> The dial thing is... infuriating. It never once found a situation where it made using the device better, and in most situations it made it worse.

Digital dials can be nice in some cases.

My parents had an oven with a dial for the temperature. Spin it either way to increase or decrease the temperature by extra 5 degrees. I loved it. It was so much better than the touchpad design. The range of actual temperatures in an oven is pretty small and I found this much more friendly than punching in the temperature, getting it wrong, cancelling, and punching it in again. It was a “finger tip” dial so it was quick to spin. Probably horrible for people with bad arthritis or other hand mobility issues, though.

I wouldn’t mind a microwave with a similar dial for time. Again, the actual range of times in typical use (for me) is not that high. The design described with a two tier system for adjusting time seems moronic though.

For temperature, I can see it working... though I don't see how it would actually be _better_ than tapping in the number.

For the microwave time, it was a horrible experience pretty much every time I interacted with the device. A keypad is simple, intuitive, and easy to use.

Keypads should be simple and easy to use, but they often are not. The buttons are inconsistently responsive and there’s always at least one other key you have to press, often two. And those other two are named whatever the designers decided and placed wherever the thought would be most confusing.

“Okay, I want to cook for 3 minutes.”

‘300’

”Ok, the numbers don’t work until I press something else. Hmmm”

‘Time Cook’ ‘400’

“Shit. I hit the 4. Where’s the cancel?

‘Cancel’ ‘Time Cook’ ‘300’

“Where’s the start?”

‘Start’

> The range of actual temperatures in an oven is pretty small

The range of temperatures you use is about 200 degrees?

Maybe 250. 300-550. I rarely go up to 550 and never below 300 that I can recall. With 5 degree increments, that’s only 50 clicks, fewer if the system is speed sensitive.

My microwave oven uses a dial, and it works great. It uses increasing intervals between dial ticks (5 seconds for cooking times under 1 minute, 10 seconds for cooking times under 3 minutes or so, than 30 seconds, than 1 minute, than 5 minutes; I don't know the cut-of points by heart). The intervals are chosen in a way that they're precise where they need to be, and large where they don't need to be precise. It's really easy and fast to set the time you need.

It's a bit limited, in the sense that you can't set the time to e.g. 17:27. But who needs that?

When my old mechanical kitchen timer died on me, I bought a digital one with a dial, in the hope that it work the same way as the one on my microwave oven. Boy was I wrong. It kinda increases the interval when you spin it faster, but in a completely unpredictable and impractical way.

So I guess it's easy to make impractical dials, but it certainly is possible to make very well functioning dials as well.

High quality dials with adaptive increments are amazing and much faster & easier to use than a touch pad.