Daniel Cooper on why we still don’t have smart appliances in the kitchen.
Sure, that countertop CD player has given way to an Echo, but you’ve probably not invested in a smartphone-controlled oven or DRM-enabled juicer. Look hard enough, however, and you can see more radical shifts in the appliances world on the horizon. It’s just going to take a while before this technology is affordable enough for us mere mortals.
Echo? Amazon may have sold a few million, and tech writers fawn over Alexa, but I don’t know a single person that has an Echo. What’s the market penetration here? 1-percent? 2-percent?
But the last big innovation — assuming you don’t count the items you find on late-night shopping channels — was probably the microwave or dishwasher.
That’s about right. Samsung and LG have a few very cool appliances, including futuristic washers and dryers but it seems a stretch to replace a $500 oven with Miele’s Dialog Oven at $10,000.