A built-in ice maker is a great way to be woken up in the middle of the night by your fridge when a fresh batch of frozen cubes is loudly dumped into its dispenser. But if you turn your nose up at cubes — the beverage chiller of common folk — LG will now happily sell you a $US4,400 ($6,533) fridge that churns out an endless supply of trendy ice spheres instead.
Editor’s Note: Australians lusting over this beast of a fridge may have to pump the breaks on their urges — it doesn’t appear to be listed for sale in Australia just yet.
Outside of what you’ll find in a professional kitchen, the LG LRFVS3006S sits somewhere in the upper echelons of fancy appliances. Its most PR-worthy feature is its built-in Craft Ice maker which creates perfect spheres that are claimed to be the most effective way to quickly chill a drink by maximising surface area while melting slower than cubes or crushed ice, which are also both available here from an in-door dispenser.
There are already a few different ways to produce ice spheres, including heavy metal molds that squeeze an oversized ice cube until it melts down to a polished sphere. LG’s new fridge takes a faster approach with spherical molds that get filled with water and then frozen. The results aren’t as pretty, but it allows the fridge to churn them out like a factory in your kitchen.
This being a fancy fridge, it’s got plenty of other features to help justify its price tag. It includes smart appliance features like wifi connectivity, so the fridge can provide access to smart assistants like Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa, or diagnose what might have gone wrong when it breaks down. (“Hey, why are these ice spheres now ellipsoid shaped?!”) LG’s also included one of those LCD shutter windows on one of the doors so that with a couple of quick taps on the outside it instantly becomes transparent allowing you a peek inside without actually opening the door.
As The Verge points out, if there was any doubt this fridge was designed specifically for the one per cent who rarely have to use their own appliances, just look at how the photoshoot’s food stylists have filled it. Pre-poured glasses of lemonade? Fancy shrimp cocktails ready to serve? Veggie shots? Broccoli just crammed into a drawer so that it can shed tiny florets everywhere?
My fridge is currently filled with four-day-old leftover french fries, celery I should eat but never will, mysterious and long-forgotten takeout containers, and more embarrassing secrets I never want revealed through a windowed door.
This fridge is more like a climate-controlled museum for perfect produce and Instagram-worthy meals and cocktails — which means LG will undoubtedly have no trouble finding interested buyers.