It made me wonder if anyone actually tested the damn design before approval for mass production.
From my limited experience with touch operated stoves - these would be just as reliably operated by randomly throwing darts at a board.
The knobs are more convenient to operate, but they tend to accumulate grease in the joints and other parts where you cannot reach. And if you want to clean them thoroughly you need to disassemble the knobs and that's annoying as hell. For me being easier to clean compensates everything.
The other thing is you can buy new knobs which can update/change/refresh the look of an older cooktop.
Got the touch buttons now and am forever turning stuff off randomly. It's like my hand meats are drawn to pressing more than one button at a time
I guess the idea is if the water overflows it'll 'touch' multiple buttons and turn the heat off but I've only ever turned it off by accident so far haha
Then, when in a shocking twist of events it's absolutely miserable, the tests are slightly mangled to highlight the usability gains ("easier to wipe", "looks modern and integrates well in a modern kitchen") and ensure no one's yearly bonus is endangered.
Surprisingly, it works out really well despite competition because everyone's doing it pretty similarly.
If your next question is "but why on Earth is it done like that!?", well, there are many reasons for that. But the tl;dr is that making kitchen appliances with universal, "boring" features, which last for 20 years, would spell disaster for a lot of companies in a lot of industries, from home appliances to furniture, and for smaller, specialized suppliers in these fields. The market has fine-tuned itself for frequently replaceable junk that's just good enough to that someone can plausibly say "well ackshually" when I refer to it as junk. Anything better would inherently result in much longer growth cycles, which Western management and stakeholders are not capable of handling anymore, and would disrupt "fashionable" trends, which would further prolong growth cycles in both home appliances and connected industries (furniture, home decor, cooking vessels believe it or not, and so on). It would also make it difficult to outsource mass production to cheap factories with poor quality control processes, thus driving prices up even more than the better materials and design would warrant, but that's more of a second-order effect than a cause by now.
Sauce: I used to work on consumer products years ago -- not kitchen appliances specifically but I know people who did those, too. Attending meetings was a lesson in cognitive dissonance and doublespeak and it's one of the least rewarding tech jobs you can imagine.
Designing and selling long-lived consumer products is a tremendous effort in terms of regulatory activity and logistics. And if you're just entering the market, you're entering a market where established players have been sitting on standardizing committees, lobbying regulatory bodies, and have had special deals with manufacturers, transporters, TV channels and shopping malls since Jimmy Carter was in the White House, and have been able to leverage them when dealing with online shops since the days of the dotcom boom.
Furthermore, getting that "more of the market share" requires actual first sales to happen in the first place. Selling fewer, better, and inherently more expensive products by claiming that yours are really good and last a long time is not very straightforward at all: it's not like everyone else is openly advertising that they're selling cheap junk that's worse than their 1980s versions in every way except maybe power consumption (because we can make better power supplies now). If you're selling kitchen stoves that last for twenty years, it's gonna be at least seven or eight years before anyone really believes you.
So all this requires tremendous initial investment in a pretty hostile environment. Consumer markets are already perceived as low-yield and under tremendous price pressure. But, worse, some segments -- household appliances in particular -- also suffer from a "marketshare = dead market" problem: if you sold someone a washing machine that lasts fifteen years, you're not going to sell them another one for fifteen years. So if you're selling things that last for fifteen years, you gotta convince the folks whose money you're depending on that you can keep selling things at a reasonable pace for fifteen years from now, and you won't really know if you've succeeded at your basic value proposition ("we make better things that last longer") for at least seven or eight years into it.
That's not just pretty risky, it's on a timeframe that's about an order of magnitude higher than companies/investment funds/people willing to throw that kind of money into things that run on electricity are able to work with.
That's not to say no one has been entering these markets. They have, but they've usually done it through other value propositions -- stuff that's even cheaper, stuff that's ethically sourced and so on. New premium brands do pop up but they either target prosumer/super premium markets (slang for "super rich people who want to brag or impress"), where the rules are slightly different, or go straight for the professional market first, where the rules of the game are very much different, and use whatever reputation they can make there to start selling home appliances too.
That'd be my go-to panic resolve anyway
* For folks unfamiliar by this I mean it takes almost zero effort to turn the switch off, but takes a little bit of force to switch back on
If I'm honest I only noticed it because the last one I came across seemed to be wired upside down (easy on, resistant off) and I'm almost certain the house before had the same but wired the "right way"
Could just have been some rogue grease or something either lubricating or gunking up the switch haha
I've never seen one of these soft touch control designs on a cooktop but I did hear they existed and at least one cat had turned one on by standing on it resulting in a house fire. The only dumber idea I can think of is a touch screen, which I'm sure they're hard at work integrated right now.
Right, that's bad design.
The cooktop I'm familiar with always turns off and beeps if something (metal pots or a liquid) covers a part of the button area.
To turn it on, you have to press two different buttons within a certain time limit, with a pot standing on the appropriate cooking zone. Most cats probably won't manage to do that.
> The only dumber idea I can think of is a touch screen
Oh, don't get me started. We own an oven with a touch screen. It's pure idiocy. But the cooktop is actually very good IMO.
Cats responsible for 107 house fires in Seoul in past 3 yrs ... According to the Seoul Metropolitan Fire & Disaster Headquarters, cats are believed to have started the blaze by turning on the electric stove in the kitchen with their paws. ... Electric induction cookers often come with touch-sensitive buttons, which can be switched on by the paw of an animal.