That 1999 piece on smart fridges said we'd have meal planning robots by 2005

I was digging through some old tech magazines my dad kept in the garage, from like 1999 and 2000. There was this big feature about the smart kitchen, and it went hard on how fridges would scan your groceries, suggest recipes, and basically run your whole meal prep. It said by 2005 we'd all have these. Here we are in 2025 and my fridge just makes ice and hums at me. My phone can do the grocery list thing, and I still plan dinners on a paper note stuck to the door. What actually happened is the internet and Amazon got big, not the fridge becoming a computer. I get that the tech was too clunky and expensive back then, but nobody talks about how the whole idea just got absorbed into other devices. Anybody else find old kitchen tech predictions that just fizzled out for a different reason than people say?

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keithyoung4d ago

Man, that's spot on. My parents' old fridge from the 90s is still kicking and the smartest thing it does is a door alarm. The whole tech just got sucked into phones and apps. Same thing with those early tablet concepts, they all became the iPad eventually. Nobody remembers the clunky versions, just the one thing that actually stuck around and did it better.