Alternatively, web is generally more valuable. You don’t buy a new washing machine because the current firmware sucks, but you will shop somewhere else if Newegg’s website is terrible. That relationship is generally true where people rarely test embedded software until after a purchase, but people tend to jump ship more frequently online.
Net result a lot of critical infrastructure and devices suck as much as possible while still getting the job done.
I’m building a house at the moment and I have been insisting that I am able to actually test all the built in appliances with power to see if the software is garbage.
I have found that most of the high end brands have a completely horrible user experience. Miele is the worst I’ve tried, and I found that as you go up the price range even inside that brand the experience gets worse.
The top end Miele induction cooktop takes over 5 seconds to boot up before you can even turn a hob on. The interface has a second of latency on presses. It took me probably 20 seconds to work out how to turn a hob on. I happened to be with my mother at the time and I asked her to try to work out how to turn a hob on and she had failed after 1 minute of trying and gave up and asked me.
It looks nice though.
The thing I find the most infuriating about it is that my attitude towards this stuff is just not understood by designers at all. They complain at my choices because the Miele appliances which they specified are “better quality”. And yet I feel like they can’t have actually tried to use them because as far as I can tell the quality is total garbage.
The mere idea of waiting for a kitchen appliance to "boot up" makes me angry. How did we normalize this madness? Telephones, TVs, car engine instruments, HVAC thermostats, why can't any of these be instant-on like in the 80s? Apply power and it starts working is a basic design principle.
Meh. Bootup time is irrelevant if the thing is always on. Many "dumb" microwaves won't let you use them until you set the clock after a power loss which creates an artificial "boot up time" of 5-120 seconds (depending on how complicated the procedure is; I remember microwaves that had absolutely obtuse clock-setting procedures).
Slightly off topic but imagine an induction cooker with the original iPod control wheel as it's power control.
We opted for a gas hob when we installed our kitchen. Mostly because I like the controllability when cooking. Obviously it's a nightmare for health and the environment but man it makes cooking easier.
Touch controls on induction cooktops/hobs are almost ubiquitous, and they have extremely poor usability in my experience. Liquids cause problems, and you need to be very careful not to move a pan or any utensils over the controls, or brush against them while concentrating on cooking. Apart from the other awful usability issues with the UI or icons.
I did a survey of all the cooktops/hobs I could find in my city, looking for something that would suit my elderly mum, and I didn’t find a single unit that was usable. Fortunately a salesperson knew of a recently developed “cheap” model from a noname brand, which had individual knobs, so I ordered that, it arrived an month ago so I got it installed, and it has worked very well for my mum.
Usability is not something that most people know to look for when making purchases, so most whiteware ends up with a hideous UI. People will buy shit, then complain, but it doesn’t change their future purchasing habits (e.g. looking for features, especially useless features!)
I bought a middling brand microwave with knobs that has reasonable usability, despite providing all features. The iPhone is another possible counterexample, although I fucking hate many of their usability decisions (remove all multi-tasking shit from my iPad - I only ever initiate it by mistake and I always struggle to revert my mistake - fucking floating windows and split windows and fucking ... at top of the screen).
The ability to clean the cooker is the only advantage of touch controls. I don't know how well the original iPod touch wheel would hold up in that environment but from a usability point of view it was excellent.
how is it a nightmare?
if you aren't getting that energy from natural gas, you'd mostly get it from a CO2 producing power plant, with efficiency losses going from heat (steam) -> electric -> heat (cooktop)
Even Gas cooktops without a pilot light are surprisingly inefficient with under 40% of the energy ending up in your pan. (Which is why the air several feet above the pan is so hot.) On top of this you end up venting air your HVAC system just used a lot of energy to make pleasant outside and/or breathing noxious fumes from incomplete combustion so Carbon Monoxide, NOx, formaldehyde etc
Induction stoves powered by natural gas power plants are more efficient than directly cooking with natural gas plus you can use clean solar/wind/nuclear/hydropower or oddballs like geothermal.
It’s even worse if you don’t size the burner to the pan. My wife always uses the largest burner with an 8 inch pan, probably 70% of the heat goes around and over it. Really made me want to switch to induction but I noticed the same thing that most induction cooktops have stupid, unreliable touch controls.
I think efficiency of a hob is pretty low on the priority list right? Certainly when framed in cost terms (gas being cheaper than electric). The total amounts are too small relative to hot water / home heating to make much difference. Especially if you go out of your way to find an induction cooker with a decent interface (there is at least one out there with knobs).
For most things which would need cooked on a hob for a long time we use an Instapot electric pressure cooker anyway (out of preference rather than efficiency concern).
It depends on what your paying for fuel, propane is shockingly expensive at 3$/gallon right now + delivery fees but let’s use 3$ for 91,452 BTU which works out to 11.2c/kWh before you consider efficiency.
At an optimistic 40% efficiency for a stovetop vs 90% for an induction cooktop the breakeven is 25c/kWh which is well above average US electricity prices. Worse that 40% assumes properly sized cookware in contact with the burner, no pilot light, and ignores the cost of venting air outside.
As to total costs, at full blast a propane burner only costs around 1$/hour but some people do a lot of cooking.
Same goes for car MMIs. Tesla is almost fine when it comes to the latency (still far behind an iPad e.g.) but other manufacturers are just atrocious in this respect
