Samsung are very big at pushing silly features but what I'd really like from a washing machine is a 10 year lifespan, like our old one with a mechanical timer! How long till water ingress in the touchscreen screws it up?
10 years? Our's has been running for my entire lifetime, 17 years! I bet this one will have its plastic break in the first 5 years of sitting next to a window.
These appliances tend to get more complicated all the time. All I want for a stove, for example is 4 or 5 burners, a grill I can place on top and 4 or 5 knobs. The only electronic function I would like in a stove is a temperature readout for the oven, accurate to ±10 degrees C is enough. And that doesn't even need to be electronic... No timers, I can buy as many egg timers as I need and microwaves already have one built in.
Microwaves are done right. So are the more basic blenders. All I need for a fridge to be digital is energy saving schedules. Trust me, nobody is gonna watch TV or recipes on a fridge. I would spend my money on a tablet and a cooking app instead.
There is something that I want to be digital, though. Toaster ovens tend to have a very bad manual timer knob. It breaks after 6 months of use and doesn't work right. The temperature regulation is bad, in my opinion (not that you are going to reflow PCBs on it
). Digital controls can be more robust when done right. 3 buttons for toasting, more buttons to select the mode (you know, toaster, oven, broiler) and 2 rotary encoders (with the lifespan of a computer mouse encoder) to set temperature and time. I once used a microwave with a rotary encoder instead of a keypad. It was good for most uses.
My point is, adding digital electronics and user interfaces to devices that used to be mechanical is not always bad. You just have to make it cheap, simple and easy to use.
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