costs in 2020 (in comparison to them having standard dishwashers from 1990 before any eco targets were set)
https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/product-list/...
Not shown: water wasted from pre-washing dishes or having to run multiple cycles because the new eco-modes don't do the job properly. Also from manually washing dishes because the dishwasher is blocked for longer (and even longer once you add the extended drying time required due to the lower temperatures).
Shown: the regulations actually set minimum cleaning and drying requirements, for precisely that reason - the equipment has to do the job properly.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:...
It's almost as if they already thought this through when making the regulation.
Not shown: the EU cleaning requirements are inadequate in reality which is why dishwashers previously defaulted to higher-energy modes - because those modes are the ones that actually work reliably for users. It's almost like the regulations are ideologically motivated rather than having anything to do with reality.
That sounds annoying too. I want the default to be the one that does what I want it to do, clean a normal load of dishes, and do a good job at it. My dishwasher defaults to the last mode I set it to.
> I find it absolutely crazy that a German company, when given free rein in the USA, would actually paywall Eco mode. It's just mind-boggling.
... they didn't do that. There is no paywall.
Perhaps I misspoke, but needing a network connection, needing a smartphone, giving over your details, very likely getting marketing materials you didn't want via app notifications, or email, requiring to comply with terms of service, and at any time the company is free to rescind or change the offer, to me is "paywalling". You are paying out, giving them things of real value, over and above buying the device, and if you don't then they're blocking functionality.
All the functionality should be in the device itself, and require no sign-up or ongoing relationship with the company to use it.
It's annoying, but it's not a paywall.
> All the functionality should be in the device itself, and require no sign-up or ongoing relationship with the company to use it.
For a dishwasher yes, but I don't agree with that as a blanket statement. There are cloud connected devices that I really like. e.g. I like to run my Roomba on-demand after I leave my house, and I think that's an entirely reasonable use case.
Many other devices are useful away from home as well, which would all require internet connectivity. e.g. security systems, cameras, etc.
The internet doesn't need to be the cloud.
Security cameras are the classic example of widespread self hosted but internet-accessible.
Even the ones that have proprietary apps are often just alternative frontends to a web server running on the home network.
It does when the end user is being a NAT and a firewall and they don't know how to configure it. Legacy IPs cameras are notorious for being difficult-to-impossible for consumers to install, and when they managed to do so, they were often set up insecurely.
The typical MJPEG/ONVIF camera doesn't even remotely compete for the same customers as Ring/Nest/Blink.
> not a paywall
You pay with your data
Nobody uses the word that way. You give HN the ability to use all user-contributed data. Nobody would say HN is paywalled.
It's true that the companies wouldn't want you to use the word "pay", but that's what it is.
When you register at HN you know that they need some data to manage your user account, for the same reason cookie banners aren't needed if all of a site's cookies are required for it to function. A dishwasher doesn't need a wifi connection or data to clean dishes, and if it's not clearly advertised before purchase that's effectively a hidden cost.
Perhaps nobody uses the word like that so far, but if enough people did it probably would turn out better for the consumer.
It really is annoying. And if I have to switch modes I normally go for the 70C power wash instead of "normal" setting to make sure everything gets clean too.
> ... they didn't do that. There is no paywall.
Where I live internet access isn’t provided for free.
Where I live housing isn’t provided for free; are all dishwashers paywalled?
Y’all are doing acrobatics to twist the definition of a very common and clear word.
I mean, is Bosch the bad guy here or the salesperson? It sounds like they either lied or were incompetent.
I guess maybe both are bad. Yesterday I tried to configure a friend’s wifi router after the speed was suspiciously slow. It forced me to ask them for their Spectrum login info (the same info they use to pay the bills, not the wifi info) which nobody remembered and I gave up. Apparently this is required according to https://www.reddit.com/r/Spectrum/s/3sLnHuWgEF
So if we’re badmouthing companies that lock physical functionality behind a cloud, add Spectrum. Not that you’ll have much choice if they’re the only provider, but still.
The more I think about it, the more I agree with you. What if you have someone house sitting? You really need to download the Bosch app to their phone just to use the same dishwashing routine that you usually do? Blah.
Any alternatives to Bosch that don’t do this?
Cable company "Customer Premises Equipment" normally has provisioning capabilities built in, so that they can be controlled/reconfigured/reset from the upstream provider. You could probably call Spectrum and they can reset for you.
The reason they do all of this is exactly because of the scenario you ran into: people are always forgetting their logins -- and back when modems/routers didn't have remote provisioning, they spent a lot of time and money sending technicians out to physically reset people's equipment.
Mesh routers are requiring an app to configure them now. TPLink and Ubiquiti is a big violator of this. (Ubiquiti you can run a docker container as a controller... but still..)
How is Ubiquiti a violator of this? You can run their Java software on anything or buy a cloud key. I use an old HP thin client. There’s a good app and a well maintained webpage. If you enjoy pain, most gear has a cli.
I can’t think of a better way to offer the functionality in a way that works for so many customer segments.
He asked for no wifi, was sold a no wifi dishwasher and then later changed his mind and wanted wifi after installing it. Where's the misrepresentation?
No, the person above was led to believe that all of the dishwasher's features could be used offline, but that was not the case.
Usually contracts say that the entire contract is contained within the four corners of the document and anything the salesman tells you isn’t a contract.
If there was a written contract, it might say that. I haven't always been asked to sign a written contract for appliances at retail. But even if it did, those types of contracts can not disclaim away any liability for the salesperson accurately representing the product. Verbal contracts are legally contracts whether or not the seller wants to be held liable for them.
If the contract doesn’t correspond to what the salesperson said, wouldn’t the company still be on the hook for false advertising and/or fraud?
Bought from a dealership. I don't think he lied, I think he just didn't know about "advanced functions".
I never got the "no need for wifi" in written form.