This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died.
I bought a Bosch 500 series because that's what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock.
After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed start and eco mode, require an app.
Not only that, to use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher.
This blog post is a lightly-edited transcript of my latest YouTube video on Level 2 Jeff: I won't connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud.
So getting back first to that old GE dishwasher, it was, I don't know, I think that planned obsolescence is something that applies to many consumer products today.
Companies know if they design something to last only 5 or 10 years, that means in 5 or 10 years someone's going to have to buy a whole new one.
And on my GE Amana dishwasher, it started having weird power issues, like the controls would just not light up unless I reset the circuit breaker for a few minutes. That started happening more often, and this past Saturday it just wouldn't come on no matter what, even after I tested and re-wired it all the way from the panel up to the dishwasher's internal power connector.
So it was dead.
Next up, I looked at what it took to get a control board. Well... $299 for a control board that was 'special order' and might not even fix the problem? That's a non-starter for my $600, 8-year-old dishwasher.
Even if I got it fixed, the front panel was starting to rust out at the hinge points (leaving some metal jaggies that my soon-to-be-crawling 6 month old could slice his fingers on), and other parts of the machine were showing signs of rust/potential future leaks...
It was Saturday night, and for a family of five, a dishwasher is kinda important. We don't have 1.5 hours every night to spend hand-washing dishes (not to mention the water bill!).
So I needed to get a new one, and it's really hard for me to schedule a few hours for my Dad and I to get it done in the middle of the week (plus that's multiple days without a dishwasher!).
So I did some research, and I found Bosch seemed to have the best bet for under $1,000, available locally on a Sunday.
Consumer Reports, random Redditors, etc. seemed to have some praises for Bosch—on Reddit many also praised Miele, but I couldn't find any of those available locally. And Consumer Reports especially praised all the Bosch units, with them topping all their reliability and customer satisfaction charts!
I remembered five or ten years ago, whenever I had bought my old GE, I remembered Bosch topped the charts too, but back then I settled for GE to save a few bucks...
Installation was (mostly) great!
So I spent a little more this time, hoping for a better experience. And installation was actually great—it was a lot easier to install the Bosch than it was that the GE.
It has a plastic base that slides better on the floor, and there's easier routing of the drain hose, inlet hose, and power wire that makes it less risky when you're pushing the thing into the blind cutout under the counter.
The one weird thing was that whoever like tightened the feet on the bottom at the factory must've used an impact driver or something because they were all practically embedded, and wouldn't budge.
I was turning the little screw on the front that pushes the rear foot down through a little gearing, but the worm gear slipped out and kinda shoved the long rod that connects the front to the back out of place. I had to buy a 10mm hex socket to wiggle the foot loose enough the gearing would actually work.
But once that was done, the rest of the install was seamless. (Thanks especially to some help from my Dad).
First use, encountering the Cloud requirement
So I turned it on, and immediately hated the new touch sensor stuff on it.
The old GE had buttons: you press them in, they click and you know that you pressed a button.
The touch sensor, you kind of touch it and the firmware—like this new dishwasher actually takes time to boot up! I had to reset it like three times and my wife meanwhile was like laughing at me like look at this guy who does tech stuff and he can't even figure out how to change the cycle on it.
That took about five minutes, sadly.
But eventually I pulled out the manual book because I was like... "this is actually confusing."
It should be like: I touch the button and it changes to that mode! But that was not how it was working.
I wanted to run just a rinse cycle to make sure the water would go in, the water would pump out through the sump, and everything worked post-install.
But I couldn't find a way to do a rinse cycle on the control panel.
So I looked in the manual and found this note:
It says options with an asterisk—including Rinse, Machine Care (self-cleaning), HalfLoad, Eco, and Delay start, are "available through Home Connect app only and depending on your model."
The 500 series model I bought isn't premium enough to feature a 7-segment display like the $400-more-expensive 800 series, so these fancy modes are hidden behind an app and cloud service.
I was like, "Okay, I'll look up this app and see if I can use it over Bluetooth or locally or whatever."
Nope! To use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to your Wi-Fi, which lets the dishwasher reach out on the internet to this Home Connect service.
You have to set up an account on Home Connect, set up the Home Connect app on your phone, and then you can control your dishwasher through the Internet to run a rinse cycle.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
An app? I mean, I can understand maybe adding some neat convenience features for those who want them. Like on my new fridge—which I chose not to connect to WiFI—it has an app that would allow me to monitor the inside temperature or look up service codes more easily. If I wanted those add-on features, which my old fridge didn't have, I could get them.
