I worked for a number of years in the appliance and controls business, doing residential and commercial/restaurant equipment. I'm gonna write some random observ

I worked for a number of years in the appliance and controls business, doing residential and commercial/restaurant equipment. I'm gonna write some random observations, not in any order or meaning. It could all be bullshit, and your experiences will most likely be different. - Features sell appliances. More features command more money. But 99% of users don't do more than 2-3 operations with their units, usually no more than the basic unit will perform. - Some appliances are furniture, literally. People will put $10,000 Wolf ranges in their homes and then eat carryout for years. The wine cooler gets touched once a year. - A lot of manufacturers have zero experience in controls/electronics. It's shopped out to the lowest bidder and screwed into the unit at the assembly line. - The manufacturers that do have electronics experience overthink it. - Nobody tests the usability of the appliances until it's nearly done. Next year's model is the same as last year's with one new feature added. - I worked with one company that did massive amounts of design and focus group testing on a wall oven. Took years. By the time they had a design they liked and got it programmed, the graphics and layout looked obsolete. - A decent graphics/UI toolkit like Qt is too expensive for appliance makers, who count pennies. So it all runs on a 10 year old 16-bit CPU with an 8-bit color display. - There's no market pressure because nobody cares. A radically usable and nice looking UI won't sell any more units than a cheap model with a shitty UI. People buy on price, and if it fits in their kitchen.