This $1,500 Toaster Oven Is Everything That's Wrong with Silicon Valley Design
fastcodesign.comThe $1500 price tag alone makes it difficult for anyone to really be affected by their objective of 'getting more people to cook.'
Who doesn't cook? Millennials. [1]
Who doesn't have money for a toaster oven that costs twice their monthly rent? You guessed it.
The author nailed it here - '...yet, June is taking something important away from the cooking process: the home cook’s ability to observe and learn.
The sizzle of a steak on a pan will tell you if it’s hot enough.
The smell will tell you when it starts to brown.
These are soft skills that we gain through practice over time. June eliminates this self-education.'
If we want more people to cook, we should give them solid reasons to. Automating the process doesn't teach people to 'cook', it teaches them to be yet more reliant on a piece of technology.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/millenni...
Automating the process doesn't teach people to 'cook', it teaches them to be yet more reliant on a piece of technology.
Precisely the direction SV wants us to keep marching blindly in.
I kind of agree with the author, but that ship sailed a long time ago. It's not coming back.
This reminds me of the (Hitachi?) thousand dollar rice cooker.
I guess you can argue for balance between craft and automation, but it's rather futile and more a nice mental exercise.
It's like trying to convince most kids to learn how to derive square roots longhand when they have a computing device in their pockets.
Which ship sailed? The one with all the people cooking? or another one.
I wouldn't count cooking as 'out' just yet. Many people of all ages love to cook, but many of them love the creation of it. An oven that cooks for you is like paint by numbers, it 'might' get people interested in cooking to the point where they want to learn more.
The ship that sailed is the one that says we must keep traditional systems alive and well in the modern world.
Yes, some people live cooking --as do I when I have the spare time, on the other hand, often I don't have the time to futz and just need a pragmatic meal, rather than experience based cooking.
I regret buying a rice cooker. I already knew how to make rice in the pot. Now I have a device that sits on a shelf almost all of the time just to simplify 5 minutes of my life.
A crucial difference being that cooking is quite literally a matter of survival.
The first thing I thought of when I saw the headline: http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/ktoast.html
It seems like everyone's switched to 8-bit microcontrollers now, but pretty much accurate.
That being said, there is room for a smartphone-controlled toaster / oven; but it should give more control (customizable & shareable heating profiles, as part of a recipe database) rather than less.
Still 1800W, so it'll still take 5min to make a piece of toast.
"Carbon fiber heating elements ... preheats faster" Total B.S.
Much better to install a real outlet and get something like https://www.katom.com/569-FC33.html
The only lasting complaint here is "the oven does things for you, which means you won't learn to do things yourself." Which is ridiculous, because that's the point of automation. Every other issue (bugs, price) can be chalked up to the early adopter principle.
The other fallacy is that everyone wants or needs to learn how to cook. I enjoy cooking, but sometimes I also enjoy dumping ingredients into a rice cooker and firing and forgetting.
I think the thermal sensor is a very clever bit of tech. I'm guessing the estimates won't be perfect because the oven can't gauge thickness, and it refines estimates once it measures the rate of heating.
> The salmon's done at 6:52 p.m.
Which is meaningless, because this is the first time the article's mentioned the time.
I do LOVE that tag line
> Automated yet distracting. Boastful yet mediocre. Confident yet wrong.