> home appliances like stoves and washing machines are returning to knobs
It can't come a bit too soon. My oven has buttons that aren't actually raised from their surroundings, and presses are registered via some sort of presumably fancy processing that I guess sounded slick when it was being pitched, but in practice means that it's very, very difficult to be confident that a button press will do anything, especially when fingers are greasy from cooking.
Oh, and sometimes whatever processor it's using gets frozen up, so I have to turn it off and back on again. But, since it's hardwired, this involves toggling a fuse. I'm sure that there are many ways that this is a better oven than the one in the many-decades-old apartment where I used to live, but I never had to re-boot that oven.
> presumably fancy processing that I guess sounded slick
I'm pretty sure that capacitive touch sensing is just cheaper than physical interfaces, it's more to do with corner cutting than being slick. All you need to create a capsense "button" is some traces on a PCB, they're essentially free if you're making a PCB anyway.
> I'm pretty sure that capacitive touch sensing is just cheaper than physical interfaces, it's more to do with corner cutting than being slick. All you need to create a capsense "button" is some traces on a PCB, they're essentially free if you're making a PCB anyway.
I love how my stove’s capacitive buttons sometimes don’t register when I’m using one hand to stir with a conductive spatula while trying to turn down the temp with the other until I let go of the spatula.
Dishwasher, same thing. Half the time it won't register a press when I need it to turn on. Yet the cat can start a cycle when he decides he wants to have a climb.
It can't come a bit too soon. My oven has buttons that aren't actually raised from their surroundings, and presses are registered via some sort of presumably fancy processing that I guess sounded slick when it was being pitched, but in practice means that it's very, very difficult to be confident that a button press will do anything, especially when fingers are greasy from cooking.
Oh, and sometimes whatever processor it's using gets frozen up, so I have to turn it off and back on again. But, since it's hardwired, this involves toggling a fuse. I'm sure that there are many ways that this is a better oven than the one in the many-decades-old apartment where I used to live, but I never had to re-boot that oven.