Bespoke good design exists. It's a niche, and rarely survives mass production if has moving parts or requires close tolerances, and unused features are whittled away.
The original openwrt targeted a design of home router which was hackable. The first thing the v2 did was shrink the memory and run a simpler OS: it became less hackable, because the bill of materials shaved 15c off manufacturing costs and hackability was not in the design goal spec.
Bauhaus design was awesome because it was applicable to mass production. But, if you look at modern derivative they aren't quite as good. Same with eames chair, and I guess, this kettle: it's not innately profitable to have a satisfying click when the lid shuts, at 2x the unit cost to make unless it's 10x the unit cost to sell
I’ve baught the same kettle several times during more than 20 years years. Very durable design.
It fullfils all the points, except the bonus point. Price is close:
Several times over the course of 20 years is not that bad. I'm guessing he wouldn't be buying it every 2 years (like common appliances that break apart right after guarantee period).
Some people I know have a 50 year old kettle. Sure, they look a bit old fashioned, and have marks and scratches, but they still 100% boil water.
I don't really see any reason kettles can't be made to last that long - it isn't like the human need for boiling water is going away anytime soon.
To get a design that lasts that long isn't much more expensive either - all it takes is very carefully recording what's broken on each kettle that fails, and modifying the design to avoid that failure mode. Within a few iterations, you'll end up with most kettles lasting 50 years.
Came to recommend the same one. My first one stopped working after a decade, now been on the second one for six years. (The "stopped working" thing is not ideal, but given the constant use, also not a dealbreaker for an electrical appliance.) I most like it for the big ... 'spout'? that allows filling it without needing the lift the lid.
I do remember it being the only decent option in the store. I guess other people have other priorities in kettles, for all those other models to stick around?
Funny, I've spent entirely too much on the one I have in the US because it has a temperature control. I want my tea and coffee at hot, but below boiling so it doesn't wreck my mouth. He calls it a bonus but it's the one feature I actually care about.
Similar Philips story for me - had several pairs of SHP2000 (and HP200, which is basically an earlier model nr for the same exact headphones) over the last 20+ years. They're comfy, sound great for their price and the quality hasn't become worse over the years.
As someone who remembers very little of the German he took in college, I’d like to mention that I’m amused that a kettle is literally a “water cooker” (Wasserkocher) in German.
We have a similar Breville kettle (it’s a Strix design sold under several consumer brand names) and it doesn’t have temperature control which is the cause of the OP’s troubles.
It's not even the price. I have a commercial toaster sitting in the garage, works well. But I don't have counter space or a need for a toaster with a conveyor belt. I'm just not making that much toast.
The main problem is toasters generally toast the bread for a set (adjustable) time. When you toast the first slices the toaster starts cold, but when you toast more slices right after the toaster starts hot so the slices get toasted more.
I think bigger problems is the moisture content of the bread itself.
Unless your bread is fresh out of the pack, depending on where you brought it from either refrigerator or rack, it's moisture content is going to vary changing your toasting time.
The breville toaster ovens work fairly well. If you have it set to "6" and toast some bread, and put more bread in immediately afterwards, it correctly reduces the toasting time, since it is already warm.
I've had one of these for nearly a decade now, and I love it. I even use it in place of the regular oven when I've got something that needs baking that's small enough to fit, just because it takes about 1/4 the time to come up to temperature.
Since the bread is flat in there, it also makes it much easier to melt cheese on top of it without either getting the bread hot enough to melt it all by itself (which would surely leave it much browner than I like), or microwaving, which makes the bread soft and moist.
I grown up in communism. It was impossible to buy stainless steel kettle. Our industry simply could not produce that material, and borders were closed. Today it is recommended not to buy cheap kettles from communist asia, it may contain poisonous bromine.
Today I just use dumb kettle on induction stove. Never breaks and saves space.
Great idea, and in theory the induction cooker should be able to detect temperature, to turn off when the water boils, and also be able to function as a rice cooker etc.
But I've never seen one with a temperature sensor or probe.
Actually, they do have a temperature sensor that is used to turn off the induction over a critical temperature.
But it’s below the glass top, so it lags behind the real temperature, only tread the temperature of the bottom of the pot. This makes it unreliable for fine temperature control.
I have a portable one that gives you the possibility to set the temperature you want by 20 degrees, but it’s not fine enough for tea (40, 60, 80, 100, 120... degrees Celsius)
A jug filter is much bigger and uses a different mechanism, a kettle filter is just a mesh to anything bigger than a large grain of sand in the kettle.
