The best microwave I've ever used didn't have any numpad at all. Instead, it has a horizontal sliding touch pad. It sounds stupid, but it works SO WELL. Move your finger slowly and it increments one second at a time, move it quickly and it jumps faster. On the front there are only two buttons (stop/clear and start/+30sec) and the touch slider and screen.

If you open the door there are a few more buttons for setting power levels and a timer, and the only useful preset button (popcorn), but none of the useless ones.

This LG NeoChef model: https://www.lg.com/ca_en/microwave-ovens/lg-LMC1575BD

Just got one of these, and after an initial learning curve agree it is super intuitive (now) and works really well.

This is such a weird thing that we accept as normal. Completely agree it's absurd that on the microwave we have a numpad and on an oven we have up/down arrows with an arbitrary starting point (mine is 350 degF).

I'm on my phone, so it's a bit difficult to look up, but 350 isn't actually arbitrary. It's a temperature that is hot enough to allow you to get a maliard reaction without being so hot that you easily burn food.

350 degF might not be so arbritarily chosen, it's probably a good starting point, then the user would only have to press down or up a few times to reach the cooking temperature they want for their food.

Every digital control oven I have ever used continued to increment or decrement as long as you held the appropriate button down. No need to press the button twenty times. Some of them even increased the rate of increase/decrease the longer you held the button down.

Yes, but that's nowhere near as simple nor effective as a turn dial.

This is just another example of the brain-dead designers and coders running around ruining the world.

It sounds extreme to say, but I suspect quite a few of them have blood and misery on their hands, because some poorly designed control cascaded in effect and caused a catastrophe elsewhere. It's easier to imagine with medical equipment than microwaves, but its still putting someone's desire to write fancy control algorithms over a simpler more effective design.

Start out by punching any jackass insisting everything be digital, you will go a long way to solving the problem of bad designers.

Oh yeah and the button will probably give out after 3 years, at which point you have to replace the entire "timer" (control panel PCB), which is about half the price of the oven.

I selected our oven specifically because of the sensible analogue controls (large knobs) for selecting the function and temperature.

https://www.fisherpaykel.com/au/cooking/ovens/contemporary-o...

My oven has a rotary encoder on it for temp adjustment. It works pretty well.

My oven has a numpad. I punch in the temperature I want. It's great! GE Profile dual oven circa 2000.