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.
There are induction stove tops with normal knobs, thankfully. Neff also makes ones with a magnetic puck, which I also find very intuitive and easy to use.
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
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.
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
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.
I realize this is probably hilariously unrealistic but. I prescribe a kitchen remodel. They have all kinds of designs for folks in wheelchairs that you could use with just a regular chair
i get that. sometimes i feel like a bicycle. i’m fine laying down or leaning on shit, but if you want me upright you need to give me space to keep moving (so i don’t tip over).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Easy to wipe true, but what if instead of a capacitor button we can have a magnetic control board with magnetic push keys?
It would be fully removable, attachment magnet snaps it into place and then it’s essentially a button with a magnet physically travelling up and down.
The I really hate the capacitor buttons since if you get pasta that boils over it fucks with the buttons pretty fast and the “off button” is just not good for quickly turning it off when flooded. It’s same for pan cooking sauce that splashes a bit, wiping the surface moist rag can have mixed results, paper towels become a requirement. There’s just a lot to not like.
A standard knob, as long as it’s not designed by an idiot, can be very simple by having a piece of heat resistant non corrosive material stuck out of the stove top and the button having a 1cm gap under it. Just make the pin chonky and you can drop a pan on it without anything happening. Lift the button off and it becomes still very easy to clean.
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.
Knobs are definitely better for a stove. Even the best capacitive touch sensor won’t work if you’ve got an oven mitt on, or you need to make a quick adjustment without taking your eyes off the food
The highest quality touchscreen on earth that works perfectly not matter what is on my hands and never makes a mistake would still be shittier than a simple fucking knob.
I’ve seen really rough “analogue” 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. 🌝
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.
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
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.
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
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?
Keep the knobs in a child safe drawer when not in use until the kids are old enough to know better. Reaching through steam is a burn risk as is reaching over hot oil.
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.
My induction range has knobs! Even the oven setting is a knob.
Hoooolllllynshit you nailed the head right on the hammer!
I cannot stand the controls on my induction cooktop. Still fundamentally the right choice of tech but it is a PITA to actually use.
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.
One of my friends just bought an obscenely expensive stove bc it was the only one they could find that was induction with knobs
There are induction stove tops with normal knobs, thankfully. Neff also makes ones with a magnetic puck, which I also find very intuitive and easy to use.
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
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.
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.
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 heras 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
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.
I realize this is probably hilariously unrealistic but. I prescribe a kitchen remodel. They have all kinds of designs for folks in wheelchairs that you could use with just a regular chair
i get that. sometimes i feel like a bicycle. i’m fine laying down or leaning on shit, but if you want me upright you need to give me space to keep moving (so i don’t tip over).
Heh, nice.
Mine has knobs, that was one of my non-negotiables. The oven controls are touch, but I can lube with that.
I made the switch from gas to induction this year and had no issue finding models that had physical knobs.
Mine has knobs. It’s fucking great. It’s a Bora professional 3.0
that’s showing up as an extractor fan on my computer
It’s a modular system of a downdraft extractor and induction or gas hobs. Scroll down.
But didn’t you know that all old design is bad design, and you’re supposed to laugh at people with knobs on their stove?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Easy to wipe true, but what if instead of a capacitor button we can have a magnetic control board with magnetic push keys?
It would be fully removable, attachment magnet snaps it into place and then it’s essentially a button with a magnet physically travelling up and down.
The I really hate the capacitor buttons since if you get pasta that boils over it fucks with the buttons pretty fast and the “off button” is just not good for quickly turning it off when flooded. It’s same for pan cooking sauce that splashes a bit, wiping the surface moist rag can have mixed results, paper towels become a requirement. There’s just a lot to not like.
A standard knob, as long as it’s not designed by an idiot, can be very simple by having a piece of heat resistant non corrosive material stuck out of the stove top and the button having a 1cm gap under it. Just make the pin chonky and you can drop a pan on it without anything happening. Lift the button off and it becomes still very easy to clean.
Neff has that, they come with a magnetic disc you use to control everything. Only drawback is you can only control one thing at a time.
The other drawback is that I could buy 10 IKEA stovetops for the same price lol
Not really… if you buy a same sized filed its maybe 30 percent.
Ikea just offers a lot of smaller ones too.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here but mine has an app for that
That’s worse. Don’t make me pull my phone out of my pocket to change stove temp. Absolutely embarrassing that this idea got to production.
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.
It’s an inductive stove, the pots heat up instead of the surface.
That doesn’t prevent my pots from boiling over.
I tried this once at an Airbnb and it was really annoying to change temperature while cooking, which is one of the things indication is good for
Some newer stoves now put the control panel separate, and you can e.g. build it into the edge of the countertop.
Knobs are definitely better for a stove. Even the best capacitive touch sensor won’t work if you’ve got an oven mitt on, or you need to make a quick adjustment without taking your eyes off the food
The problem is give me a damned knob.
The highest quality touchscreen on earth that works perfectly not matter what is on my hands and never makes a mistake would still be shittier than a simple fucking knob.
I’ve seen really rough “analogue” 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. 🌝
No, touch screens are always shit compared to knobs. You might have even worse touch screens but that’s just like even worse!
One stray globule, and suddenly your stove is set to 700°
Typically what happens is that the range detects liquid on the buttons, alerts, and stops accepting input until the liquid has been cleaned up.
Another problem that would never happen with knobs!
Another error and that’s in Celsius 😁
A bunch of new stoves have a pizza setting that’s in that range.
You have to be careful though, they’re not all actually insulated for that range, so the electronics actually cook and fail.
If you do buy one the self clean usually works better due to the higher heat range, but all the appliance sales reps said to never use it anyways.
Wouldn’t that be fun, a button on the stove to convert the units.
“Honey did you touch the f/c button?”
“No why?”
me looking at burnt pan “oh no reason”
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.
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
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.
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
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?
The trick is to not have toddlers
How else are you gonna teach those lazy toddlers to cook? Smdh
Keep the knobs in a child safe drawer when not in use until the kids are old enough to know better. Reaching through steam is a burn risk as is reaching over hot oil.
Yeah that would be nice ngl