Once a product is good and sells well, all the incentive goes to aggressively reducing costs (and thus making the product worse) and making sure that no other good products appear. A stable state of this situation is that every company is making low-quality products.
A certain amount of planned obsolescence can be a force for good. It makes sure that production capacity does not become stagnant and disappear. But senseless cost reduction is an atrociously bad thing.
I draw a hard moral line here: Intentionally designing failure into a product is just plain wrong.
I don't mean fail safes, like building a table saw that fires an explosive charge to stop a spinning blade when it detects the presence of a finger [0]. If some given production capacity can only be sustained by selling fresh barrels of oil converted into easily-broken home goods is it worth sustaining?
On the other hand, perishable stuff is pretty natural. If anything, it is non-perishable stuff that seems odd... There's nothing eternal in an ecosystem. Individual animals and plants die continuously and their stuff is recycled on an on. The individual cells on your body die and are replaced.
While I absolutely abhor that you cannot buy a toaster that lasts more than two years, I still see a case for well-thought-out obsolescence to be an important ingredient in sustainability.
Think about a spaceship that is moving a city to another star system for a multi-generation trip. Would you embark anything that is non-perishable? What if it breaks by accident? It is maybe better to make sure that nothing lasts more than a generation, so that there's always people having the experience to build it again (because they have already built it before).
I'm not convinced by your "moral hard line" against planned obsolescence. It is a matter of quantity: today our technology is sadly too perishable. But a (tiny) amount of planned obsolescence may still be a good thing. Just don't say it too loud :)
That’s not designing failure into a product. That’s designing a product so that when it does, it fails in specific ways. The latter is just good product design and engineering; the former is what’s arguably unethical.
Therefore, by adjusting the quality down a little bit, the company gets a bit of feedback as to how low quality a typical consumer is able to tolerate at their price point.
So i think ultimately the responsibility lies with the consumer to demand the quality they want by purchasing good quality stuff, even if it costs more, and to educate themselves to discern what is quality and what is fluff.
The issue is that higher price and promise of quality does not reflect reality once you start using the item. We paid £100+ for a cutlery set and it still stained for example.
Follow up question: can't a competitor make a kettle that's 20% better (and more profitable)? You do say that the incentive goes to "making sure that no other good products appear", but I'm not sure how a Bosch can stop a Cuisinart from making a slightly superior (and more profitable) kettle.
Maybe. A competitor, however, can’t make people pay more for a kettle that’s insufficiently marginally better.
Considering these are multinational companies doing at least tens of millions in business every year, I presume they have the expertise to do obvious market research and come to the correct conclusions about what and how much people are willing to pay for, and that is reflected in the choices you see in the marketplace.
That's a good point. Thanks. So I guess it boils down to (heh) "most consumers are happy with the existing kettles" (which could actually negate the very premise of my article.
The idea is not to change the chemical composition of the water (as a softener in a Brita filter does), but just to filter out any chunks of scale that have formed inside and come loose.
Really you just ought to descale your kettle regularly.
Tea made from a scaly kettle will form a scum, even if you use a mesh limescale filter. Apparently Yorkshire Tea for hard water might help with this, but I drink decaf so that's not an option for me.
My kettle fulfill almost all his criteria. It max out at 1.25L and it beeps. I like the beep feature, it's not super loud on mine, but I guess it could be possible to disconnect the beep.
Looks a bit like Cuisinart. Costs about the same too, the only difference being that Cuisinart has a temperature quick select on buttons (85° and 100°C), and the lid opens from a button above the handle.
The lid button is surprisingly nice to have, because you don't accidentally burn your hand when refilling right after the first batch.
But that wouldn’t answer the question. Why is it not profitable to make good kettles?
Also, you’re wrong. The people designing these kettles aren’t doing so to make more money for their company. If anything you could say that capitalism optimises for job security. That’s why you don’t see new features on kettles, and why no one will make a left handed microwave. No one wants to take a risk
Not sure if this was a troll, but I'll assume it was honest and then point out that every system optimizes for profit. Profit is just taking out more than what you put in. That could be being paid even if you don't show up to work, or doing one hour of work and getting paid for 2, or selling something for $2 when you could easily sell it for $1. Everyone wants to take out more than they put in.
The genius of capitalism is in encouraging and facilitating competition so that other firms can come and take away your profit by selling something that appeals to customers more. In this way, the universal profit motive is turned into better products as people compete for surplus income rather than having that assigned by birth (middle ages), political connections (soviet systems), religious considerations (indulgences/moral crusaders), etc.
But everyone is going to optimize to get more than what they put in -- e.g. profit. The only question is what determines that income stream -- being able to sell products to consumers better than the other guy, or being a loyal party deputy.
