Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 238 posts

Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

#191

Post by maxlybbert »

silisili wrote: post #152
maxlybbert wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to make do without a toaster when I first lived on my own, because I didn’t care enough about toast to get one. Except, originally, I didn’t get anything else that could make toast, so if I wanted toast, I used a dry frying pan. And, probably because I didn’t have a toaster, I wanted toast a lot more often than I expected I would. I eventually got a toaster oven, but I almost never used it for anything other…

> Except, originally, I didn’t get anything else that could make toast, so if I wanted toast, I used a dry frying pan This made me laugh out loud. Ever so often my wife decides to reorganize and put everything away, and me being too lazy to dig everything out, resort to making toast that way in a dry cast iron skillet. Not sure about yours, but mine rarely turned out right. Usually burned the raised edges and left th…

I never got the hang of it. If there’s a trick, I didn’t stumble across it.

Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

#192

Post by gambiting »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #184
hapless wrote: post #156

They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. You can still buy really, truly excellent toasters made for industrial/commercial use, or for the homes of the very rich, and they're quite a lot better than the trash people keep in their houses. And…

>You can have the good toaster, the good mixer, etc, but it sure looks like people don't actually want that. The pattern of product offerings in your average store suggests people want something affordable, and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job. I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetim…

>>I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetime according to some agreed standard

We can, but again, I feel like a lot of customers don't want that. Even here on HN I hear people saying that well, if I want to buy a $200 washing machine that falls apart in 3 years, then it should be my god given right to do so. If consumers want better appliances then they can just buy them without the need for regulation.

I don't really agree with that mindset, but I think it's common enough to prevent the change you're talking about.

Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

#193

Post by compsciphd »

cuddlybacon wrote: post #59

Since everyone is mentioning Technology Connections (he deserves it, great channel), I want to bring up this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiS27feX8o0 To me, this really shows the sad direction smart appliances have gone in. I would love to see that smart appliances would have continued to evolve in this direction. I don't like the current state of smart appliances, but going back to the absolute basic seems…

without watching the video, just based on the description. is this the smart microwave one?

Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

#194

Post by AussieWog93 »

gambiting wrote: post #192
AussieWog93 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can have the good toaster, the good mixer, etc, but it sure looks like people don't actually want that. The pattern of product offerings in your average store suggests people want something affordable, and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job. I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetim…

>>I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetime according to some agreed standard We can, but again, I feel like a lot of customers don't want that. Even here on HN I hear people saying that well, if I want to buy a $200 washing machine that falls apart in 3 years, then it should be my god given right to do so. If c…

I'm not arguing that we ban washing machines that break in 3 years, just that they're properly labelled.

Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

#195

Post by xadhominemx »

34679 wrote: post #178
hapless wrote: post #156

They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. You can still buy really, truly excellent toasters made for industrial/commercial use, or for the homes of the very rich, and they're quite a lot better than the trash people keep in their houses. And…

I think this says more about the decreased purchasing power of the average US household than it does about what people want. The Venn diagram of what a person wants and what they can afford is rarely a circle.

> I think this says more about the decreased purchasing power of the average US household

What does it say about that?

Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

#196

Post by GekkePrutser »

Yeah toasters these days are crap. I always have to compensate for ambient temperature and the thing still being hot from a previous slice, thickness etc.

I'd pay more for a toaster that was smart like this one. I wonder why that's not a thing, we have smart everything else...

Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

#197

Post by denton-scratch »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #73
denton-scratch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Washing machines were one of the first applications for microcontrollers. If you have an electric motor that's supposed to speed up, slow down, reverse, spin fast etc., all on a schedule, it's a no-brainer (pun intended). It's usually the pump that fails, but the controller-cards often fail too. Pumps and controller cards are, of course, outrageously expensive. These things are supposed to fail. Back in the day, they…

"Yeah, reliable equipment probably is a bit of a nerdy preoccupation" Efficient market hypothesis summed up in once sentence

/me not an economist!

I don't see what my remark has to do with the EMH; perhaps you could explain.

Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

#198

Post by Someone »

Nextgrid wrote: post #144
ASalazarMX wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to automate my house, but the results convinced me that starting from the absolute basics and growing from it is the best approach. It's more environmentally friendly too. The only smart devices left are some smart bulbs, and I'm waiting for them to fail before replacing them with regular LEDs. Nothing beats the reliability and energy/resource savings of plain locks and buttons.

A smart home can be reliable, useful and environmentally friendly (if we consider potential energy savings). You just won't get there with consumer-grade solutions. Pretty much every consumer-grade tech nowadays is designed to generate "engagement" and collect data; the actual "useful" work it does is only the bare-minimum needed to convince you to buy the product and "engage" with it. If you look beyond the consumer…

> A smart home can be reliable, useful and environmentally friendly.

Unless you have free spare electricity, I think it’s very difficult for smart electric lighting to be environmentally friendly. The controllers simply need too much standby power.

For example, https://eprel.ec.europa.eu/screen/product/lightsources/84743... is a 5W IKEA lamp that uses 0,3W when powered off. So, the lamp itself uses 4,7W, and you can leave that light on for about 1½ hour every day for the power that the controller uses. Said otherwise, you currently have to have such a light on longer than needed for 1½ hour every day to make up for the energy use of the controller. Add in energy used to make the controller and it gets worse.

There are days where I accidentally leave on a light for 1½ hours, but that’s nowhere near the average over all my lamps over a year.

Smart lights give you convenience. They won’t help saving the environment.

Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

#199

Post by jakub_g »

gambiting wrote: post #192
AussieWog93 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can have the good toaster, the good mixer, etc, but it sure looks like people don't actually want that. The pattern of product offerings in your average store suggests people want something affordable, and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job. I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetim…

>>I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetime according to some agreed standard We can, but again, I feel like a lot of customers don't want that. Even here on HN I hear people saying that well, if I want to buy a $200 washing machine that falls apart in 3 years, then it should be my god given right to do so. If c…

> if I want to buy a $200 washing machine that falls apart in 3 years, then it should be my god given right to do so

The $200 unrepairable washing machine has a massive negative externality for the planet. Most people don't think in those terms (especially when the budget is tight, or they are landlords and just need to put checkmark items in the apartment), that's why we should have strong regulations to prevent mass-creation of electro crap.

Regulation is good, because it sets a baseline. W/o regulation it's race to the bottom so if company X does something better but it's $50 more expensive, the cheaper company Y. If you have baseline, they both will figure out a $250 machine which is better. Companies who can't create durable items do not have god given right to exist and sell crap which harms the planet.

Thankfully EU has been working on this recently, and will require the vendors to offer N years of spare parts availability.

> If consumers want better appliances then they can just buy them without the need for regulation.

See above. I have a low-repairability fridge whose rubber-magnet got old. Fix? Replace whole door, which costs as much as the new fridge. I don't think my landlord was taking weeks to research repairability and warranty rules for the fridge, because why would they? The law should provide reasonable defaults.

I do hope we'll move towards fewer long-lived models with good repairability, even if it costs more short-term, than 7 new fridge model each years with half-life of 2 years. It's nuts.

Another thing we have in EU is power-hungriness of devices (they get labeled prominently A, B, C, D, E). IMO should be the same with warranty / spare parts availability length: One year = E, ten years = A etc.

Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

#200

Post by jschwartzi »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #184
hapless wrote: post #156

They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. You can still buy really, truly excellent toasters made for industrial/commercial use, or for the homes of the very rich, and they're quite a lot better than the trash people keep in their houses. And…

>You can have the good toaster, the good mixer, etc, but it sure looks like people don't actually want that. The pattern of product offerings in your average store suggests people want something affordable, and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job. I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetim…

I want legislation that the manufacturer has to publish, online and in a conspicuous place, full board-level schematics, parts lists, and service notes for household appliances no later than the day after the first unit of a model goes out of warranty. Or that such documents are placed prominently in the packaging the product arrives in and that installers are required by law to provide it to the customer. You can sell something that breaks in 3 years but you have to give me the documents I need to repair it including the logic board. My biggest fear in getting a new washer/dryer is that it starts my wife and I on the same junk treadmill everyone else is on.
Post reply on HN