it’s so they know what to advertise to you

Navigating through the extensive settings menu is beautifully simple with the new touch screen user interface.

I am sorry, a fucking settings menu on an oven is a primary sales argument?

Lol fuck that. A touchscreen certainly isn’t a selling feature on a device I expect to be reliable. And why would I want a menu of options for a device that normally offers all its settings up-front?

They even brags about internal steak and bread thermometers, we have had those for decades.

And they either break after a few uses or they just don’t read the temperature properly and cause the oven to set the temperature incorrectly.

Well obviously, it has a connection to an app or even a smart speaker, and ofcourse the UI on the oven is a touch UI.

If it doesn’t work without a network connection I don’t want it. An appliance should be dead-simple, standalone, with near-bulletproof electronics and no built-in process decisions that are not clearly surfaced to the user.

Thanks, but no thanks, I’ll keep using my oven with normal knobs…

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

It’s probably not using any AI in any modern sense of the word, it’s just there for marketing purposes. What I’m guessing it really is, is more fancy sensors (temperature sensors in more locations, infrared sensors, moisture sensors), and multiple heating elements and/or fans that can be individually turned on and off, connected to a more complicated PID controller that is adjusted based on the selected dish. So it can do things like detect that the rear is hotter than the front and turn off the rear heating element, or detect if too much moisture is being released and turn down the temperature, but it’s ultimately the same kind of technology as any oven with a temperature knob uses.

I rarely use my oven for anything other than pizza, bread and cookies, so it’s probably not very useful to me, but maybe it’s convenient if you do things like cooking a whole turkey or something?

The touchscreen is cheaper to install than buttons and knobs, and they’re trying to come up with reasons that a cheaper, worse product is actually good and you should thank them for their innovation.

At least with the internal thermometer you could plausibly use some kind of control loop. But all the recipes you get are going to assume a normal fixed-temperature oven anyway.

I think all the “AI” magic beyond that is a con, in the purest sense of the word. They are trying to get people’s money by building unearned confidence with bullshit.

An oven should turn on, hold temperature, and that’s. That’s all it needs. Might be nice if it can also do convection stuff. And super high temperatures for pizza. But it doesn’t need to know if I’m baking bread, destroying evidence, or making pizza bagels.

Obviously it doesn’t. Same way a fridge doesn’t need to know what you have in it.

Why does an oven need to connect to an app for the clock to be set?

Ask Samsung

Ill bet there is a subscription for all those “features” that bricks it if you dont pay them monthly after buying it for $5k

It needs to know so it can send your data to whatever company made it, duh. Nothing will go wrong giving ai control over something that can start a fire in your house.

Need? No

My air fryer (just a small countertop convection oven big enough for a whole chicken and sides) has a meat probe attachment that turns off the device when the internal temp reaches the desired doneness, and that requires telling it what kind of meat you have, but thats all. It doesnt need to know anything else, including whether or not you have sides, that’s what the guide tables in the booklet are for.

I assume this ai thing just does the same thing internally, and probably doesn’t even have ai or advanced logic at all. You plug in the food and it references the guide table itself internally. Saving you exactly zero time because plugging in the food is more work than looking at a reference table.

The manufacturers’ reasoning here is presumably that the more technology is built into a device, the faster it becomes obsolete, and the sooner consumers will have to buy new devices.

This is a classic example of consumer-unfriendly design, in which manufacturers ensure that devices have a limited useful life or a purposely frail design. This is called planned obsolescence and can be achieved through both mechanical means and software.

The AI is a gimmick. It’s probably not actually ai. But I can understand tweaking the timing and temperature of certain dishes for optimal juiciness and texture. Some people will cook eggs on high and they come out bad other than some people cook them on a lower temperature for a longer time. Now imagine that someone did science experiments on a bunch of dishes and just programmed it into a basic chip. I think the biggest part would be having it validated and verified. But calling it AI obviously means you did not do any of that so.