Negative review of a $1,500 Silicon Valley toaster oven

Are people this desperate to spend money? Do they not know it doesn’t expire?

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For sure it seems like they don’t know. I often think about an item i want to purchase for quite some time, in some instances for years. The things i buy i most often regret are the expensive spur of the moment purchases that i don’t think about too much.

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sticking to my old fashioned, no timer analog dial toaster oven. works great - high build quality - low price without all the bells and whistles.

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Yours doesn’t have a bell?

Mine has a bell.

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it was the bell - but that only works for toast. wish i could tone down the microwave ping…need to work on that!

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Mine has a bell that acts like a timer! When the timer dings the oven turns off

It’s really inconvenient for anything that takes more than 15 minutes to cook.

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But it doesn’t have a whistle now does it?

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At this point, I feel like you do have to be careful about pontificating about what it makes sense to strap a sensor and a network connection to. It’s hard to come up with a problem that has to do with regulating a process that doesn’t have a pretty fair chance of being a little better by introducing a feedback mechanism that, in the modern age, probably looks like a camera chatting with a distant server. And it is true that using a thermometer can make you a more consistent cook when it comes to, say, a really big piece of meat like a turkey-that won’t fit in this oven, which seems like a misunderstanding of the market. Want to fix the one bit of culturally unavoidable anxiety-inducing cookery? Make the Thanksgiving centerpiece fire-and-forget.

But also, this is dumb. The competition for an expensive IoT oven isn’t some hypothetical wasteland filled with the vomiting remnants of your consistently poisoned family, it’s the fridge magnet with time/temp/weight tables gifted by your local insurance agent, or the equivalent on your phone- or takeout. They’re speaking reassuringly about how involved the humans will still be in the cooking process, but don’t seem to notice that the necessary amount of human supervision is such that setting up a couple of well tested parameters and double checking them with a stab of a fork is not functionally different from having a conversation with a buggy machine learning stack, if not, as the reviewer discovered, easier.

It’s probably not fair to make any sociological hash out of this, but also, how can you not? The whole home automation reborn as IoT thing just stinks of anxious, bored money at this point. Information technology seems to be at something of a functional plateau in efficacy at getting someone’s idea in front of your eyes, and anything prone to misbehavior without regulation- engines, industrial processes, whatever- has had a computer in it for a generation or two, and everyone is smart and rich but out of things to do with themselves, and so they put network connections in lightbulbs.

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the design firm that gave us Beats headphones.

Erm… wasn’t that Monster?

Honestly i can’t fault startups and larger tech companies. A lot of what has been coming out of them has been absurd technology that’s been poorly implemented… but under a sheen of futurist optimism and luxury. But it’s what they do and the promise of being the next big thing must be alluring. I admire and hate it, but god damn we’re living in the fucking future if we can have shitty talking toaster ovens with more sensors than it reasonably needs.

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It’s not a shitty toaster over - all toaster ovens are shitty.

This is a shitty convection oven, where a $500 counter-top convection oven can be used in a restaurant for 50 years and have extremely accurate oven temperatures. I know a few people that swear by them in the commercial world, but I have no interest bringing one into my house even when cooking is one of my main hobbies. They have a very narrow use and are best used for consistency over anything else. Sort of like a bread machine or a blender that also cooks soup or a coffee maker.

I have a way to cook food poorly quickly, it’s called a microwave.

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Sounds like the broiler line-cook at my last kitchen job.

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That idea at least does seem like it could have some real-world possibility longterm.

Step away from all the microwave cooking, i think it is making you angry!

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On the plus side, this toaster is probably really, really well qualified to run BSD; unless some asshole locked the bootloader.

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I think I see his problem. He didn’t use the wild caught Scottish salmon with native blue tooth support.

Most of the newer toaster/convection combos are rad . The brevilles in particular. Not 1500 bucks but not cheap either. The “shitty toaster oven” of myth and legend is your typical free with $100 purchase at the mall deal.

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Malware infected toaster oven says… “I WILL FLASHBROIL YOUR WILD-CAUGHT CHINOOK STEAKS UNLESS YOU PROMPTLY XFER 25BTC TO THE ACCOUNT AT THE LINK PROVIDED!!”

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I bought one after visiting a friend that had a review unit and seeing it work. For her, it’s worked perfectly.

They give you 100 days to play with it, so if you get one and don’t like it, they will take it back.