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Comment by ttepasse | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how cultural that must be. Here in Germany most mainstream cheap microwaves in the last decades still have electromechanical knobs, one for selecting power, one for time. If forced to draw a microwave out of memory that is my canonical mental image – and I didn’t had a microwave the last 15 years.

Basic Example: https://www.bosch-home.com/de/de/product/kochen-backen/mikro...

Until this article I had no idea what US-Americans were (rightfully) bitching about.

(Edit: Oh, I see, the cheaper Bosch Microwave range has capacitive buttons. Erghs.)

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As a US-American who occasionally shops for appliances, I can confidently say that you cannot easily buy a microwave in the US with knobs for any price. The vast majority of appliances these days still use resistive or pressure-sensitive panels. And I hate them. They sure LOOK like buttons but when you press them, there is no actuation feedback, knowing how hard to press is a guessing game, and often you have to press so hard that you fear breaking the panel. (Let's not even talk about how little thought goes into what the buttons actually do.)

Plus, the plastic panel eventually cracks over the most-used buttons. Built-in obsolecence.

If you want capacitive buttons, you generally have to climb a few tiers up the pricing ladder. But they don't advertise this as a feature, which means you have to see/use the microwave in person to know for sure that's what you're getting.

ALL appliances in the US are terrible in some way or another. Either they are cheaply-made chinese garbage that are frustrating to use and break in 5 years, or they cost as much as a brand-new low-end car. Sometimes even both!

In my experience buying microwaves in Northern’s Europe it’s the cheap ones that have a straight forward interface with simple knobs and the expensive ones that doesn’t.

I guess the complicated interface is both more expensive to built and looks more impressive so you add it to higher end machines.

That’s supposed to be a “cheap microwave?” Here in the U.S., the aisles are full of microwaves (with touch-sensitive buttons only) at around $30-$70. Once you get above $100 you do sometimes start seeing some with knobs of some sort.

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