>Not sure if this was a troll, but I'll assume it was honest and then point out that every system optimizes for profit.
If we bend profit to mean anything we like, yes.
But the commonly understood sense is "making more money", not "keeping party bureaucrats happy" or "making the private owner of the company proud of the quality of his products, even if he's not making as much as he could".
Aside: Not a troll. Appreciate you taking it at face value, thank you. I think too often I give short answers and expect others to understand / expand my point.
Will expand properly elsewhere but the implicit point was that profit is not necessarily even remotely connected to product quality or customer satisfaction, but the author seems to have made the assumption that they are.
Hi, author here (and I really am looking for answers).
Thanks for your comment.
As someone below you hinted at, wouldn't one expect that "high profit" would result from "high consumer satisfaction"? I think that's the step that puzzles me.
I have to say, reading through this thread I'm beginning to think that the existing offering of kettles in the market does deliver sufficient satisfaction to consumers, removing the incentive to create a better product.
Multiple commenters have said they don't mind beeps, or flashy lights, or the lack of a calcium mesh. It may be worth pointing out that the kettles I bought had VERY loud beeps (I don't mind a "normal" beep), VERY strong lights (I don't mind "normal" lights, I actually enjoy seeing light in my kettle). Also, I actually do pre-filter my water with a Brita jug, and I also descale my kettle regularly, but the calcium content in my area is so high that I'd have to descale between every 2 cups of tea not to get calc bits in my drink.
This all leads me to conclude that probably my opening premise is wrong: maybe I am unreasonably picky about kettles and, since capitalism makes kettles for the masses and not for the 3% of people who are as picky as I seem to be, then I can't find a (cheap) kettle that meets my requirements.
But... why did the first 19.99€ kettle exist then? How come that product was possible (and later disappeared)?
Another part of me feels that if someone produces a reasonably durable kettle that meets all the requirements in my post (as well as some secondary requirements that I didn't write about but that my 19.99€ kettle did meet), then that will quickly become the new gold standard for kettles and in 10 years we'll look back and say "oh my goodness, can you believe we used to not have temperature control in most kettles?"
You may ask "then why did the 19.99€ kettle disappear?" and that is a good question. The best answer I've been able to find is that it was a generic supermarket-brand kettle and it cannibalised profits from other more expensive brandname kettles. I also don't understand why the super advanced toaster (that someone else in this thread posted a video of) disappeared. And I guess that is the crux of my question, really: in 1948 we had a design of a toaster that was superior in every way to modern day toasters. How come it's disappeared for good?
Question: does socialism, communism, fascism, anarchism, or other ism produce a better kettle? Could we conceive an ism that makes better home appliances?
They don't, and no one is claiming that they do. The author is simply puzzled as to why capitalism (a system where maximizing profits is the goal) hasn't capitalized on the desire for a good kettle? And the speculated answer is that maybe there isn't enough desire for it to be profitable, because most people are happy enough with mediocre kettles.
Yes it's not the fault of capitalism as such (private ownership of the means of production for private profit), but of market-based economies.
They deliver a combination of what producers want to produce, and what people want to buy (measured by what they actually buy), not necessarily what people need or is good for them. Just look at the industrial food complex.
Thought experiment: mechanism does not exist anymore. Would people still want to click nonsensical kettles on their screens and not care about vendor's reputation?
Thus my answer is education, education, education.
I did not say that someone should assume authority and dictate what people need or want. Just that raw free markets with purely economic/financial incentives fail at the task.
But nutrition science would be good place to find some answers to the 'need' question for food.
> I did not say that someone should assume authority and dictate what people need or want.
The very idea that there is any sort of universal standard for what people "need" or what is "good for them" implies such an entity.
Here's a novel thought: how about treating people as adults with their own intensional stances and allowing them to decide for themselves what they "need" or what is "good for them"?
You're not their parent. "Nutrition science" isn't their parent, either.
I bought the stove-top Fellow Kettle [0] a year ago and it's a fantastic kettle. Boils water surprisingly fast, has a thermometer attached to it and the polished steel is beautiful.
They don't have filters because you are supposed to filter your water, a bad water isn't going to produce a good water based drink.
There are good kettle for enthusiastic coffee or tea lovers, but you have to be ready to pay a fair price for a product focused on a niche market in the west.
The trend for kitchen products which beep at you baffles me. Kettles, dishwashers, washing machines, ovens and hobs all seem to beep these days and there's almost never a way to switch it off. Can anyone tell me why? I can't believe anyone actually likes the beeping. Is it a result of disability legislation maybe?