But requiring an app to access features that used to be controllable via buttons on the dishwasher itself—or are still if you pay $400 more for the fancy "800" model? That's no bueno.
What can I do?
Well, first of all, I could just not use those features. That's kind of annoying because I bought it with the assumption that I could run the cleaning cycle, that I could run the rinse cycle without having to have an app and Wi-Fi.
Another option is I could just connect it to my Wi-Fi, maybe on an IoT VLAN.
But it's not like a video doorbell, where an Internet connection adds on functionality, like being able to see who rang while you're on vacation, or storing security footage clips on the cloud so you have them available even after someone robs your house...
But a dishwasher... I'm not going to remote control my dishwasher and like, run an extra rinse cycle while I'm on a beach somewhere.
I don't need Internet on my dishwasher.
Another third option is somebody has reverse engineered this protocol and built HCPY, a Home Connect Python library.
But here's the problem: I already spent like four hours getting this dishwasher installed in my kitchen. I don't want to spend another four hours configuring my own web UI for it—which still requires at least a one-time connection through Home Connect!—and maintaining that as a service on my local network, relying on an unauthorized third party library using reverse-engineering to get at the private dishwasher API!
What can we do?
I don't think we should let vendors get away with this stuff.
First, it lets product designers get lazy.
A feature like a little display, a little seven segment display that can show like two letters and a number of minutes remaining or something like that... How much does that cost?
How hard is it to integrate that into every model, even the cheap ones?
A lot of cheap dishwashers actually have those things, but not Bosch!
With Bosch, you have to pay $400 for the privilege of a little display!
Second, this might be a little bit conspiracy theory or whatever, but it feels like it's part of planned obsolescence. Just like with the GE, where a lot of parts are designed to rust out after 5 or 10 years.
If you have a cloud app, that means there's a cloud service that has to be running. That costs money to maintain.
And if there's no subscription fee right now, that means one of two things:
- They could be selling our data already.
- At some point, they'll either close the service because it's a cost center (so the rinse cycle and eco mode on all these dishwashers just goes "POOF!"), or they're going move to a subscription model.
All of a sudden, if you want to run the self-cleaning cycle, you better start paying five bucks to Bosch every month. Forever.
That's insane.
Third, it's a security hole in your local network.
Bosch might be a little better than some no-name light bulb company making IoT light bulbs on Amazon, but only a little.
I don't want to have Bosch having full internet access on my local network.
Their API would be able to talk back to my dishwasher, and the dishwasher—unless I put it on a VLAN, which 99% of consumers have no clue how to do that...
That's just something that shouldn't have to happen.
This is a dishwasher!
I don't know.
What should be done?
When I posted on social media about this, a lot of people told me to return it.
But I spent four hours installing this thing built into my kitchen.
I hooked it up to the water, it's running through cycles... it is working. I'll give them that. It does the normal stuff, but you know, there are some features that don't work without the app.
At a minimum, I think what Bosch should do is make it so that the dishwasher can be accessed locally with no requirement for a cloud account. (Really, it'd be even better to have all the functions accessible on the control panel!)
Anyone building an IoT device, here is my consumer-first, e-waste-reduction maxim:
First local, then cloud.
Cloud should be an add-on.
It should be a convenience for people who don't know how to do things like connect to their dishwasher with an app locally.
And it's not that hard.
A little ESP32, a little $1 chip that you can put in there could do all this stuff locally with no cloud requirement at all.
I think that there might be some quants or people who want to make a lot of money building all these cloud services.
I don't think that it's people who are consumer-first and eco-conscious because if they were, they would give us control first and then add on 'nice' quality of life features through a cloud service.
With my Bosch 500 series dishwasher, I was excited after the easy install (besides those leveling feet), then was let down so hard once I found out I couldn't use all the features it came with.
Comments
Beyond ridiculous.
We have a Whirlpool dryer purchased in (cough) fall 1984. Nice and simple and old school. No computers. No cloud. JustPlainWorks.
We had a guy come out a number of years ago to do minor maintenance on the corresponding 20+ year Whirlpool washer and he said something along the lines of "yup - love these models from back then. They never break. They are repairable. Do not ever replace that dryer. Just run it forever because that's how long it is going to last. So simple."
Contrast that with a former coworker who went with a super programmable LG (I think) who had nothing but problems with all the unnecessary electronics.
At some point you need to vote with your wallet. Rip it out and take it back as 'does not work'. Something that expensive shouldn't require anything at all other than power, water, and you pressing a button.
You really appreciate a lot of the ingenuity that goes into engineer consistent design. One example I have that features a useful design that is local first then cloud is ac on cars.
