Appreciation post: My 'smart' kettle takes 5 minutes to connect to WiFi every morning

Bought this fancy WiFi kettle from Amazon last month for $80. Thought it'd be great to boil water from my bed. Now I stand there for 5 minutes waiting for it to connect while I could've just used a normal kettle and had tea ready. Anyone else dealing with gadgets that take longer to set up than to actually use?

3 comments

3 Comments

logan5611mo ago

That's a perfect example of something I've noticed a lot lately. It seems like half the new gadgets we buy are really designed to solve problems nobody actually had. This whole trend of making everything "smart" often just adds extra steps and frustration to something that worked fine for decades. A kettle's whole job is to boil water, and now it needs to talk to your home network before it can do that. I'd rather have a simple, reliable tool than one that spends five minutes trying to remember its password.

king.eric1mo agoMost Upvoted

Exactly five minutes that smart kettle saved me this morning while I was already across the house getting dressed, @logan561. The old kettle meant standing there waiting or forgetting it entirely, so now I just tap my phone and the water's ready when I walk in. Progress isn't always about fixing a broken thing, sometimes it's about making a good thing fit into a faster life.

aaron_mitchell1mo ago

spends five minutes trying to remember its password" LMAO that's painfully real. I've got a friend with a smart washer that literally locked them out for 3 hours because they changed their wifi password. @king.eric I get what you're saying about convenience but I'd rather walk to a stove and flip a switch than have to reset a kettle's network config every time my ISP has a hiccup. Simple is better when the smart stuff is just adding another point of failure.