It's antiquated. My toaster uses machine learning to determine the "doneness" of the bread. Thereby allowing for breads of variant moisture levels to be brought to the same level of doneness, independent of surface heat.

Couple that with the fact that my toaster is also connected via 802.11g to the INTERNET where, naturally, I can view the toast progress via an iOS or Android app. A live feed of the toast progress is streamed to the app, and I can either cancel early or allow the bread to finish toasting. Upon finishing, a push notification is sent to my phone. Nice.

Lastly, and this is probably the highlight feature... I can share my toasting status to social. With the click of a button I can share a screen shot of my toast, WITH my choice of camera filter. Nothing says "ive got it better than you" than a picture of a perfectly toasted piece of toast with a christmas spirit filter.