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.
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.
People get irrational over this kind of products where all control of the outcome has been ceded to the product designer. I don't. To me, this is the kind of product that disrespects the user by not even giving the user any (literally) knobs and controls to customize things. Especially on something as personal as food.
I'm at least glad that the author describes the failings of the toaster and says it only works "most of the time".
I saw some lark call it the toaster fu*er problem once and it’s stuck with me.
40 years ago if you fetishised having it off with a toaster and told your mates they made fun of you and/or you got help.
Today you tel your mates; they make fun of you, you double down, find the toaster fu*er community online, feel vindicated in your newfound sense of meaning, purpose and belonging and get about defiling kitchen implements
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.
I find it more annoying when you get bombarded after buying the toaster. Surely they know I made that purchase and don't have a need for multiple toasters.
or they make the toaster to slightly and unpredictably vary the quality of the toasting - not enough for you to notice anything specific, yet enough to make you start the day with a bit of puzzled annoyance and undermining your confidence in your perception of reality - "was the toast different yesterday or is it just me?" - and leaving you with something bugging at the back of your mind through the day making you a bit impatient, a bit more easily frustrated, distracted and having some unspecified resentment building up deep inside you more and more with every day...
Yeah just start with the assumption that “this is an appliance” in my world and most of the rest probably makes sense.
From my point of view and use case, right now the market has two options:
1. A smart toaster with WiFi and Bluetooth that runs modified Linux and uses this functionality to both offer you automatic bread ordering and also spy on your daily toasting habits. But if you don’t like being spied on you can also run aftermarket ToastOS which works on most toasters (though it’s maintained by volunteers and sometimes you update and try and make toast but it never pops and lights a fire in your kitchen). Or…
2. A relatively dumb toaster with a lever and thermocouple. It cannot run custom toast programs. It always makes toast to the exact same darkness regardless of if you want it lighter or darker. If it stops working you throw it out and get a new one because the whole case is glued shut and it’s unrepairable.
Also in this not-so-hypothetical-hypothetical I have literally zero hours in a day to spend on things but a whole big pile of dollarbucks. Also I’m a techie with ADHD and if there’s a piece of broken or annoying technology in front of me I _can_ fix, I will fix.
I’ll pay you extra to solve my toasting problem for me with your dumb appliance so I can get back to migrating workloads off of my EKS cluster on to the bare metal k3s cluster that’s heating up my utility room or rebuilding my garage doors or whatever it is I need to be doing today.
The standard American household with 2.3 kids has everything on the counter near the toaster.
For the "oven" style toasters there's an significant chance that there's something made out of either paper or plastic atop the metal roof ready to melt as well.
> Also why not unplug it when done?
And plug it back in every morning? That'd be unnecessarily annoying.
Let's take the toaster out of context here and then if that's just a "product" and the brands/governments want you to purchase it frequently that's why.
I see limited use for a digital toaster, there are some perks you /could/ see like having personalized settings which somehow just know which person is using them ( RFID? ) and sets the appropriate toast setting for that person.
Possibly detection on what it is toasting ( ie: hash-browns, muffin-splits ) and "smarter" toasting ( ie: using an optical sensor to measure surface browning, and using a laser thermometer to measure core temperature ( which is required for hash browns because they're often still cold in the middle :( ) ), but these are all purely practical features and I'd want the toaster still 100% practical with no knowledge of these features.
But I'm guessing these sorts of features are not the ones they implement, and probably add silly things like an LCD screen with a countdown timer, and a blingy screensaver, and a robotic toast loader ( ok, on the other side I can see how that would be useful, I do get annoyed every time the toaster is a little too eager and throws my toast in the air and into the sink ..... ) , and they probably add useless features like bread-decorating toasting with high powered lasers or something equally stupid.
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.
reply