Although we have questioned the usefulness of smart or connected appliances over the years the one thing we didn’t get into or consider all that much was the reliablity of them. Turns out J.D. Power in the USA has and, it’s not good news.
Asides from the report suggesting that users have “issues” with using smart appliances that sugest recipes and the likes, it has found them to be less reliable than their “dumb” counterparts.
They say that bluetooth and Wi-Fi-enabled appliances had an average of 87 problems per 100 appliances, while non-enabled appliances had an average of 63 per 100, according to the study involving over 14,000 owners across three years by J.D. Power and repotred on by USA TODAY.
One of the authors cited as aying a key finding was that some consumers don’t want the smart technology or don’t know how to use it.
For instance, a phrase people used was “‘We want to set it and forget it. … I want to put the clothes in, turn the thing on, and then when I come back, it’s all done,'”.
And yet, appliance makers in a bid to add value to their machines are bent on adding these features that, it ould appear from this and feedback we get, people don’t really want.
Perhaps just a case of trying to reinvent the wheel to drive sales and, it doesn’t appear to be working.