What a coincidence, I bought one today. Optimised on minimal plastic this time. It was slim pickings. Found a glass one without the gaudy blue LED illumination from below, so bought it.
I bought a kettle that turned out to have an obnoxious loud beep, so I just desoldered the piezo speaker that emitted the beep from the circuit board. Problem solved.
Perhaps people like me, who just make things work, are a part of the problem? I mean, if they don't get any negative feedback, I guess they'll just assume that people are happy with their products.
Then again, does anyone actually want loud beeps and bright lights on home appliances? Who are those people?
>Then again, does anyone actually want loud beeps and bright lights on home appliances? Who are those people?
Presumably the same people who leave every sound effect switched on [usually full volume] on their phone. So, when sitting near them on a bus or train, you have to suffer an endless cacophony of bleeps, buzzes and bells as thye do... <whatever the feck it is morons do, that requires you can't be separated from your phone for more than a nanosecond> ...for the entire journey.
I have never bought a bad kettle. Maybe I'm just less particular about my kettles, but as far as I can tell, even the cheap £5 ones from ASDA meet all of these requirements.
I have had a Bosch Village Collection kettle for the last 5 years, which I bought for £20. Still works fine and frankly if it broke tomorrow, I can't really complain. I bought it because it was the cheapest 3kW kettle they had.
Also my experience is the limescale filters don't work. If you want a nice cup of tea, you really need to pre-soften your water with a Brita jug and descale regularly. My water is 400ppm at the tap (London!) and the Brita jug takes it down to 150ppm. A monthly descale keeps the kettle nice and clean.
You have clearly never lived in North America, continent of pathetic kettles. It's hard enough to find one here that's electric in the first place, it seems people prefer to balance their kettles on the tops of stoves, like peasants. On the odd occasion you do find one that plugs into a wall, often it's like it was designed in the dark ages before they were cordless, and of course the cord is only about 6 inches long, so you have to unplug it to move it to the tap for a refill, then plug it in again. My current apartment's kettle doesn't even have a lid or a button, you have to fill it through the spout and it starts boiling immediately when you plug it in. After all that, it still takes about 27 minutes to make a cup of tea. Forget all these fancy lime scale filters and temperature controls, just finding a £5 one that actually worked would be a dream.
Rant aside, apparently a large part of the problem is because North America uses 110v at the wall. Quick explanation here[0]. As mentioned in the linked article, many houses here also have a separate high voltage line for washing machines. Perhaps they should have a high voltage kettle line.
I’m sorry, but what? There are infinite electric kettles available. 27 minutes to boil water? Again, what?
Seriously, have you ever been in North America? Just go into literally any big box retailer and find the 50 foot long shelves full of electric kettles. Or go to an online retailer, say Amazon, and find hundreds and hundreds of them. Virtually every major brand makes electric kettles, they all seem to work just fine, and they don’t take 27 minutes to boil water.
Not much we can do about that, I’m afraid. Most residential outlets are 15 amps, and to double them to 30 amps or convert them to 240V would require costly rewiring. And copper prices are sky-high these days.
Photonicinduction's 10-second kettle[1] doesn't use a battery, instead it uses his 100A 240V input through a big variac to run at 10kW (440V, 22.7A). This isn't good for the longevity of the kettle he used, sadly.
The electrician, drywall repair, and other skilled labor costs of running a thicker gauge wire to the kitchen from the circuit breaker would far outweigh the cost of the wire itself. By orders of magnitude.
> From web searching, North America is 120V but two phases. So you could redo the socket to 240V without running new cable through your walls.
You'd need an extra conductor of wire than is there in the cable for a standard 240V outlet. (Hot1, Hot2, Neutral, Gnd).
You can run a Hot1/Hot2 240V circuit with existing 14/2 romex, but odds are that whatever feeds the outlet in your kitchen also feeds many other outlets, and you don't want them all to be 240V.
Note North America doesn't use ring circuits like the UK.
Sure, but 27 minutes is such an absurd exaggeration. I can boil a liter of water on my electric kettle in 4-5 minutes. I rarely need a full liter, anyway, and I don’t always want the water at boiling temperature. It is typically under 2 minutes for me to have hot water for a cup of tea. In Europe maybe those numbers are halved, but to me it’s just a trivial difference.
Yeah, we use the kettle all the time, for quickly bringing water to the boil. Always for pasta. Sometimes for potatoes (though they are probably better gradually heated from cold).
A power boil option would be a decent alternative.
Electric kettles in America seem to be something of a boutique item. I often had to say “tea kettle” before anyone even understood what I was looking for.
