I had an over-the-range combination range and have my share of complaints.
I almost never used the the convection function, so there would be a dependable layer of grease build-up.
For the convention or combination functions to work effectively, it needed time to come up to temperature, which meant “pre-heating” the element (and burning off the layer of grease).
The ownership experience was constant maintenance of the element, as well as management of compatible materials for cookware.
It met an untimely death when condensation from a microwave bottle sterilizer left overnight shorted out a door interlock and blew the internal fuse.
In my dazed state of having a baby, it was less of a hassle to replace it with a microwave-only unit than it was to hunt down a fuse.
Then heard nothing and got no indication I’d actually done anything. It definitely gave me the impression they didn’t care.
When you change ASR and Alexa functionality, don't forget to test more than Music and Video, else you might burn someone's house down. What is QA anyways...
I like how at no point did you realize the complete and unnecessary idiocy of remote controlling potentially dangerous appliances.
You have to walk up to it to put the food inside. Is pushing a few buttons afterward that difficult? Ok, so you sent your kid, you trust him or her to put the food inside but not operate the controls? What if your kid forgot to remove the cardboard wrapper?
Why is this IoT nonsense needed? WHY? For the love of God someone please explain to me why this was invented and what non-problem it solves. You're not even supposed to leave a toaster unattended let alone a microwave oven.
Things that can burn your house down should not be connected to the internet. There should be laws on the books for this. If you're so busy and so important that this presents an actionable problem then maybe you need a live-in housekeeper/butler.
But the voice controls being an accessibility boon is part of the current context here. I think they're exactly right to place the failure with amazon.
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> maybe it was decided it was too dangerous of a product.
That’s almost certainly what happened. If you give people the ability to do something insane like turning on their microwave without being in the same room as it, somebody is going to be foolish enough to actually attempt that — regardless of how pointlessly dangerous that is or how infinitesimal the amount of time or convenience that the ability to do so might create.
It was a hectic morning and we were getting ready, and I had my kid put something into the microwave/oven. She put in the metal rack and the food on top. We’d done this dozens of times before.
I then used Alexa from another room and said “Alexa, bake at 400° Fahrenheit for twenty minutes”. Later I looked at the logs and Alexa had caught the words “____ at 400° Fahrenheit for twenty minutes” and took this to mean microwave. I’m not sure who specifies temperatures when microwaving, but that’s how it interpreted these very specific instructions. I’d gotten in the habit of being extremely specific because a few times it had tried to microwave when I’d specified bake, and naively thought this specificity would avoid such an issue.
Long story short I was having a nice shower when I smelled smoke, I basically got to live out the Disneyworld Carousel of Progress future scene when the oven went crazy. The metal cook pan embedded itself into the glass somehow and it smelled absolutely awful. We had to throw out the entire thing.
I actually told this story to an Amazon Alexa lead Engineer at a conference in 2021. He said he’d look into it and the microwave disappeared off the market soon after, so I don’t know maybe it was decided it was too dangerous of a product.