Who doesn't cook? Millennials. [1]
Who doesn't have money for a toaster oven that costs twice their monthly rent? You guessed it.
The author nailed it here - '...yet, June is taking something important away from the cooking process: the home cook’s ability to observe and learn.
The sizzle of a steak on a pan will tell you if it’s hot enough.
The smell will tell you when it starts to brown.
These are soft skills that we gain through practice over time. June eliminates this self-education.'
If we want more people to cook, we should give them solid reasons to. Automating the process doesn't teach people to 'cook', it teaches them to be yet more reliant on a piece of technology.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/millenni...
Precisely the direction SV wants us to keep marching blindly in.
This reminds me of the (Hitachi?) thousand dollar rice cooker.
I guess you can argue for balance between craft and automation, but it's rather futile and more a nice mental exercise.
It's like trying to convince most kids to learn how to derive square roots longhand when they have a computing device in their pockets.
I wouldn't count cooking as 'out' just yet. Many people of all ages love to cook, but many of them love the creation of it. An oven that cooks for you is like paint by numbers, it 'might' get people interested in cooking to the point where they want to learn more.
Yes, some people live cooking --as do I when I have the spare time, on the other hand, often I don't have the time to futz and just need a pragmatic meal, rather than experience based cooking.
That being said, there is room for a smartphone-controlled toaster / oven; but it should give more control (customizable & shareable heating profiles, as part of a recipe database) rather than less.
"Carbon fiber heating elements ... preheats faster" Total B.S.
Much better to install a real outlet and get something like https://www.katom.com/569-FC33.html
The other fallacy is that everyone wants or needs to learn how to cook. I enjoy cooking, but sometimes I also enjoy dumping ingredients into a rice cooker and firing and forgetting.
I think the thermal sensor is a very clever bit of tech. I'm guessing the estimates won't be perfect because the oven can't gauge thickness, and it refines estimates once it measures the rate of heating.
> The salmon's done at 6:52 p.m.
Which is meaningless, because this is the first time the article's mentioned the time.
> Automated yet distracting. Boastful yet mediocre. Confident yet wrong.