7 ms·

They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toas

They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. You can still buy really, truly excellent toasters made for industrial/commercial use, or for the homes of the very rich, and they're quite a lot better than the trash people keep in their houses. And they cost a lot more, too. Last time I checked, a commercial 2-slice toaster was in the $300-$400 range. This is true for lots of home appliances. My favorite example is the Kitchenaid mixer. The modern mixers are very thoroughly "value engineered" to keep the price down. If you want to buy an original "Kitchenaid," like they made in the 1930s, you can call up Hobart and buy a miniature mixer. And it will cost you ~$2,000 in 2021, just as it did in 1935. You can have the good toaster, the good mixer, etc, but it sure looks like people don't actually want that. The pattern of product offerings in your average store suggests people want something affordable, and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job.

jonahx 5y ago
> and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job. I would amend that to: "it doesn't matter whether it excels at its job, as long as it's good enough." And those modern, cheap toasters are good enough.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
> They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. From the article it seemed that it's better because it has a radiant temperature sensor rather than a simple timer. Unless you're disputing that and saying it's good for some other reason that would cost a lot of money, a temperature sensor and little control system for it would not cost hundreds of dollars to make today. EDIT: The problem seems to be that regular consumer appliances seem to have raced to the bottom in the past 30 years or so. It's not that a significantly better toaster would cost hundreds of dollars more, it's that it would cost a few dollars more. The high end things that are 10x the price seem to be priced that way mostly because there is not a strong mid range market, or maybe they compete on gimmicks rather than basics. Because you don't need a $300 powder coated steel toaster with an a glass oven door and 5 cooking regimes including steaming that was mentioned in the article (https://us.balmuda.com/collections/toaster https://us.balmuda.com/collections/toaster) to get the functionality and robustness of their simple 1940s sunbeam toaster.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  Watching the video with the article I'm truely amazed at the engineering involved in this. In some ways it's so simple, in other ways its crazy complex. Without the timer and automatic io of the toast, I think it would be expensive to manufacture. The internal design might be harder to automate to keep cost down. I think*
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Basically all toasters use temperature to stop rather than time. Am I missing something? I actually looked for a timer based toaster for ages and couldn't find one.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Tagbert 5y ago
    Some toasters have a simple timer circuit that releases an electromagnet to trigger the toast to pop up. There is usually a resister to adjust darkness that controls how long the timer runs. The cheapest toasters apply current to a bimetallic strip that heats up and bends away from the contact causing the heating to stop and the toast to pop up. These are variable due to ambient temperature and because the bimetallic strip is still warm if you do a second batch of toast and will trigger too soon. These are both indirect proxies for doneness of the toast, not a direct measure like the toaster featured in the article.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    I don't know, I'm just going by the article and youtube video referenced. From the article: and it’s got a mechanical thermostat inside that stops your bread toasting when it’s toasted and ready, NOT after some arbitrary amount of time. From the video: Modern toasters operate based on a timer...
- Breza 5y ago
  I recommend the book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. The author talks about how the market for consumer goods has been bifurcated into insanely cheap and stupid expensive.
34679 5y ago
I think this says more about the decreased purchasing power of the average US household than it does about what people want. The Venn diagram of what a person wants and what they can afford is rarely a circle.
- xadhominemx 5y ago
  > I think this says more about the decreased purchasing power of the average US household What does it say about that?
  - fuzzfactor 5y ago
    Compared to the way it was during the lifetime of this model from a major company offering all price points, there is no longer a sizable enough percentage of Americans able to afford supporting this level of quality/superior-engineering for production to have continued past a certain year.
AussieWog93 5y ago
>You can have the good toaster, the good mixer, etc, but it sure looks like people don't actually want that. The pattern of product offerings in your average store suggests people want something affordable, and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job. I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetime according to some agreed standard - the same way that manufacturers of large appliances have to provide information about energy and water use. As it stands, it's really hard for the consumer to know whether or not the $1000 coffee machine is actually better quality than the $500 one, or whether they're just milking a fancy brand name and relying on FUD.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Cheap toasters today don’t have a shorter lifetime than this one. In fact, they have fewer moving parts.
- gambiting 5y ago
  >>I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetime according to some agreed standard We can, but again, I feel like a lot of customers don't want that. Even here on HN I hear people saying that well, if I want to buy a $200 washing machine that falls apart in 3 years, then it should be my god given right to do so. If consumers want better appliances then they can just buy them without the need for regulation. I don't really agree with that mindset, but I think it's common enough to prevent the change you're talking about.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    I'm not arguing that we ban washing machines that break in 3 years, just that they're properly labelled.
    - paledot 5y ago
      Why not?
truculent 5y ago
This would make more sense if manufacturing hadn’t improved in that time. But isn’t it reasonable to expect the price of these items to have reduced over the past 100 years?
- hapless 5y ago
  How, exactly, has anything improved in manufacturing? As a rule of thumb, any time you see a Phillips head or Pozidrive screw, you are looking at a product that was assembled by hand, the way things were done 100 years ago.. If that seems prohibitively expensive for the product you are holding in your hand, well, that is why manufacturing has fled the USA. It's hard to make a $10 toaster if your workers demand reasonable wages. A Hobart mini-mixer is still made more or less the same way it was in 1935, out of rather similar input components and materials, and it is still assembled in the USA. We can make electronics a lot cheaper than we did in 1935 (transistors are lots cheaper than valves aka vacuum tubes!) but we can't do that for an electric motor, or for the chassis, or the various tools that attach. Those are all very similar to their 1935 versions.

