There’s a moment in every trip to a Good Guys or Harvey Norman where you end up standing in front of a fridge with a touchscreen on it and you think: who is buying this, and do they love it, or do they regret it?
I had this exact moment recently. The Samsung AI Family Hub. A screen the size of a small tablet built into the door. Internal cameras. Recipe suggestions. The ability to see inside your fridge from the supermarket. A music player. The option to mirror your Samsung TV onto it while you make nachos. It was $5,099.
I stood there for a while. A man next to me tapped the screen. It beeped. He looked mildly alarmed and walked away.
Smart appliances are everywhere now, and the range has exploded well beyond fridges. Smart washing machines, smart dishwashers, robot vacuums, AI ovens. The pitch is always the same: more convenience, less effort, a home that basically runs itself. But is that actually what you get? Or are you paying a significant premium for features you’ll use twice and then forget about?
I’ve spent some time digging into this, and the answer is genuinely more interesting than a simple yes or no.
Smart Fridges
What does a smart fridge actually do?
Depending on the model and price point, a smart fridge can do a surprising number of things. The more advanced Samsung models have an internal camera that uses AI to identify up to 33 fresh food items, track their use-by dates, and suggest recipes based on what you have. You can check your fridge contents from the supermarket via your phone. There are digital noticeboards, calendar integration, music streaming, and for the Samsung Family Hub, even the ability to mirror your TV onto the door screen.
LG’s smart fridges come with their ThinQ app, door-in-door access so you can grab items without opening the whole fridge, and compatibility with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. Entry-level smart fridges start at around $2,000 in Australia. The more feature-loaded options like the Samsung AI Family Hub sit at $5,099, and the LG 642L French Door with InstaView is $4,599.
Are smart fridges actually worth the premium?
This is where it gets honest. CHOICE, Australia’s independent consumer advocacy organisation, has said fairly directly that smart fridges haven’t reached peak functionality yet. Their assessment is that many of the smart features are convenient in a mild way, but not convenient enough to justify the price premium on their own. The most useful features, according to their testing, are the shopping list app and the internal cameras. Which is a bit like buying a sports car because you like the cup holders.
That said, there’s a genuinely compelling argument for them if you care about food waste. Australian households throw out around 2.5 million tonnes of food each year, and that costs the average household about $2,500 annually. If a fridge that tracks your groceries and tells you your spinach is about to go off actually changes your habits, that’s real money saved. Whether it will change your habits is a different question, and one only you can answer honestly.
The other thing worth knowing is that if you’re already in the market for a new fridge and you’re comparing two otherwise similar Samsung models, the smart version sometimes doesn’t cost significantly more. In that case, the calculus changes. You’re not paying $2,000 extra for the smarts, you’re paying a few hundred dollars, and the fridge is good on its own merits anyway.
What are the downsides of a smart fridge?
Two things come up consistently. The first is cross-brand compatibility. Smart appliances work best when they’re all talking to each other within the same ecosystem, Samsung SmartThings, LG ThinQ, or whatever your preferred platform is. Mix brands and things can get patchy. Experts have flagged this as a real limitation for anyone building a smart home gradually over time rather than all at once.
The second is the question of what happens in five years. A fridge should last fifteen years or more. The app support for a 2025 smart fridge in 2035 is genuinely uncertain. If the software gets discontinued or the features stop working, you’re left with a $5,000 fridge that has a blank screen on the door.
Robot Vacuums
Are robot vacuums actually worth it?
Yes. And this might be the clearest yes in the entire smart appliance category. Over 44% of Australians already use some form of smart home appliance, and robot vacuums are a big part of why that number has grown so quickly. They do exactly what they say, and they do it reliably.
The best mid-range models available in Australia right now will map your house, avoid obstacles, vacuum, mop, return to their base to self-clean their mop pads and empty their own bin. You set a schedule on your phone and forget about it. I know people who have described this as genuinely life-changing, and I know that sounds dramatic, but if you have pets, kids, or a household where the floor needs attention every couple of days, having it handled automatically is a different way of living.
