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[–] 240 points 1 day ago (66 children)

Induction can have the crown as soon as appliance designers stop giving them infuriating capacitive touch controls that are a fundamentally bad input method for a fucking stove.

Give them knobs. The UI nerd in me is so angry at the slow death of competent design as its cannibalized by marketing and branding people, and the penny pinchers they serve.

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  • [–] 45 points 1 day ago (35 children)

    The problem is not with the controls fundamentally, it's with the low quality controls. A glass touch surface has merit: it's extremely easy to clean and keep clean, you're never gonna get boiling pasta juice in there and corrode the contacts or whatever. It's just that the manufacturers use the worst, most pathetic sensors that stop working as soon as the surface gets slightly moist. My own induction stovetop is pretty bad in that regard, but my parents' significantly more expensive one is perfectly fine. The control part of the glass surface never gets very hot either.

    Point is, it's pretty good when done right. But they often don't do it right.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

    Do your parents have cats? Ours have turned the stove on during the night by walking across it. Now we have to “lock” the controls every night, and then “hold for 3 seconds” before we can unlock. The more sensitive the controls, the worse this all gets.

    Knobs, dude. If you will it it is no dream.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 hours ago* (1 child)

    Ours have turned the stove on during the night by walking across it

    But aren't induction stovetops only heating when a compatible metal is on top/detected? So if you don't leave pans and pots on it shouldn't the stovetop be powered off, even if the cat turns on the switch? Besides that, there must be better options, even if companies refuse going back to knobs.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 hours ago

    Yes but it’s very possibly easier to just lock the buttons than it is to wash all the pots before bed and make sure no one leaves so much as a spoon on the cooktop before bed. Either way its an extra thing to remember and deal with and since there’s really no major advantages to capacitive, it’s a simple decision for me. Knobs.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 day ago (8 children)

    Knobs belong on the front of the stove, under the ledge of the range/counter where you can't spill anything on anyway.

    Induction already wins cleanliness by a mile through not burning in whatever lands on the cooktop. No need to make knobs worse to make them easier to clean, when they don't get dirty in the first place.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    You mean in the space where I have a drawer full of cooking utensils and herbs? Because my induction top is only as high as my countertop. I much rather have the touch buttons than lose that space.

    I will say I specifically bought an AEG because it has a slider. I can set it to 1 from 10 with one button press.

    There's nothing worse than having to press the minus-button 10 times when your pot is cooking over.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    As long as the knobs aren't behind the burners I'm happy. Every time I have to reach behind a boiling pot to turn it to simmer I just hear "bad design" in the voice of the audio book narrator for The Design of Everyday Things

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    I agree with induction where it can sense whether there is a pan but always thought the opposite with gas. Why do those burner knobs need to be reachable by toddlers?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    Just discovered one place my induction burner is worse for cleanness. Since it’s a glass top there’s no place for boilers to go, except down the side of the range.

    Compared to my previous gas stove that had sealed burners that were recessed to catch boilovers

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    But I never want to try and find the right place to touch a flat surface when I’m in the middle of basting meat and my pot is boiling over.

    Analog style dials (they’re digital now) are easy to reach without looking, which keeps your focus on the task. Muscle memory is super important for flow.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago*

    I’ve seen really rough “analogue” and hybrid control designs. Like, an oven with knobs and touch buttons, so you can set temperature more easily with a knob, but some more specific settings are set through touch input. Overall idea sounds good, until you try do something with it - then it quickly becomes a convoluted mess, because rather than separately choosing which directions to heat or whether to turn on the fan, manufacturers decided to make a list of all possible combinations to scroll through. 🌝

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Rented a place with the capacitive touch style and my cat kept turning on the stove… luckily with it being induction it meant it didn’t get hot as long as a pan wasn’t on there but holy shit could that be really dangerous

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago

    I hunted specifically for an induction stove with knobs, and couldn't be happier. It's how all induction stoves should be.

    Btw, it's a secondhand Gorenje stove, and it only costed me $50. An absolute bargain.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (8 children)

    got your knob right here bb.

    Seriously though, I'm with you. I have an induction, and it's fantastic, but any stupid moisture gets on it, and the controls don't work until you wipe it off, and the things spazzes out at you, beeping incessantly.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    My wife once dropped a metal bottle cap on the capacitive controls for our oven.

    I don't know anything about oven software, but so far as I could tell, it caused the entire thing to basically reboot.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (5 children)

    so my mother's kitchen, it looks like she has two ovens stacked vertically (the range is off to the side). top one is a microwave tho. my mother likes to microwave her eggs for some reason. probably just to disgust me. but like i warned her as prophecy foretold one day she spilled an egg down the front of her microwave and down into the oven controls.

    she was smart enough to cut the power immediately (her side of the family was farmers, my dad's side miners, so we're used to fixing everything ourselves. we just had to clean out the pcb and had no permanent shorting) but i feel your pain.

    she still microwaves her eggs. like fuck how hard is it to grab the big kettle and the spider skimmer

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    I get the microwaving eggs thing. It's an inferior culinary experience, but it's easier. I microwave things whenever possible because I have difficulty standing up for any significant period of time; even if the time taken is identical, microwaving something usually means pressing a few buttons before sitting down and waiting, whereas cooking something on the range usually involves tending, meaning I have to stay there.

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