Walking around CES preview events, it’s clear that AI and other smart technologies are coming to toasters, grills, and all kinds of other appliances. As someone who loves to cook, it’s possible that these products aren’t really for me, but I can’t help but think that a bunch of smart technologies built into small home appliances would be a disaster for the planet.
Burn, darling, burn
Perfecta Sir Grills is one example of this. It’s an AI propane gas grill that claims to be the world’s fastest grill.
“We can cook a one-inch ribeye steak in about 1 minute and 45 seconds,” says Jordan Aspley, the company’s founder. “We have two vertical infrared burners that cook at 1,652 degrees Fahrenheit. It cooks both sides of the steak at the same time – it’s basically a steak roaster.”
The company will open for pre-orders in the next few days, and the grill retails for $3,500.
Wave, baby, wave
Another device shown off at CES 2024 is the “Macrowave” from Revolution Cooking. It was the company’s previous product Toaster $400. Now, she’s back with a device called a “microwave.” It’s an air fryer, toaster oven and microwave in one, using the same “InstaGlo” rapid heating element she developed for her toaster.
“Frozen food was really my biggest problem. Things like frozen burritos. The instructions are, you know, defrost in the microwave, preheat the oven, take it out of the microwave, put it in the oven. Or if you just microwave it, it’ll explode. So we know that microwaves “It’s great technology, but it wasn’t designed for cooking. It was designed to heat things up,” says Tom Clough, CEO of Revolution Cooking, in an interview with TechCruch at CES 2024 in Las Vegas. “The idea was to make microwaves the hero: Let’s make the microwave do What he’s supposed to do. With the microwave, it has the best qualities of what a microwave does, which is heat food quickly, and InstaGlo, which heats up very quickly and efficiently and emits infrared heat directly into the crisp.”
This is all very smart, but carrying a $1,800 price tag is hell, even for a multifunctional device like this. It made me wonder, why does everything have to be smart and connected? For a toaster, you have to walk up and put the toast in the machine anyway, so is it really that hard to press a button to start everything?
The Revolution Cooking team suggests that this is crucial, because you can get software updates for your toaster. Yes. Software updates. For your toaster.
“You know, there are things we wanted to add to it over time that we couldn’t add because they weren’t connected, just to provide a better experience,” Clough says. You’ve pushed it to the type of updates it needs. “For the toaster, we’ve added new algorithms for panini pressing, so we can constantly add more creativity around that. Our customers ask us for different types of toast that are a little different than what we currently have. So it would be great to add those as well.”
Quite aside from the glorious phrase “Panini’s algorithm,” and despite the fact that I love technology as much as anyone else, I can’t really see the point for myself. In a world where you can buy a $25 toaster from Amazon Basics, I have a hard time seeing how Revolution Cooking’s $400 toaster can add 25 times more value. Or think about it, when you can get a microwave for $100 and Toaster oven can be used as an air fryer For another $140, how does it make sense to pay 7 times the price for a microwave.
How long does it last?
Is there anything wrong with a $3,500 grill, a $400 toaster, or a $1,800 microwave? No, by all means, if you have the money to do it, do it. However, the problem with a lot of these products is that they seem to be just relatively minor improvements over existing products, a “solution” to a problem that doesn’t really exist. This in itself is not a problem – no one is forcing consumers to shell out 25 times more for the product.
However, what really bugs me about “smart” products is that heat and electronics rarely mix well, and the longevity of some companies that make these types of products can get wonky. One example is the Spark One — the $1,100 smart grill we featured in our 2020 gift guide — which It ceased operations by 2022. In theory, it was a great design (I know the founder well—hi Ben!—and they built something unique), but the company didn’t make it, which rendered a lot of its grills unusable: without using special “brik” charcoal inserts, The grills become essentially useless, resulting in the grills being taken to landfills after less than two years.
That’s my fear with a lot of the products I see at CES: great ideas, but if they don’t have the longevity of the products they replace – I still use a toaster oven from the mid-90s, and I still have a toaster oven that I think the Vitamix was made in 1970s and so over-engineered that it seems to refuse to give up the ghost – we are only accelerating our consumption pattern. Even products that claim to be environmentally friendly do not become environmentally friendly if they are not repairable (because companies go out of business), or worse, stop working altogether when consumables are no longer available.