Anyone else annoyed that basic appliance features now need an app?

I'm on the other side of this one, mostly becasue of one specific thing: delayed start tied to off-peak rates. Our utility has cheaper electricity overnight, and being able to set the load to run at 2am from the app before bed means it's actually done and empty when I get up. With my last machine I'd either run it during peak hours or open the door to a wet load of plates every morning. That said, I fully agree the basics shouldn't live behind a login. Our current washer has a physical dial that works fine with zero wifi, and the app is purely optional extras. That's the right split. When we replaced our fridge a couple years back, the ice maker filter status and temp controls were app-gated and it drove me up the wall during setup because our guest network blocks those devices. One thing I'd check before swearing off connected appliances entirely: alot of them will run every core cycle fine with wifi never configured. You usally lose the remote start and notifications, but the panel itself still handles normal washes. If the 500 Series forces you through account setup just to press start, that's a real dealbreaker and returning it is fair. If it just nags you with a blinking light, might be worth living with.

You're not getting old and grumpy either way. The market split is getting better precisely because people return things.

I was all in on connected appliances too, untill the wifi board in my Samsung washer died at year four. The machine worked fine otherwise, but the main control board and the wireless module are one piece on that model, so the repair quote came in around three hundred bucks plus the service call. That experiance burned me on the whole idea.

Now my rule is that anything with a motor and a pump stays dumb. My current dishwasher is a Whirlpool with a basic timer knob, and in six years the only maintanence has been cleaning the filter. My neighbor has one of the app-controlled machines and mostly uses it to silence the end-of-cycle chime, which a physical button also did on every dishwasher I have ever owned. The off-peak scheduling point is legit, but where I live the utility charges a flat rate year round, so that benefit just does not exist for a lot of us. Meanwhile the failure risk and the account requirement are guaranteed costs. When the company eventually shuts down the servers or stops pushing updates, the smart features become dead weight on a machine that cost twice what a simple one does. So no, I do not think it is age or grumpiness. There is a real tradeoff, and for anyone planning to keep an appliance for a decade or more, I think simple wins more often than not.

Been fixing my own machines since the days when a dishwasher was a timer, a pump, and a heating element you could test with a multimeter on a Sunday afternoon. Those old electromechanical units were dumb as a stump but you could actually repair them with parts from the appliance store down the road. Nowadays everythign runs through one sealed control board, and when it flakes out you're not tracing a wire, you're paying for a whole new brain. My buddy's dishwasher refused to finish a cycle last year because it lost its wifi connection and sat there confused. A dishwasher shouldn't care what the router is doing. Return it and buy the dumbest model you can find, that's my advice.

The thing that worries me more than the login screen is what happens five years out, because the useful features live on someone else's server now. My Brother printer lost its scan-to-cloud function when the company retired the app, and the hardware was perfectly fine, they just switched it off. An appliance that only phones home through one company's servers is one reorg or one end-of-life announcement away from losing the extras you technically paid for. A dial keeps working no matter what the account team decides. So no, I don't think you're being grumpy, you're pricing in a risk most buyers never think about until the shutdown email shows up.

Ended up in a similar spot last year but solved it a diffrent way. Same brand had a step-down model in the lineup with the same wash system and a dumb button panel, no wifi module at all. Cost less too. Twenty minutes with the spec sheets saved me the whole headache and I haven't missed a single thing. My wife runs a load every night on normal and the machine just does its job. One question though, since you actually had the 500 in your kitchen: coud you press start and run a basic cycle straight off the panel, or was the app actually required? That's the line for me between annoying and a return.