Ask HN: What're the best-designed things you've ever used?

Completely agree! The funny thing is the first thing I thought of was an old microwave I owned with a similar setup mainly because the microwave I own, today, is so awful[0].

I have a GE combination convection oven/microwave and it was clearly designed by someone who had their first experience with LSD that day. Every function requires a different, magic, set of key combinations to make it work. Want to set a timer? That's easy, press timer, turn the dial to the right time (which inexplicably increases/decreases the time in 30 second increments). OK, you've done that, now you want to start it. Press "Timer" ... nope. Press "Start" ... nope. Oh, I have to push in the dial... I didn't even know that, too, was a button. Oh, and not once, not twice, but three times is the magic number of times required to start said timer.

Starting the microwave with a specific time in mind requires hitting no less than 6 buttons, but there's one button that will start the microwave on high for 30 seconds, so everyone just uses that button and hits it as many times as is required to get close to the desired cooking length. I can hear my wife counting out loud ten beeps for a 5 minute cook time.

It's got piles of advanced, useless, features, my favorite of which is a hybrid "microwave/oven cook" mode that manages to bring in the worst of both methods, giving you soggy food, unevenly cooked that takes an eternity to cook.

Even the clock is stupid. You punch in the hours/minutes, and thinking you're done, you move on to something else. Later you go to cook something and for some bizarre reason, "AM or PM" pops up on the screen at which point nothing in your previous experience in operating a microwave prepares you to figure out why heating something up requires knowledge of whether it's morning or afternoon. Of course, nothing this microwave does requires knowledge of AM/PM, nor does it display AM or PM anywhere on the screen, but for some reason it just must know.

[0] This isn't the exact model but it looks close: https://www.amazon.com/GE-PVM9179SFSS-Profile-Stainless-Micr...

Google Chromecast

Takes a quite complicated set of things going on (control signals from phone, data signals from internet), and turns them into a seamless intuitive experience.

I find the initial setup process particularly excellent. Getting a device with no user input onto a wifi network would normally be a nightmare, but the magic they do with setting up a temporary access point on the device is excellent.

Does it replace a stove for you?

And it working even when your portable device isn't in the same wifi network ("Nearby devices" option) is pretty magical. Ultrasonic communication between phone and some-other-thing is stuff that you'd expect to read about being done in a lab, yet here it is in a consumer thing that's really cheap, and working flawlessly.

Galaxy Nexus with stock Android 4.x.

More precisely, when I bought it almost five years ago I was simply shocked at how much more its UI seemed to have been designed with actual phone use in mind, compared to, say, my former late-Symbian Nokia E50.

Typical example: the E50 had the well-known idiosyncratic Nokia 'profiles', whereas the Nexus only had the fragment that users usually relied on -- that is, an easy switch between full-settings/vibrate-only/absolute-silence.