Should You Buy a Samsung Bespoke Fridge?

Family Hub, Family Hub+, and AI Family Hub+

It’s confusing, but Samsung offers three different versions of its Family Hub tablet and camera system in various Bespoke fridges. 

To begin, the plain old Family Hub features a 21.5-inch touchscreen and three internal cameras to let you view the contents of your fridge while you’re out shopping. Many popular apps and services are built into the Family Hub tablet, including Alexa, Amazon, Google Photos, Instacart, Pandora, Ring (to view Ring doorbell and camera feeds), Samsung TV Plus (to watch free streaming TV channels), and Spotify.

Additionally, the Family Hub can act as a SmartThings smart home hub for devices in your home, including Matter and Thread smart home devices. But to use it that way, you’ll need to buy a SmartThings Hub Dongle, $35, which has an extra wireless radio for devices that use ZigBee and Thread wireless technology.

Next, the Family Hub+ can do everything the regular Family Hub does, but it has a bigger 32-inch touchscreen and the extra smart home hardware is built into it, meaning you can ditch the dongle.

Finally, there’s the AI Family Hub+. It’s essentially the Family Hub+ with extra AI features and a new camera system that enables Samsung’s AI Vision Inside. This new feature uses a single camera mounted at the top of the fresh-food cavity to automatically identify food as you place it inside the refrigerator. You can then view the items on the Family Hub tablet to add expiration dates and look up recipes that use the ingredients you already have. You can also pull up a list of these items on your smartphone, using the SmartThings app, to see what you need while grocery shopping.

The other big feature of the AI Family Hub+ is called AI Energy Mode. This feature is supposed to save energy and money by adjusting the compressor speed and defrost time of the freezer based on how you use the fridge.

These Family Hub features can feel gimmicky. But the AI Energy Mode might provide some legitimate savings, and once it’s in your home, a Bespoke refrigerator can get software updates—at least for the first few years.

Samsung says it will provide such updates for seven years, but many people expect to keep a refrigerator for longer than that. Looking back, Samsung added the Amazon Alexa voice assistant to its second-generation and newer Family Hub fridges back in 2021, but the original 2016 Family Hub didn’t receive that update. Similarly, the company just announced it will bring AI-generated wallpapers and an AI upgrade for Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant to Family Hub fridges—but only to select models. The wallpaper feature is coming to models dating back to 2022, while the Bixby upgrade is only coming to a single 2024 model.