jonahx 5y ago

> and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job. I would amend that to: "it doesn't matter whether it excels at its job, as long as it's good enough." And those modern, cheap toasters are good enough.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

> They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. From the article it seemed that it's better because it has a radiant temperature sensor rather than a simple timer. Unless you're disputing that and saying it's good for some other reason that would cost a lot of money, a temperature sensor and little control system for it would not cost hundreds of dollars to make today. EDIT: The problem seems to be that regular consumer appliances seem to have raced to the bottom in the past 30 years or so. It's not that a significantly better toaster would cost hundreds of dollars more, it's that it would cost a few dollars more. The high end things that are 10x the price seem to be priced that way mostly because there is not a strong mid range market, or maybe they compete on gimmicks rather than basics. Because you don't need a $300 powder coated steel toaster with an a glass oven door and 5 cooking regimes including steaming that was mentioned in the article (https://us.balmuda.com/collections/toaster https://us.balmuda.com/collections/toaster) to get the functionality and robustness of their simple 1940s sunbeam toaster.

philliphaydon 5y ago
Watching the video with the article I'm truely amazed at the engineering involved in this. In some ways it's so simple, in other ways its crazy complex. Without the timer and automatic io of the toast, I think it would be expensive to manufacture. The internal design might be harder to automate to keep cost down. I think*
IshKebab 5y ago
Basically all toasters use temperature to stop rather than time. Am I missing something? I actually looked for a timer based toaster for ages and couldn't find one.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Some toasters have a simple timer circuit that releases an electromagnet to trigger the toast to pop up. There is usually a resister to adjust darkness that controls how long the timer runs. The cheapest toasters apply current to a bimetallic strip that heats up and bends away from the contact causing the heating to stop and the toast to pop up. These are variable due to ambient temperature and because the bimetallic strip is still warm if you do a second batch of toast and will trigger too soon. These are both indirect proxies for doneness of the toast, not a direct measure like the toaster featured in the article.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  I don't know, I'm just going by the article and youtube video referenced. From the article: and it’s got a mechanical thermostat inside that stops your bread toasting when it’s toasted and ready, NOT after some arbitrary amount of time. From the video: Modern toasters operate based on a timer...
Breza 5y ago
I recommend the book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. The author talks about how the market for consumer goods has been bifurcated into insanely cheap and stupid expensive.

34679 5y ago

I think this says more about the decreased purchasing power of the average US household than it does about what people want. The Venn diagram of what a person wants and what they can afford is rarely a circle.

xadhominemx 5y ago
> I think this says more about the decreased purchasing power of the average US household What does it say about that?
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  Compared to the way it was during the lifetime of this model from a major company offering all price points, there is no longer a sizable enough percentage of Americans able to afford supporting this level of quality/superior-engineering for production to have continued past a certain year.

AussieWog93 5y ago

>You can have the good toaster, the good mixer, etc, but it sure looks like people don't actually want that. The pattern of product offerings in your average store suggests people want something affordable, and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job. I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetime according to some agreed standard - the same way that manufacturers of large appliances have to provide information about energy and water use. As it stands, it's really hard for the consumer to know whether or not the $1000 coffee machine is actually better quality than the $500 one, or whether they're just milking a fancy brand name and relying on FUD.

UncleMeat 5y ago
Cheap toasters today don’t have a shorter lifetime than this one. In fact, they have fewer moving parts.
gambiting 5y ago
>>I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetime according to some agreed standard We can, but again, I feel like a lot of customers don't want that. Even here on HN I hear people saying that well, if I want to buy a $200 washing machine that falls apart in 3 years, then it should be my god given right to do so. If consumers want better appliances then they can just buy them without the need for regulation. I don't really agree with that mindset, but I think it's common enough to prevent the change you're talking about.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  I'm not arguing that we ban washing machines that break in 3 years, just that they're properly labelled.
  - paledot 5y ago
    Why not?

truculent 5y ago

This would make more sense if manufacturing hadn’t improved in that time. But isn’t it reasonable to expect the price of these items to have reduced over the past 100 years?

hapless 5y ago
How, exactly, has anything improved in manufacturing? As a rule of thumb, any time you see a Phillips head or Pozidrive screw, you are looking at a product that was assembled by hand, the way things were done 100 years ago.. If that seems prohibitively expensive for the product you are holding in your hand, well, that is why manufacturing has fled the USA. It's hard to make a $10 toaster if your workers demand reasonable wages. A Hobart mini-mixer is still made more or less the same way it was in 1935, out of rather similar input components and materials, and it is still assembled in the USA. We can make electronics a lot cheaper than we did in 1935 (transistors are lots cheaper than valves aka vacuum tubes!) but we can't do that for an electric motor, or for the chassis, or the various tools that attach. Those are all very similar to their 1935 versions.