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A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

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

#161

Post by Gigachad »

hapless wrote: post #159
sgtnoodle wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas stoves can put out significantly more power than electric, and achieve high temperatures much more rapidly. It's very convenient compared to electric.

That's not particularly true Inductive stoves are vastly more efficient than the old fashioned resistive coil stoves, so your 3000W of input power can yield cooking heat similar to a 40,000 or 50,000 btu gas stove. They also reach temp much, much more quickly than the old style. You can vary the output as quickly as a gas stove.

The induction ones are crazy powerful now. The one I was looking at could pull 12kW. Could boil a pot of water very fast. Much faster than gas.

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

#162

Post by saalweachter »

Gigachad wrote: post #94
varelse wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe less dumb and more easily repairable? Microcontrollers are great, just make a standardized component for all the things that can be unplugged and replaced and have at it. Why must we late-stage capitalism everything?

I don't think that dishwashers and related appliances are fragile or that they are too hard to repair. It's just that the brand new manufacturing cost has become so insanely cheap while human labor has become extremely expensive. So when the dishwasher finally craps out, it just isn't worth paying someone to crack it open and fix it. Hobbyists are able to fix almost anything when they do it for fun in their free time…

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Every new dishwasher is assembled the same way; potentially, every broken dishwasher is broken in a different way, and needs some different part and different fix. (I mean, there are probably a handful of problems that account for 90% of the failures of any appliance. But still.)

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

#164

Post by Nition »

exhilaration wrote: post #135
silisili wrote: post #134

Serious question - do most folks still own toasters today? They just seem so... specifically single function and take up counterspace. In my house, we have a sandwich press which we use for 4 or less pieces of toast at a time. And of course it doubles as a press for paninis or cubanos, too. And you never have to worry about unevenness, as it's just two hot plates basically. If cooking a lot of toast for a get togethe…

Toaster oven FTW, it's probably our most used appliance. Get one with the convection setting and it'll beat any air fryer too [1]. [1] Wirecutter review: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-air-fryer/

Funnily enough, convection toaster ovens are rebranding their same old models as being air friers now. Because of course an air fryer is just a weirdly shaped convection toaster oven in the first place.

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

#165

Post by droopyEyelids »

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…

Crestron may be as good as humanity can do for home automation, but it's the way to madness with proprietary development tools, security vulnerabilities, and hardware that still isn't up to infrastructure reliability levels.

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

#166

Post by Gigachad »

saalweachter wrote: post #162
Gigachad wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that dishwashers and related appliances are fragile or that they are too hard to repair. It's just that the brand new manufacturing cost has become so insanely cheap while human labor has become extremely expensive. So when the dishwasher finally craps out, it just isn't worth paying someone to crack it open and fix it. Hobbyists are able to fix almost anything when they do it for fun in their free time…

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Every new dishwasher is assembled the same way; potentially, every broken dishwasher is broken in a different way, and needs some different part and different fix. (I mean, there are probably a handful of problems that account for 90% of the failures of any appliance. But still.)

OEMs mostly deal with this by grouping everything in to modules. If a chip fries, they don't bother checking every chip to find it. They just replace the entire board.

But it still requires someone to go to your house, pull the thing apart, and put the new one in which costs way more than robots in India putting the thing together almost unassisted.

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

#167

Post by jonahx »

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…

> and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job.

I would amend that to: "it doesn't matter whether it excels at its job, as long as it's good enough." And those modern, cheap toasters are good enough.

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

#168

Post by sgtnoodle »

Gigachad wrote: post #161
hapless wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not particularly true Inductive stoves are vastly more efficient than the old fashioned resistive coil stoves, so your 3000W of input power can yield cooking heat similar to a 40,000 or 50,000 btu gas stove. They also reach temp much, much more quickly than the old style. You can vary the output as quickly as a gas stove.

The induction ones are crazy powerful now. The one I was looking at could pull 12kW. Could boil a pot of water very fast. Much faster than gas.

I suspect that the 12KW isn't to a single burner, but rather the total across all burners. A typical home gas range is probably totalling 17kW or so with all burners going. doing some research in the internet, the large burners on induction cook tops do about 3.5kW, with less common 11" burners getting up to 4kW or so. The large burners on a gas stove do about 17500 BTU, which is about 5kW.

I could believe that the power transfers more efficiently on an induction stove as the pot itself heats up. Maybe it's enough to balance out to roughly equivalent to gas, and a 12kW induction range sounds like a nice convenience. I would bet that you aren't boiling your water as fast as you think you are relative to a gas burner though. :-)

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

#169

Post by late2part »

JoshGlazebrook wrote: post #102

Honestly, I searched for a great toaster after going through a few cheap ones and I always came back to this Japanese "steam" toaster. - https://us.balmuda.com/products/balmuda-the-toaster $300 for a toaster seems insane, but it honestly is worth it. You fill the little 5cc "cup" with water and pour it in, and it uses steam to lock in moisture and then toast. Toast (and honestly everything else) comes out perfectly c…

I have this and the Mitsubishi T0-ST-1T. Both are good. Neither are great. I miss my Breville, it seemed more consistently better than good.

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

#170

Post by Gigachad »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #168
Gigachad wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The induction ones are crazy powerful now. The one I was looking at could pull 12kW. Could boil a pot of water very fast. Much faster than gas.

I suspect that the 12KW isn't to a single burner, but rather the total across all burners. A typical home gas range is probably totalling 17kW or so with all burners going. doing some research in the internet, the large burners on induction cook tops do about 3.5kW, with less common 11" burners getting up to 4kW or so. The large burners on a gas stove do about 17500 BTU, which is about 5kW. I could believe that the p…

> I would bet that you aren't boiling your water as fast as you think you are relative to a gas burner though.

I moved recently to somewhere that has gas and noticed its is quite a lot slower than the induction stove I was using. The gas one seems worse in every way but initial cost.

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