They are definitely 100% available to buy. However, they cost more and seem to be of lower quality than the range available in the UK.
I suspect the voltage difference is the underlying reason. If you have a gas burner then an old fashioned stovetop kettle is almost as fast as an electric kettle in the US.
The cord is “6 inches” (it’s actually 24 inches on my cheap kettle) because most kitchens in the US have many power outlets at the countertop, where the kettle sits. It would be annoying to deal with excess wire.
I live in the norther part of India near Himalayas, water to my house has 200-250 TDS and I use RO system to turn it down to 1TDS then it's remineralized again.
I've never seen a 20 A plug on an appliance, even though every kitchen less than 20 years old is fitted with 20 A outlets. Probably because manufacturers don't want to make them because most kitchens still only have 15 A outlets. If I ever build my own house I'll probably fit a 240 V outlet in the kitchen for an imported kettle.
I have no answers to the question posed, other than that capitalism doesn't incentivise "good", it incentivises profit, and with these kind of small electronics those two things are mutually exclusive. The very first thing I thought of when I started reading this article, was this thread [1] about a toaster from decades ago that is better than anything one can buy today. I watched several videos about that toaster that day and it now lives rent free in my head, especially every time I take the burnt or unevenly toasted toast out of my stupidly expensive, but rubbish, Dualit toaster.
When we moved countries we only brought 2 suitcases each. Left all at home. Now I wish I sorted a van to bring everything with us.
After five years I am still looking for high quality cutlery that will not stain after a month. We went through three sets and never opted for the cheapest one. All of them stained even though it says stainless steel on them. I have cutlery at home from 80's and it never stained and still going strong. I brought a few pieces back with us after visiting old country and the difference in quality is obvious.
I got a good set some years ago, from German brand WMF. Doesnt stain and it is scratch proof & nice. Also stays sharp and hasnt needed sharpening in 8 years.
Edit: maybe the water scale/salt levels are different in the new location? Or maybe it's the different cleaning agent in the dishwasher
You're welcome. I bought the "Chromargan" alloy series:"WMF Vision", btw :-)
Edit: i also suggest to check out the different models in person. The blades have different thicknesses and handles have different shapes, its not easy to get an idea what fits best from the pictures alone. Took me an hour of thinking until i made my choice. Ps: found a nice comparison on YT, the guy expanded his set from 6 to 12 persons in 2018 and holds a daily driven knife from 2008 (left side) against a new one (right side). Only micro scratches according to the (german) video and no stains at all. Also mentions that its still sharp.
And make sure to get a "cromargan protect"-named set. Just looked up "Vision" on amazon, it's expensive (12 persons set is 700£) :-) but still recommended, the more expensive sets have better steel and thinner blades. This set is great for both steaks and spreading butter. Also, you can start small and extend after some years (wmf cutlery has longterm availability)
I recommend using a microwave to heat water (with a porous wooden stirring rod to prevent overheating).
I cook all of my food in a microwave using techniques and technology developed in the 70s. Browning pans have evolved since then and I can cook better food than ever in one sixth of the time. My oven/grill is called a MicroPro and is made by Tupperware. It is actually life changing. My wife cooks for me consistently for the first time in our marriage of 10 years, I never get burned cooking, and we get 2 hours back in every day.
I am convinced that the microwave cooking movement was opposed by the fossil fuel industry and oven manufacturers.
Electric pressure cookers can achieve the same thing and arguably produce tastier food. The electricity use is probably even less than a microwave due to the lack of evaporation.
I have a rice cooker and a bread maker too. There is a pressure cooker for the microwave, but I don’t feel I need one. Time savings—-the ability to make a Thanksgiving meal for 4 and eat it and put it away and clean up in 35 minutes—-is the main benefit. You would never know the food was cooked in a microwave. It is indistinguishable. Bad associations created through de Beers style society level advertising campaigns that seem more like traditions than advertisement are the reason.
The only reason I can buck these trends is that I have made my living in advertising and public opinion influencing.
241 comments
[ 18.4 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadThe original openwrt targeted a design of home router which was hackable. The first thing the v2 did was shrink the memory and run a simpler OS: it became less hackable, because the bill of materials shaved 15c off manufacturing costs and hackability was not in the design goal spec.
Bauhaus design was awesome because it was applicable to mass production. But, if you look at modern derivative they aren't quite as good. Same with eames chair, and I guess, this kettle: it's not innately profitable to have a satisfying click when the lid shuts, at 2x the unit cost to make unless it's 10x the unit cost to sell
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Philips-HD4646-00-kettle-anti-lim...
