Why You Should Buy the Dumbest Appliances You Can Find

Why You Should Buy the Dumbest Appliances You Can Find:

"...One afternoon, I attended a panel discussion about the rapidly approaching "connected home," referred to nowadays as the Internet of Things. 
The panelists promised that household devices of all kinds would soon be connected to one another and to the internet, thereby transforming the average American home into a futuristic fortress of hyperefficiency.

Many of the predictions sounded familiar, so while the panelists were talking I did a Google search on my phone and found this New York Times article: "Forget about waiting in your bathrobe for the tub to fill or padding around at night to lock the doors and turn off the lights. Think instead about calling up your appliances—the refrigerator, the hot tub, the alarms—from the car phone as you commute home from work. The refrigerator defrosts a pie and tells the oven to start the roast; the range signals the microwave oven to heat the soufflé, and 102-degree water fills the bathtub." 
That article is from 1988. 
...Most people's houses still don't have almost any of that stuff, and the fact that they don't suggests either that manufacturing truly smart gadgets is harder than anyone lets on, or that consumers aren't all that interested in leaving raw meat in a cold oven all day so that they can begin cooking it as they drive home from work. 
Or maybe it's a little of both.

...I hereby propose the Owen Test of appliance connectivity: Until I can operate my Samsung TV, Blu-Ray player, Amazon Fire TV Stick, and Cisco cable box with a single remote control, the Internet of Things is a hoax.

...The appliances in my mother's kitchen weren't smart, but they lasted forever. If one of them broke, a repairman came to our house and fixed it. 

The last time a repairman came to my house, he told me that he'd had to get a full-time weekday job at Home Depot because nowadays, when appliances break, most people just buy new ones. 

And they do break. 

Now, the most vulnerable parts of modern appliances are usually the ones containing computer chips. 

My wife and I learned that when we fried the brains of a pair of expensive side-by-side convection ovens by self-cleaning them simultaneously. 

The repairman's advice, after pronouncing the circuit boards too costly to replace: 
Buy the dumbest appliances you can find..."