It might also sometimes crawl a bunch of web pages or code repositories on behalf of some AI company so the site operators can't effectively block them. Surely that's a benefit worth sacrificing some food for!

I mean... maybe?

I would honestly rather just not own a fridge than put up with that.

I have done it before when living in a shared house because people stole stuff in the kitchen fridges. So I only kept food in my room and didn't have a fridge in there.

I'll do it! I'll do it for Samsung. After all they've done for me, it's the least I can do!

Why, I remember when I bought a new Samsung laser printer and five years later they stopped making new toner cartridges for it. That's gotta be be worth, somthin', ain't it?

That strongly depends on what time-frame you're looking at. I only found this study which shows energy usage of refrigerators up to 2002. So unless your fridge is >30 years old, you probably won't see that much of an efficiency gain.

Sadly I can't find a source in English for this, but the German Umweltbundesamt published a study on replacing appliances last year. The study more or less states, that, within a 10 year time frame, it's almost never worth it to replace a fridge from an ecological point of view. It might make economic sense, but that's about it. Here's a short blog post of the Umweltbundesamt about it with some infographics that may be a bit more language-agnostic.

Your fridge (without freezer) would have to use 240 kWh/year for it to make ecological sense to get a new one within the next 10 years. For a fridge-freezer combination it would have to be 340 kWh and for a freezer 430 kWh. From what I saw on this beautiful (also German, but it's basically a huge table anyway) page it depends more on the type of fridge you have, not really the age. Side-by-side fridges seem to be especially bad.

I don't think any but the most expensive fridges had ice makers when we were looking for a new one a year or so ago. Is it more of an American feature? It seems so pointless. How much do you use ice to need it in your fridge door.

Are the dumb fridges made today as reliable as the 20-year-old one? My gut says no. I suspect I'd need to replace it much sooner, like right after the warranty ends, killing whatever small gains I got from greater efficiency. It's not like they don't use electricity at all.

My IoT are on a separate LAN. None are of any particular value…IOW no door locks or cameras, just TV and some light switches. Yes, it is possible to be hacked.

That’s a possibilty I’m willing to live with to avoid what is essentially allowing a manufacturer to do exactly what a hacker might do: brick my devices, spy on me, spy on my network, etc. The manufacturer can go even further with an update by paywalling formerly free services, holding my device hostage for money.

Seems there isn’t much difference these days.

If it doesn't have internet access, how is it an attack vector?