Hardware

CES brings us another wave of overpriced ‘smart’ cookware

Comment

smart cooking device control panel
Image Credits: Haje Kamps (opens in a new window) / TechCrunch (opens in a new window)

Wandering around the CES preview events, it’s clear that AI and other smart tech is coming to toasters, grills and all sorts of other devices. As someone who loves to cook, it’s possible that these products aren’t really for me, but I can’t help but think that a bunch of smart tech built into small home appliances is going to be a disaster for the planet.

Burn, baby, burn

Seer Grills’ Perfecta is one such example. It’s a propane grill with AI smarts that claims to be the world’s fastest grill.

The Seer Grills Perfecta uses AI smarts to cook a steak to a perfect medium rare in less than two minutes, its founders claim. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / TechCrunch

“We can cook a one-inch ribeye steak in about 1 minute and 45 seconds” says Jordan Aspley, the company’s founder. “We have two dual, vertical infrared burners that cook at 1,652°F. It cooks both sides of the steak at the same time — it’s basically a toaster for steaks”

The company is opening for preorders in the next few days, and the grill retails at $3,500.

Wave, baby, wave

Another device shown off at CES 2024 is the “Macrowave” from Revolution Cooking. The company’s previous product was a $400 toaster. Now, it’s back with a device that it calls the “macrowave.” It’s an air fryer, toaster oven and microwave all in one, using the same fast “InstaGlo” heating element it developed for its toaster.

Presenting the Macrowave. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / TechCrunch

“Frozen food was really my big problem. Things like frozen burritos. The instructions are, you know, defrost in your microwave, preheat your oven, take it out of the microwave, put it in your oven. Or if I went just with the microwave, it would just explode. So we know that microwave ovens are great technology, but it wasn’t designed to cook. It’s designed to heat things up. And what we saw when we invented InstaGLO, which is our platform technology for the toaster, was it was an extensible platform that we can actually put into a larger cavity,” says Tom Klaff, CEO at Revolution Cooking, in an interview with TechCruch at CES 2024 in Las Vegas. “The idea was to make microwaves the hero: Let’s make the microwave do what it’s supposed to. With the microwave, it’s got the best qualities of what a microwave does, which is heat up food fast, and InstaGlo, which heats up really, really fast, efficiently and projects infrared heat directly to crisp.”

All very clever, but carrying an $1,800 price tag is a hell of a thing, even for a fancy multifunction device such as this. It made me wonder, why does everything need to be smart and connected? For a toaster, you need to walk over and put toast in the device anyway, so is it really such a hardship to press a button to get everything started?

The Revolution Cooking team suggests that it’s crucial, because you can get software updates for your toaster. Yes. Software updates. For your toaster.

“You know, there are things that we’ve wanted to add to it over time that we couldn’t because it wasn’t connected, just to deliver a better experience,” says Klaff. I pushed him on what sort of updates you’d need. “For the toaster, we added new panini press algorithms, so we can continually add more creations around that. Our customers are asking us for different varieties of bread that toast a little bit differently than what we have currently. So it’d be great to add those, too.”

Quite apart from the glorious phrase “panini algorithm,” and despite the fact that I love tech as much as the next person, I can’t really see the point myself. In a world where you can buy a $25 Amazon Basics toaster, I’m struggling to see how Revolution Cooking’s $400 toaster can add 25x more value. Or, come to think of it, when you can get a microwave for $100 and a toaster oven that can be used as an air fryer for another $140, how it makes sense to pay 7x more for a macrowave.

How long will they last?

Is there anything wrong with a $3,500 grill, a $400 toaster or an $1,800 not-just-a-microwave? No, by all means, if you have the money to do it, go for it. The problem with a lot of these products, however, is that they seem to be relatively minor improvements over the existing products, “solving” for a problem that doesn’t truly exist. That, in itself, isn’t an issue — nobody is forcing consumers to fork out 25x more for a product.

Where I really get my heckles up with “smart” products, however, is that heat and electronics rarely mix well, and the longevity of some of the companies building these types of products can get wonky. One example is Spark One — the $1,100 smart grill we featured in our 2020 gift guide — which went out of business by 2022. In theory, it was a great design (I know the founder well — Hi Ben! — and they did build something unique), but the company didn’t make it, leaving god-knows-how-many of their grills unusable: Without the special charcoal “briq” inserts, the grills are essentially useless, relegating the grills to landfills after less than a couple of years.

This is my fear with a lot of the products I see at CES: Great ideas, but if they don’t have the longevity of the products they replace — I still use a toaster oven from the mid-1990s, and I still have a Vitamix that I believe was built in the 1970s and was so over-engineered that it seems to refuse to give up the ghost — we are merely accelerating our pattern of consumption. Even the products that claim to be eco-friendly aren’t if they aren’t repairable (because the companies go out of business) or, worse, stop working altogether when a consumable stops being available.

Read more about CES 2024 on TechCrunch

More TechCrunch

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch all of the AI, Android reveals

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google gets serious about AI-generated video at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google reveals plans for upgrading AI in the real world through Gemini Live at Google I/O 2024

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade

At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .

Google’s generative AI can now analyze hours of video

The AI upgrade will make finding the right content more intuitive and less of a manual search process.

Google Photos introduces an AI search feature, Ask Photos

Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially…

Apple touts stopping $1.8B in App Store fraud last year in latest pitch to developers

Online travel agency Expedia is testing an AI assistant that bolsters features like search, itinerary building, trip planning, and real-time travel updates.

Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we look at the drama around TabaPay deciding to not buy Synapse’s assets, as well as stocks dropping for a couple of fintechs, Monzo raising…

Inside TabaPay’s drama-filled decision to abandon its plans to buy Synapse’s assets

The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch has learned. The…

Threat actor scraped Dell support tickets, including customer phone numbers

If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and…

On Elon’s whim, X now treats ‘cisgender’ as a slur