The caveat is that robot vacuums are maintenance cleaners, not deep cleaners. They’re doing regular light passes, not replacing the annual pull-everything-out-and-go-hard session. For anyone expecting to never vacuum again, that’s worth setting the right expectation.
Budget models start from a few hundred dollars and do a basic job. Once you get into the $800 to $1,500 range you’re getting smart mapping, obstacle detection, and combined vacuum and mop functionality. The higher-end models like the Roborock S8 MaxV sit above $1,500 but include self-cleaning docks that handle their own maintenance.
Smart Washing Machines
What makes a washing machine “smart”, and is it useful?
A smart washing machine connects to your home Wi-Fi and pairs with a phone app. From there you can start, pause, and monitor cycles remotely, get notifications when a load is done, and in more advanced models, access AI wash cycles that detect what fabric you’re washing and adjust the settings accordingly. Some also have auto-dosing, where the machine works out how much detergent to use for the load size. You just top up a reservoir every few weeks.
The LG Series 9 12kg front loader is one of the more talked-about smart washing machines in Australia, retailing around $1,500 to $1,900 depending on where you shop. The Samsung Bespoke front-loaders with AI wash and auto-dosing sit in a similar range.
Honestly? The remote start is more useful than it sounds. Being able to throw a load on from the couch and get a notification when it’s done is a small thing, but small things add up across a week. The auto-dosing is similarly low-key but genuinely handy if you’re the kind of person who either uses too much detergent or spends thirty seconds trying to remember how much to pour.
The AI wash cycle features are harder to evaluate objectively. The marketing suggests they protect your clothes and save energy. The reality is probably somewhere between “slightly better than default” and “meaningfully better,” depending on your habits.
The Bigger Picture: Are Smart Appliances Worth It at All?
What should you actually consider before buying smart appliances?
The most useful framing I’ve found is to separate the smart features from the appliance itself. A good fridge that happens to have smart features is a good investment. A mediocre fridge with a flashy screen is not. The same applies to every category. You want to be buying a quality product first, and then assessing whether the smart features add genuine value to your life specifically.
Saving energy is one of the top reasons Australians are drawn to smart appliances, according to Telsyte, a technology analysis firm. The ability to schedule appliances to run during off-peak energy hours, track consumption, and automate routines does have real potential to reduce electricity costs. Whether that potential is fully realised by current products is still an open question, but it’s moving in the right direction.
Security is worth at least a moment of thought. Any appliance connected to your home Wi-Fi is a device on your network, and internet-connected fridges, washing machines, and vacuums do have a theoretical attack surface. In practice, the risk for most home users is low, but it’s worth keeping your router firmware updated and not reusing passwords.
Which smart appliances are genuinely worth it right now?
In order of how clearly the value proposition stacks up:
Robot vacuums are worth it for most households, particularly those with pets, kids, or hard floors. The gap between the promise and the reality is smaller here than anywhere else in this category.
Smart washing machines are worth it if you’re replacing an old machine anyway and the price difference between a smart and standard model is modest. The remote start and auto-dosing features are legitimately useful. Don’t pay a huge premium purely for smart features.
Smart fridges are worth considering if you’re buying new and the price gap is reasonable, or if food waste is a genuine concern in your household. At full premium pricing, the features don’t yet justify the cost on their own merits. CHOICE’s read on this hasn’t really changed in a couple of years.
Smart ovens and dishwashers are the furthest behind in terms of features that match their price premium. They exist, they work, but the “smart” elements are mostly quality-of-life improvements rather than transformative ones.
The future that the appliance industry is selling, where every device in your home talks to every other device and the whole thing hums along efficiently and intelligently, is real. It’s just not fully here yet. We’re somewhere in the middle, closer to HAL 9000 telling you your cheese is expiring than HAL 9000 running the whole household. Which, honestly, is probably fine for now.