I don't really see any reason kettles can't be made to last that long - it isn't like the human need for boiling water is going away anytime soon.
To get a design that lasts that long isn't much more expensive either - all it takes is very carefully recording what's broken on each kettle that fails, and modifying the design to avoid that failure mode. Within a few iterations, you'll end up with most kettles lasting 50 years.
I do remember it being the only decent option in the store. I guess other people have other priorities in kettles, for all those other models to stick around?
1: Leave it a few minutes to cool down
2: Blow on it
Jeebus! --talk about 1st world problems!
My dog is sadder now though. She loves to eat ice, so if I’m opening the freezer less she misses out.
While you can stop the kettle at those temps that is a lot harder than it happening manually.
https://strix.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_(inventor)#Career
Good idea about the filter.
Is there a single toaster able to consistently toast bread to the same level each time? The technology must exist.
I don't mind paying for quality, but a 700-1000$ for a toaster is too much
Unless your bread is fresh out of the pack, depending on where you brought it from either refrigerator or rack, it's moisture content is going to vary changing your toasting time.
Technology Connections made a video about just that, and it’s crazy that bread colour control just no longer exists!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y
Since the bread is flat in there, it also makes it much easier to melt cheese on top of it without either getting the bread hot enough to melt it all by itself (which would surely leave it much browner than I like), or microwaving, which makes the bread soft and moist.
Today I just use dumb kettle on induction stove. Never breaks and saves space.
But I've never seen one with a temperature sensor or probe.
But it’s below the glass top, so it lags behind the real temperature, only tread the temperature of the bottom of the pot. This makes it unreliable for fine temperature control.
I have a portable one that gives you the possibility to set the temperature you want by 20 degrees, but it’s not fine enough for tea (40, 60, 80, 100, 120... degrees Celsius)
Only just ok for Chinese hotpot:
https://www.amazon.de/Klarstein-Einzel-Induktionskochplatte-...
With a temp sensor you could also do pseudo sous-vide (pseous-vide?).
There was probably a reason why that kettle went out of production, maybe it was related to the defect you had, who knows
Limescale filter? Use a jug filter before putting the water on the kettle. No limescale and much better taste.
Other examples abound. The modern version of planned obsolescence is corporations using the DMCA to prevent consumers from repairing their own stuff.
I don't mean fail safes, like building a table saw that fires an explosive charge to stop a spinning blade when it detects the presence of a finger [0]. If some given production capacity can only be sustained by selling fresh barrels of oil converted into easily-broken home goods is it worth sustaining?
[0] https://sawstop.com
While I absolutely abhor that you cannot buy a toaster that lasts more than two years, I still see a case for well-thought-out obsolescence to be an important ingredient in sustainability.
Think about a spaceship that is moving a city to another star system for a multi-generation trip. Would you embark anything that is non-perishable? What if it breaks by accident? It is maybe better to make sure that nothing lasts more than a generation, so that there's always people having the experience to build it again (because they have already built it before).
I'm not convinced by your "moral hard line" against planned obsolescence. It is a matter of quantity: today our technology is sadly too perishable. But a (tiny) amount of planned obsolescence may still be a good thing. Just don't say it too loud :)
You want the thing to break in a safe way where you can tell before hand that it's aging and needs replacement
Therefore, by adjusting the quality down a little bit, the company gets a bit of feedback as to how low quality a typical consumer is able to tolerate at their price point.
So i think ultimately the responsibility lies with the consumer to demand the quality they want by purchasing good quality stuff, even if it costs more, and to educate themselves to discern what is quality and what is fluff.
Follow up question: can't a competitor make a kettle that's 20% better (and more profitable)? You do say that the incentive goes to "making sure that no other good products appear", but I'm not sure how a Bosch can stop a Cuisinart from making a slightly superior (and more profitable) kettle.
Considering these are multinational companies doing at least tens of millions in business every year, I presume they have the expertise to do obvious market research and come to the correct conclusions about what and how much people are willing to pay for, and that is reflected in the choices you see in the marketplace.
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Klarstein-Garcon-Kettle-Temperatu...
Some places do not event need to worry about limestone, but if you do, use a water jug with a filter whose job is just that, like what Brita proposes.
Tea made from a scaly kettle will form a scum, even if you use a mesh limescale filter. Apparently Yorkshire Tea for hard water might help with this, but I drink decaf so that's not an option for me.
The lid button is surprisingly nice to have, because you don't accidentally burn your hand when refilling right after the first batch.
