Why do I have to put the bread in the toaster? A toaster should load itself.
And half the time I can't get the toast out without using a knife. Why doesn't the bread come up to a level where I can pull it out without burning myself?
Why can't it ever toast the right amount? It's always too much or too little. It should be able to determine everything it needs to about the bread to toast at the correct level, no trial and error and no wasted slices.
In fact, I disagree with your statement so much that I'd ask the question, why are toasters so shitty?
now i have the courage to write a blog post about how i dont like toasters and have nightmares about them and how they chase me around corners and assault me in my sleep, to see how many comments it can gather. let's keep discussing this important one first though.
Interesting, but peer preasure from a toaster is perhaps a level of stress nobody would want. Then the aspect of going on holiday, forget to tell the toaster (if it even understands that aspect of life) and bam. Return to chaos.
Maybe people who would like this aspect of interaction with products, but for me the prospect of being ditched by a toaster is just not the type of motivation I feel needs filling in my life.
Imagine you walk into a kitchen and someone is plating a decent-looking (at first glance at least) piece of toast. They could have used an oven or a toaster oven or a broiler or a traditional toaster, flamethrower, Bic lighter, or Superman’s laser eyes.
They are all theoretically good ways to make toast.
You ask: What did you use to make your toast?
They respond: A toaster.
As a bit of banal, passive curiosity you think “Why the toaster in particular?”
And then somebody shows up calling you a toaster hater
And that's the problem. I wouldn't even care about it, since theoretically "no one forces me to use it" (and I don't), but in 10 years there simply aren't going to be any toasters on the market that don't do this.
Toasters are an interesting case study. I went on a tear last year after being fed up with every toaster doing the same bad job. I thought maybe someone made a proper toaster. What I found is that when you pay more the coat of paint gets nicer and maybe there's an MCU+LCD, but the guts and logic are identical. There is no good commercially available toaster today. It's sending a very loud message about how markets operate, and it's not pleasant.
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 than toast. I have a toaster now, twenty years later, and while I realize it’s silly from one point of view, I know it’s not the silliest thing I own.
I am sympathetic to the overall thrust of this, but posted on my blog (which vanishingly few customers read) rather than my main site for a reason. If your toaster can't toast, you don't want to hear why your toaster can't toast, you just want it to toast toast. This describes the relationship of almost of my users with their computers, the Internet, and Bingo Card Creator.
While I want to apologize to users who got delayed from getting back to their lives because their toaster was on the fritz, I don't want to tell anybody else that toasters sometimes can't toast toast. It needlessly complicates their relationship with their toaster: they have no relationship with their toaster, and that is how they bloody like it.
It seems like modern toasters try to accomplish so many requirements which are boring and dull at the expense of giving up on ingenuity and beautiful design. Take for example bagel mode, nearly all modern cheap toasters support that, this adds complexity and reduces viability of a rather simpler yet elegant design. Manufacturers wanting to satisfy these rather mundane requirements in order to not only appeal to as many consumers as possible, but also avoid a type of boycott because product X cannot do task Y, thus it's inferior marketing arguments, they forego engineering elegance.
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