On my car, if I hold my keyfob it rolls down all the windows to get the stale air out. It’s a great local feature.
I was spending time with a friend at a park, and as were walking back the car they whip out their phone to turn on their cars ac remotely. A nice feature that doesn’t work when your car is under 60 ft of rock.
Cut to trying to explain how a car has cellular data and has to connect to a network to be able to remote control it.
I would like to be able to crank my ac remotely but for now local control best suits my desires.
I found a page on Home Connect on the 'Consumer Action Taskforce' wiki, and it mentions the cloud requirement and 'no cloud' offline mode (which requires a cloud account and WiFi connection to enable, lol), but that page didn't mention the fact some devices hide features behind Home Connect, that you can't use if you don't use Home Connect.
Bosch has beaten you. You paid your money, found a major defect (and it is a defect), and kept it anyway. They win, you lose. Zero deterrence.
Jeff should return it, it is *only* four hours. The block is mental, not physical. The product is defective. I won't be be buying a Bosch, too bad because I had one in a rental years ago and it was amazing. The MBAs who made this decision should own their mistakes.
Time is money and four hours is a lot of opportunity cost that he could have spent doing multitudes of income generating time. I would be willing to wager that Jeff's time is honestly worth more than 100$ an hour, so taking it back *is* a loss.
I don't think anyone is so productive and amazing they can justify any 4 hours will bring them that, it's just not how the world work. Plus the vindication and the message it bring directly to the manufacturer is worth in itself. Not everything has to return immediate value for the self, it's called living in a society.
Agreed, they just want money and they got it.
Please, return it! It‘s the only way they learn.
Sadly, only one local salesperson will "learn".
Then it has to roll uphill.
Your government ordering strikes on other nations over signal, and you are worried about your dishwasher data stored in eagle data center somewhere in Swiss alps.
Hahaha dude you should not be honest online.
Yea, he should be worried about those things of which he has no control over, versus this, which he does and impacts him on a personal level.
It's all billionaire oligarchs doing billionaire oligarch shit. Their power comes from exploiting us and our willingness to let them do it.
It starts with forcing us to be renters. It ends with bombs dropping on innocent children held hostage by other oligarchs as human shields so they can launch bombs at innocent merchant marines exploited by still other oligarchs. It's all about control at every level.
Bosch and GE can get bent.
You're not wrong.
There's also an option to use other version of hcpy with HomeAssistant MQTT support which setup should take quite a bit less than a few hours https://github.com/hcpy2-0/hcpy/wiki/HomeAssistant-Addon but fully agreed that this should not be the standard... They've probably went the route they did so not to have anything Bluetooth related as that might look cheap and/or might introduce other vulnerabilities/bugs in the communication stack.
Does Bluetooth look cheap?
I honestly find Bluetooth more convenient than the other options most devices provide. I wonder if the public feels that way as well?
Well, I'd far rather have a vulnerability in the Bluetooth stack of my dishwasher, since that protocol is really only locally exploitable and the product isn't mobile, than in the WiFi stack reaching up to a cloud-connected server. In the best case, once compromised, it ends up getting used for some ransomware hackers' DDoS swarm.
Now imagine this scenario: A global war breaks out, and the cloud service controlling your dishwasher activates its hidden military functions... And it turns out there are several of them—backdoors in the chips from China, exploits in the application software from the EU, and vulnerabilities in open-source libraries, inserted by Russia and North Korea... And you could dodge all this nightmare by just washing your dishes the old-fashioned way—supposedly better for your health too!
Lesson learned from your experience: check out appliance models, and read their manuals before deciding what to get.
Don't get your hopes too high.
BOSCH's electrical equipment doesn't belong to BOSCH anymore, but is part of the large Siemens group for many years. Siemens in germany is known for its consumer products to be very expensive (cause of their very good reputation they may earned a hundred years ago), full of mostly useless features, complicated in handling, very low on product quality, high mainting aand repair rates, and outstanding repair cost.
In germany they have a joke:"Does it have to work, or can it be by Siemens?"
I had the full parade of Siemens/Bosch-be-part-of-Siemens consumer electrical, and electronical products over the last twentyfive years: all expensive crap. I'm through with dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, stoves, and several other devices, all Siemens/Bosch, all expensive, and crap!
Bosch and Siemens brands are on my personal black list of never buy again, ever.
Sorry, to tell you that, but you propably be better served with some "mexican" dishwasher for half the price - it will at least does its job for maybe 6...8 years without repairs or 'funny behaviour'.