Also, you’re wrong. The people designing these kettles aren’t doing so to make more money for their company. If anything you could say that capitalism optimises for job security. That’s why you don’t see new features on kettles, and why no one will make a left handed microwave. No one wants to take a risk
The genius of capitalism is in encouraging and facilitating competition so that other firms can come and take away your profit by selling something that appeals to customers more. In this way, the universal profit motive is turned into better products as people compete for surplus income rather than having that assigned by birth (middle ages), political connections (soviet systems), religious considerations (indulgences/moral crusaders), etc.
But everyone is going to optimize to get more than what they put in -- e.g. profit. The only question is what determines that income stream -- being able to sell products to consumers better than the other guy, or being a loyal party deputy.
If we bend profit to mean anything we like, yes.
But the commonly understood sense is "making more money", not "keeping party bureaucrats happy" or "making the private owner of the company proud of the quality of his products, even if he's not making as much as he could".
Will expand properly elsewhere but the implicit point was that profit is not necessarily even remotely connected to product quality or customer satisfaction, but the author seems to have made the assumption that they are.
Thanks for your comment.
As someone below you hinted at, wouldn't one expect that "high profit" would result from "high consumer satisfaction"? I think that's the step that puzzles me.
I have to say, reading through this thread I'm beginning to think that the existing offering of kettles in the market does deliver sufficient satisfaction to consumers, removing the incentive to create a better product.
Multiple commenters have said they don't mind beeps, or flashy lights, or the lack of a calcium mesh. It may be worth pointing out that the kettles I bought had VERY loud beeps (I don't mind a "normal" beep), VERY strong lights (I don't mind "normal" lights, I actually enjoy seeing light in my kettle). Also, I actually do pre-filter my water with a Brita jug, and I also descale my kettle regularly, but the calcium content in my area is so high that I'd have to descale between every 2 cups of tea not to get calc bits in my drink.
This all leads me to conclude that probably my opening premise is wrong: maybe I am unreasonably picky about kettles and, since capitalism makes kettles for the masses and not for the 3% of people who are as picky as I seem to be, then I can't find a (cheap) kettle that meets my requirements.
But... why did the first 19.99€ kettle exist then? How come that product was possible (and later disappeared)?
Another part of me feels that if someone produces a reasonably durable kettle that meets all the requirements in my post (as well as some secondary requirements that I didn't write about but that my 19.99€ kettle did meet), then that will quickly become the new gold standard for kettles and in 10 years we'll look back and say "oh my goodness, can you believe we used to not have temperature control in most kettles?"
You may ask "then why did the 19.99€ kettle disappear?" and that is a good question. The best answer I've been able to find is that it was a generic supermarket-brand kettle and it cannibalised profits from other more expensive brandname kettles. I also don't understand why the super advanced toaster (that someone else in this thread posted a video of) disappeared. And I guess that is the crux of my question, really: in 1948 we had a design of a toaster that was superior in every way to modern day toasters. How come it's disappeared for good?
Not the fact that we buy with clicks. Not the fact that market does not strongly prefer reputation systems. Capitalism.
They deliver a combination of what producers want to produce, and what people want to buy (measured by what they actually buy), not necessarily what people need or is good for them. Just look at the industrial food complex.
Thought experiment: mechanism does not exist anymore. Would people still want to click nonsensical kettles on their screens and not care about vendor's reputation?
Thus my answer is education, education, education.
I don't believe raw market mechanisms alone are suitable to serve human needs.
Who gets to decide what people "need" or what is "good for them"?
I did not say that someone should assume authority and dictate what people need or want. Just that raw free markets with purely economic/financial incentives fail at the task.
But nutrition science would be good place to find some answers to the 'need' question for food.
The very idea that there is any sort of universal standard for what people "need" or what is "good for them" implies such an entity.
Here's a novel thought: how about treating people as adults with their own intensional stances and allowing them to decide for themselves what they "need" or what is "good for them"?
You're not their parent. "Nutrition science" isn't their parent, either.
There are good kettle for enthusiastic coffee or tea lovers, but you have to be ready to pay a fair price for a product focused on a niche market in the west.
[0] https://fellowproducts.com/products/stagg
Perhaps people like me, who just make things work, are a part of the problem? I mean, if they don't get any negative feedback, I guess they'll just assume that people are happy with their products.
Then again, does anyone actually want loud beeps and bright lights on home appliances? Who are those people?
I have had a Bosch Village Collection kettle for the last 5 years, which I bought for £20. Still works fine and frankly if it broke tomorrow, I can't really complain. I bought it because it was the cheapest 3kW kettle they had.
