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Comment by oldcynic | Hacker News Reader

...and what no one giving us this "progress" ever seems to realise is how often it is slower.

For instance our Whirlpool microwave - touch sensitive digital and achieving 5 or 10 minutes takes much longer and more clicks than our old one (no 5 min button, but the Panasonic's touch keypad didn't much like damp hands). Setting power or grill is especially unfriendly and rarely succeeds at first attempt. First microwave had a rotary control, now the preserve of absolute bottom of range rubbish, time setting always took one touch and under a second.

I find it's affecting my choices of cars though. Touch sensitive "improvement" of anything basic (heater or fan for instance) is a big negative mark for me as chances are I could formerly achieve it without taking eyes from road, but now I need to look, and you don't want everything on the steering wheel!

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> First microwave had a rotary control

Reminds me of the old "ha-ha-only-serious" joke about how a computer scientist would design a toaster:

http://www.fiction.net/tidbits/computer/computer_cs_toaster....

Unfortunately some people interpreted it as a plan for the future.

Most toasters have a thermostat or photocell instead of a timer, so even the simple design is an example of complicators gloves.

A simple timer is under complicated - if you cook two slices in immediate successionm, the second slice will be burned as the coils will still be hot. As I understand it, a good quality toaster will have at minimum both a thermal switch (like a bimetallic switch) and a timer, which only starts when the toaster is hot.

I don't see how a simple thermostat with no timer can do the job by itself.

About the microwave: it seems to be purely American thing. Here in the UK even high-end very expensive microwaves have rotating knobs for setting the time and power. I've seen those monstrosities with a million buttons on the front but they are certainly rare.

It seems to go in cycles... Ten years ago I bought a microwave with a digital knob, and it was fucking fantastic, because if you just turned the knob it increased the time, but it had acceleration built in, so it went in small increments at the start, and larger later. But it was completely deterministic, so you developed muscle-memory for "30 seconds" or "2.5 minutes", and it was so fast to use.

Five years later we moved and I had to buy a replacement, and I found one model that had a digital knob, all the rest had the idiotic keypad instead.

Not just an American thing... At home I got a bare bones one with 2 mechanical knobs (even the "ready" sound is produced mechanically I think). But right now I'm standing in front of a sophisticated one in a Taiwanese home, it has 18 buttons marked with Chinese characters and various numbers or ranges of numbers that make no sense without a reference manual. No symbol, no knob, no useful color coding. I'm unable to operate it without help... Makes you feel like a child needing help from an adult :)

Likewise when shopping for a new hi-fi receiver, the most important feature I wanted was a physical volume control knob.

Grr. The old Denon bookshelf hi-fi had an analogue pot with slow motor tied to remote control, and infinite fine adjustment when using knob directly. After it died we just bought the current equivalent without exercising enough distrust.

The volume is now digital, so we have a choice between "too loud" or "too quiet". Turning the knob gives the same too coarse steps. No motor is required, saving Denon a few pennies and costing them a customer next time around.

The FM tuner (much better quality than DAB hereabouts), uses the digital stage somehow anyway, so analogue transmissions gain about a half second delay. As we often have the same radio station going in more than one room, this can be really annoying.

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