You'll see when you Bosch maschine gets broken within the next two and a half years, and face the repair cost half the price of a new machine, and then it will be broken half a year later again. We decided to change your dishwasher to another brand after we paid over 150% of the purchasing price for repairs only within 4 years, not to mention hundreds of situations I needed all my self control not to rip this crap out of the kitchen and throw it out of the window.
You got that the wrong way around. BSH GmbH (formerly known as Bosch Siemens Hausgeräte) is a 100% subsidiary of Bosch. They make all the home appliances. Siemens pulled out of that joint venture a quite few years ago. Bosch just uses the Siemens brand at this point. The devices are identical.
This is not true. BSH was founded as a 50:50 joint venture of Bosch and Siemens, and has been fully taken over by Bosch some years ago. They still have a licence for the Siemens brand though.
Small correction. BSH Hausgeräte GmbH (BSH Home Appliances Company) maker of all Bosch and Siemens house appliances is a subsidiary of the Robert Bosch GmbH (aka Bosch).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSH_Hausger%C3%A4te
It's actually the other way around: BSH (Bosch-Siemens-Hausgeräte) is owned by Bosch, not Siemens. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSH_Hausger%C3%A4te
We got the Bosch model with the LCD but still have to use the app for Machine Care, Rinse, etc. Some of the IOT features are pretty good honestly, reminders to fill the rinse aid or run a machine care cycle are useful, but I'd much prefer to have no wifi at all! Unfortunately most of the new applicances have wifi or they are low grade base models with no features, and it takes so much work to find a decent used applicance it's difficult to find a proper solution.
Where I rent, there's a V-Zug dishwasher. Very common over here in Switzerland. It's got exactly what you're asking, local connectivity via Bluetooth and cloud stuff over wifi if you desire. None of it mandatory. However it does come with a different price tag.
What you might be experiencing is the old printer and cartridge business model. Sell a product below cost and make it back later via subscriptions / data brokerage.
Please don't recommend V-Zug as a viable alternative to this. V-Zug has features that your device's hardware is capable of doing behind App Store In-App Purchases!... Let me repat that: ONCE YOU HAVE BOUGHT A NEWERV V-ZUG DEVICE YOU MAY HAVE TO UNLOCK FEATURES BY PAYING 400$ VIA INAPP PURCHASE!
I am never buying V-Zug ever again
Yo, you guys have heat pump appliances.
What’s your power costs look like over there.
I feel bad because there’s always a tonne of flares burning where I live, lighting up the night sky a hellish red every night. It’s tough because power is so cheap here but so bad for the environment. Best I can do is run washing loads on tap temperature water.
I don't have a dish washer with my family of 5.
Correct water use is not bigger when done (right) manually, it is ads bullshit.
But excess of chimical dish washing product is way lesser, so water is less polluted with manual cleaning, because you actually washing with your muscles.(animal grease is more annoying than vegs grease).
It don't takes 1,5h to complete dish washing... it takes the time to listen a small yt vid or a peace of my current audiobook...
I'm the dish washer, no programmed obsolescence, no wifi, not to much hard washing soap, no back pain loading/unloadind the washer, no electrical bill and recreative or imaginative time while doing simple manual task.
Will not say the same for laundry!
FreD.
This is the best solution. Of course, from the perspective of the rare person who chooses to live on a sailboat, this is also the only available solution. :-)
Hi Jeff,
Did you notice that panel was at the edge of dishwasher door?
This is a black flag:
- place where touch surface is exposed to highest temperature from the steam leaving insides when you open the door
- cheap and easy to break surface for buttons
- when door is open, you will hit and kick the edge occasionally - in the place where your control panel is
I'm sure you will find plenty of parts exposed to stress from moving or high temperatures made from plastic in the new model.
Electronic parts with network connection requirements is just cherry on the top.
Best,
Piotr
We recently got this same dishwasher when our old one died. There are a lot of little things that annoy me about it, but for whatever reason this is the biggest:
>2 hr
<2 hr
<1 hr
clean
I can't explain it well but I find that to be visually appalling UI design.
Hi Jeff,
I have the same pet peeve as you, and am of the strong opinion that features that do not require a cloud, for instance, to run a certain wash cycle, should well, not require, a cloud account.
The inconvenience of setting and maintaining a cloud account with Bosch aside, without proper safeguards for consumers in the sense of not unnecessarily opening up surfaces for cybersecurity attacks (e.g., installing an additional app on your mobile device), companies adopt the stance they can push haphazardly clobbered-together technical solution to customers. (If you, the reader are wondering why the instanace talked about in Jeff's post is indeed "haphazardly clobbered-together", the plain simple reasons are mentioned above: due to un-necessity, plus presents a potential security vulnerability).
