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Toaster-Feature

The Consumer Electronics Show (now dubbed CES) has e'er been an event where companies large and small debut new products and demonstrate cut-edge R&D. At its best, the show serves as a jumping-off betoken for the technologies, products, and services we'll see throughout the year. At its worst, it functions as a dumping ground for bad ideas and garbage products. At the show this week, Griffin Technology debuted a smart toaster as part of their new Griffin Home initiative.

In fairness to Griffin, a smart toaster is the kind of fusion device you might expect from a mythological panthera leo-eagle hybrid with no opposable thumbs, seven hit dice, and a brain the judge size of a heavily mutated walnut. I'll permit the visitor explain from here:

The next pace in making mornings as streamlined as possible is the Continued Toaster, a total-featured digital toaster that helps users toast smarter. This Bluetooth-enabled smart toaster is controlled by a companion smartphone app to offer personalized settings for the perfect slice, every fourth dimension. Continued Toaster is a two-slot toaster with digital temperature aligning and settings for bread type, darkness, even gluten-free breads. Once y'all've dialed in your preferences, the app remembers how you lot like it. Connected Toaster links with other Griffin Home products for seamless integration into your daily routine.

Hoo male child. Where to showtime?

SCRAWWWW!

When I was growing up, my parents had a toaster so old I recollect it might have been built by Jesus in his cursory, unacknowledged foray into metalworking and electricity. Despite its historic period, it had an amazing feature — information technology could remember, without fail, precisely what setting you lot had used to toast staff of life previously. Information technology even had a colour-coded characterization higher up the lever, to tell you how toasty your toast would be, in colors ranging from "Irish person sunbathing" to "Not fifty-fifty both easily and a flashlight can save you now."

GriffinTechToaster

Now, I admit, this analog lever had some limitations. It could only call back one setting at a time and it had security flaws — a mischievous sibling could easily slide the lever to 1 extreme or the other and leave yous fuming over your slightly crisped wheat bread or furnace-blasted hockey puck. Both issues could be solved past the application of the Mark I Eyeball and a post-it notation for remembering which of your artisanal, gratis-range, quinoa-and-kale sorrow-loaves should exist toasted at which setting.

The biggest problem with the Internet of Things, mostly speaking, is that no one has figured out how to build products that actually exercise anything useful enough to justify their price tags or enormous security flaws. Silicon Valley has been a tremendous source of innovation over the past few decades, but not all innovations actually improve the product. And if that wasn't enough, what use is a toaster with Bluetooth, given that Bluetooth's effective range has been empirically measured as half-dozen feet less than y'all need information technology to be, no matter what the circumstances?

No, Griffin. I demand my smart toaster use 802.11ad. Save the Bluetooth for the optional pairing with Apple's AirPods, and so I can record and listen to the audio of my bread toasting while I'm searching for apps to install on my toaster's LCD. And maybe pack some LEDs in there while you're at it.

The current, Bluetooth-but version of this abomination will sell for $100.