Samsung admits it may have bricked your soundbar, offers free repairs

Samsung's flagship HW-Q990D soundbar is one of several models affected by a serious software mistake, Samsung has admitted – and while the problem is fixable it can't be solved with another update. It needs an in-person repair instead.

The problems emerged last week when soundbar owners with automatic firmware updates enabled on their devices found that their soundbars were effectively "bricked". They weren't controllable via SmartThings; they didn't respond to the remote; and they couldn't be factory reset either.

According to posts on multiple sites including Reddit and Samsung's own user forums, the flagship soundbar wasn't the only affected model: the HW-Q800D and HW-S801D were having the same problems.

Samsung said last week that it was investigating, and US audio head Jim Kiczek has now confirmed to The Verge that there was indeed a problem with the firmware update.

Can you trust automatic updates?

All credit to Samsung: they've moved quickly on this one, confirmed the cause of the problem and provided affected customers with a solution: free repairs irrespective of warranty status.

But it's still an embarrassment for the tech firm because it suggests that Samsung's testing setup isn't as good as it should be. Given that we're talking about a soundbar that's at the high end of the market, problems like this shouldn't be making their way to customers' devices.

This isn't a disaster on the scale of last year's (and still ongoing) Sonos app problems. But it does suggest that it might be wise to disable automatic updates on your everyday devices because you can never be sure what issues they might create.

This is common practice for people who depend on their devices for work, so for example music producers don't update macOS X until they're absolutely certain it won't introduce bugs to their music software or create conflicts with their hardware. But to my mind it's just as important if you want to be sure your soundbar will work for the series finale of Severance.