Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.
Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.
There’s plenty of middle ground. We had integrated circuits embedded in circuit boards for a long time before re-programmable chips started appearing, and those ones certainly didn’t connect to the Internet and brick themselves.
PICs are cheaper than discrete ICs, even if they’re programmed only once and shipped. This is why you’ll see mainboards with un-populated sections - the processor has a software build that either excludes the un-populated parts or is designed to detect and ignore them. A discrete IC would need far more engineering to be able to selectively ignore, or each model would need it’s own discrete IC.
If by discrete ICs you mean custom logic baked into silicon, yes that’s always been expensive. I was referring to off-the-shelf ICs that cost pennies, which used to be orders of magnitude cheaper even than PICs (in the days before Internet connected fridges).
Before the term software engineer was commonplace, electronic engineers used design circuits around off-the-shelf components, like the venerable TI 555 timer or op-amps, and design a circuit around them. To do it they’d need the datasheets (https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm555.pdf). Hobbyists and aspiring young engineers would buy books like this: (https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/14021/IC-555-Projects/), which were like O’Reilly cookbooks for electronics circuits. The equipment to program a PIC used to be way beyond the reach of hobbyists, and wasn’t necessary for manufacturers producing simple control circuits. If you look at circuitboards from that time you’ll see some ICs with pins that aren’t connected to anything because those just weren’t needed for the circuit, much like you describe the empty sockets in modern boards.
It absolutely was possible in the pre-Internet days to design a fully functional fridge, and more, without writing code of any kind, and it was cheap too.