Also my experience is the limescale filters don't work. If you want a nice cup of tea, you really need to pre-soften your water with a Brita jug and descale regularly. My water is 400ppm at the tap (London!) and the Brita jug takes it down to 150ppm. A monthly descale keeps the kettle nice and clean.
Rant aside, apparently a large part of the problem is because North America uses 110v at the wall. Quick explanation here[0]. As mentioned in the linked article, many houses here also have a separate high voltage line for washing machines. Perhaps they should have a high voltage kettle line.
[0] http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2012/04/16/why-kettles-boil-slow...
Seriously, have you ever been in North America? Just go into literally any big box retailer and find the 50 foot long shelves full of electric kettles. Or go to an online retailer, say Amazon, and find hundreds and hundreds of them. Virtually every major brand makes electric kettles, they all seem to work just fine, and they don’t take 27 minutes to boil water.
They're exaggerating. But your typical North American electric kettle is—ballpark—twice as slow as a European kettle.
Your standard North American sockets provide half the voltage but not double the amperage, so they're half as powerful.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDLw1Rx_cAI
whatever happened to the guy, i was a fan of his videos then he stopped posting a few years back...
electroboom seems to be covering a similar niche, so that's good though.
But that's kinda academic if nobody sells kettles that have the North American 240V plug.
You'd need an extra conductor of wire than is there in the cable for a standard 240V outlet. (Hot1, Hot2, Neutral, Gnd).
You can run a Hot1/Hot2 240V circuit with existing 14/2 romex, but odds are that whatever feeds the outlet in your kitchen also feeds many other outlets, and you don't want them all to be 240V.
Note North America doesn't use ring circuits like the UK.
Similarly, even with good insulation, a combi boiler is more efficient than having a hot water tank.
It's great for boiling water for cooking; at 230V it's faster than heating on the hob. But if it took 7–8 minutes, that'd be frustrating.
I typically don’t even keep track of how long it takes to boil on the stove. I just do the rest of the prep work.
A power boil option would be a decent alternative.
I'm probably just impatient, to be fair.
They are definitely 100% available to buy. However, they cost more and seem to be of lower quality than the range available in the UK.
I suspect the voltage difference is the underlying reason. If you have a gas burner then an old fashioned stovetop kettle is almost as fast as an electric kettle in the US.
https://www.target.com/s/kettle
I’ve been using this $25 kettle for many years now:
https://www.target.com/p/hamilton-beach-1l-electric-kettle-s...
The cord is “6 inches” (it’s actually 24 inches on my cheap kettle) because most kitchens in the US have many power outlets at the countertop, where the kettle sits. It would be annoying to deal with excess wire.
Is your kettle faster than a stove? Perceptions of speed are funny.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21164014
After five years I am still looking for high quality cutlery that will not stain after a month. We went through three sets and never opted for the cheapest one. All of them stained even though it says stainless steel on them. I have cutlery at home from 80's and it never stained and still going strong. I brought a few pieces back with us after visiting old country and the difference in quality is obvious.
I got a good set some years ago, from German brand WMF. Doesnt stain and it is scratch proof & nice. Also stays sharp and hasnt needed sharpening in 8 years.
Edit: maybe the water scale/salt levels are different in the new location? Or maybe it's the different cleaning agent in the dishwasher
It's the product as I did bring the 'minimum set' with me when we came for first few days. Those forks, kives and spoons are still like new.
I'll check WMF, thanks!
Edit: i also suggest to check out the different models in person. The blades have different thicknesses and handles have different shapes, its not easy to get an idea what fits best from the pictures alone. Took me an hour of thinking until i made my choice. Ps: found a nice comparison on YT, the guy expanded his set from 6 to 12 persons in 2018 and holds a daily driven knife from 2008 (left side) against a new one (right side). Only micro scratches according to the (german) video and no stains at all. Also mentions that its still sharp.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WhxZQL5W1a8&t=110
Stainless steel refers to corrosion resistance, and I don't know any cutlery that corrodes in a month, even from the dollar store.
Are you talking hard water stains? What are you seeing on your cutlery that is causing this concern?
I cook all of my food in a microwave using techniques and technology developed in the 70s. Browning pans have evolved since then and I can cook better food than ever in one sixth of the time. My oven/grill is called a MicroPro and is made by Tupperware. It is actually life changing. My wife cooks for me consistently for the first time in our marriage of 10 years, I never get burned cooking, and we get 2 hours back in every day.
I am convinced that the microwave cooking movement was opposed by the fossil fuel industry and oven manufacturers.
The only reason I can buck these trends is that I have made my living in advertising and public opinion influencing.