A little about Bosch to provide context. Bosch's products are sold at a clear premium where I'm based compared to its competitors like whirlpool. And Bosch products are historically reputed to be sturdy, and is synonymous with quality. HOWEVER, when I recently decided on a dishwasher to purchase, despite being able to comfortably afford a Bosch (or even several of them), I decided to go with Whirlpool because of the types of wash cycles making a lot more sense in this modern day and age. Bosch's dishwashers have antiquated wash cycle types, stuck in an era of traditional fixed meals: breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, supper, which are now largely gone in modern households where members eat at different times, and snack in between large meals. Whirlpool's dishwashers have programmed the wash cycles that cater to modern flexibilities while Bosch's is still stuck in the 1990s.
- ChallengerDerp (on HN)
It looks like the Bosch 300 series ADA-compliant model would be a better choice. It gets rid of the crappy touch sensitive controls in favor of actual physical buttons and all the cycles are able to be selected including the rinse and machine care cycles. It still has home connect which allows the remote start and monitoring features but in this case it feels like an add-on feature which isn't hiding other features behind the cloud.
The enshittification phenomenon continues across all aspects of our electronic life
I worked at Bosch for a few years and our job back then (~2019) was to explore IoT services for existing and future appliances and tools. The great challenge of hardware or component providers like Bosch is that it's becoming substantially more difficult to make money through hardware only. China produces cheaper and with acceptable quality, putting a lot of pressure on companies like Bosch. So, one path to explore is monetizing data. Unfortunately for Bosch, few IoT business models make sense for fridges, coffee machines, hand drills, and dishwashers. And that's what you are experiencing with your machine from Bosch: the rather clumsy attempt of a hardware and engineering company to find new data-centric business models. To my (probably outdated) knowledge, it was really much more about getting a foot into the door of IoT business models than anything else.
I wasn't aware that Bosch is that advanced. ;) The first device I bought, which wanted me to join a cloud was iRobot - many years ago. No updates possible without. Do you know any Xiaomi device running without calling home?
If I could wish, I would like to have a law, that every electronic device should get a standardized local API. Just necessary to run curl and jq to use it.
You’re much nicer than me. I got one of those Bosch 500s delivered from Costco and returned it. We want to start our dishwasher after we go to bed, and to do that, every day you need to go to the app and set the timer.
Just awful. And the app has ads. Yuck.
I had a Bosch for 12 years. Now we have a Kitchenaid . It’s fine. No app.
I can understand the outrage over cloud based features...yeah it is not something anyone directly asked for except in some tiny cases, but it certainly has the potential to be abused and monetized. On the other hand I don't see a button for a rinse cycle or timed delay. When I replaced by GE dishwasher last year with a KitchenAid I looked at everything on the market. It wasn't hard to figure out that certain washers either didn't have the features I wanted or they were locked away where I couldn't easily get to them. What if this thing didn't even do a rinse cycle or have timed delay at all? Yeah the Bosch washers get great reviews, but I'm not getting my phone just so I can set up delay start.
We bought the Cafe dishwasher we have now ahead of our kitchen remodel because it was on closeout, and the replacement only offered "bottle wash" (a feature we use a lot) via the app.
It needs to be a carrot not a stick. The kitchen remodel is done, and our new range (also Cafe) I did hook up to the Internet, mainly so that it'll automatically sync its clock when daylight savings rolls around.
If we had gotten the more expensive over-the-range microwave, the range even would have sync'ed its clock with the microwave via Bluetooth, and do things like automatically turn on the under-microwave light when you turn on a burner on the range, and turn the light off X minutes after you turn the burner off. Granted, that's not something that requires Internet connectivity, but it's an intelligent way to add wireless connectivity to appliances.
I'm not against Internet connectivity in appliances. I wish our washer and dryer had it, so we could get a notification on our phone telling us when their cycles were finished instead of having to get up and go check (first world problems I know). And I do like the ability to start pre-heating the oven when we're on our way home (acknowledging all the safety issues involved with that).
I did ultimately connect the dishwasher to the Internet. I'm not sure what the utility of knowing when it's finished washing the dishes is.
I wish the dishwasher had the option to run a diagnostic so we could let a repair person know over the phone if we ever have the problem, but I don't see that. And I do hope that I can grant access to such a person so they can run diagnostics over the Internet when that's necessary (with all the necessary security precautions), but I doubt it does.
If you care to see the eventual outcome of this insipid enshittification, read Cory Doctrow's 'Unauthorized Bread'