> 2015: Breville makes a beautiful microwave oven with "a bit more".
It really is better - it has a well designed UI unlike virtually all microwaves (except the cheap 80s ones with a mechanical timer knob).
The Breville has one knob for time and one knob for power and you can vary either while it is running. All the specialty buttons still exist but are just inside the door so not visible unless you want to use them.
The two knobs are digital spinner knobs - with acceleration on the time knob something like mouse acceleration - fairly intuitive. The start button does 30 seconds at full power by default if you just tap it and adds 30 seconds each tap - as a secondary UI.
I do wish they used a slider for the power level. Presumably not used because harder to keep clean and not as cheap as optical rotary encoders.
I gave one of these microwaves to my elderly parents and no complaints.
This has made me passionately hate every other microwave with buttons - it's so commonly a fight to set 100% power for a minute. And had also opened my eyes to spending more when I find well designed UI on appliances. Most manufacturers are horrific.
It's interesting how cultural that must be. Here in Germany most mainstream cheap microwaves in the last decades still have electromechanical knobs, one for selecting power, one for time. If forced to draw a microwave out of memory that is my canonical mental image – and I didn’t had a microwave the last 15 years.
They remark on how confusing the UI is on other units ("Who needs extra buttons labelled things like 'Kids Meals', 'Healthy Cooking', or 'Snack'? What does that even mean?")
Unfortunately, my mother who is blind has a hard time with it. I gave her my Breville when her old microwave broke. The knobs on the Breville don’t give any feedback about their value as it changes. They also rotate infinitely, making it hard to guess from context clues. The UI is just not accessible.
On a regular microwave, she can either feel the buttons or someone can put adhesive landmarks on the number 5 and the start button and she can figure out the rest. And as each button is pressed, the microwave will beep, confirming the value has actually changed.
The best UI will be accessible and embody universal design, making the experience better for everyone. I think Breville is on the right track, but they should keep working on it.
> The best UI will be accessible and embody universal design, making the experience better for everyone.
That is a beautiful goal but I think that ultimately different disabilities have incompatible goals, and that the engineering costs matter too.
All design forces compromises: what is better for one protected group is often worse for another protected group. Obviously a display is absolutely useless to blind users - so do we decide to have displays or not? There's always more than one approach.
My mum had heaps of usability issues in her home and generally it took plenty of effort on my part to find a solution that was accessible for her limited strength and limited movement. The New Zealand government helped but there were plenty of issues it never helped with. I imagine it would be really hard to attempt to support someone with various levels of mental health degradation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39749581
Yeah, I too dislike jog knobs but they are a design compromise.
In my experience the majority of consumers fail to select designs that have good usability. There seems to be little economic incentive for manufacturers to develop products with better UI design.
I wish we lived in a perfect world with unlimited resources to support our blind, our elderly, and others with complex needs.
>> it has a well designed UI unlike virtually all microwaves (except the cheap 80s ones with a mechanical timer knob).
Growing up we had a Sharp Carousel microwave, a dial for the timer and a slider for power.
Nowadays they're all different. If you hit the number '1', does it automatically start a 1 minute timer, or can you enter 1:30?
Do I have to hit cook, or time before I can enter a time? If I hit start does it automatically add 30 seconds?
The other thing is I can remember those things were $400 in 1982 dollars, bought I recently bought a pretty nice $80 1100 watt Hamilton Beach microwave at the local big box store. I doubt it will last 30+ years, though.
I'd love to find an in-wall microwave with that UI. I had an '80s Amana Radarange as a kid, and it too had a knob for time, a knob for power, and buttons for start/stop. Every microwave I've used since then has been a disappointment.
The Electrolux I have today not only has a bad UI, but it has to be periodically rebooted because the display stops working.
Think you've got that reversed. The Manhattan Project kicked off the Atomic Age, and sentiments were largely positive until the height of the Cold War.
Ahh, nice, talking about inaccessible household items. The number of products I am able to buy is decreasing with every year, being blind and all that...
However, in this special case, I am really not missing out. If there is one thing I will never buy, thats a microwave. Stuff made in it tastes awful, and even water for tea sucks out of the wave thingy.
I tried to make our SaaS accessible to the blind for two of our users.
I spend two months trying to understand the user agents for blind users and the HTML attributes: but ultimately I gave up without achieving anything noticeable. This was for a small business (6 employees and I was one of the 4 co-founders).
How were we to choose the right compromise between the cost in hours to me personally versus the cost in hours to our blind users?
Is a blind user's hour more valuable than an hour of mine?
What about the huge number of other users that missed out on usability improvements because I was trying to support our blind users?
This was for a custom framework because I started building it in 2006 (when jQuery was king and no component framework had much market). Therefore hiring outside help was not going to be simple for such an intersection of highly specialised skills. Moreover a similar compromise needs to be made. How many dollars should it cost us as owners? Resources are not endless.
I still struggle with trying to find the right answer to competing deserving needs.
I have a little appreciation for accessibility because I was constantly trying to find solutions for my elderly mother (she was very clued up, but physically limited).
This comment mentions basic Bosch microwaves in Germany with an interface that could work for the blind (one power knob, one timer knob): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41848689
This is not entirely correct, Raytheon were going for a slightly higher frequency (2.6 IIRC) and the FCC ordered them down (forcing the recall of their trial ovens) because GE wanted to use crystal oscillators (klystrons) in the 1.2GHz range, and they wouldn't need to worry about the awful klystrons harmonics if they could bleed into 2.4.
GE moved to magnetrons shortly afterwards anyway, I expect they hadn't had the radar manufacturing scale that Raytheon did at the end of the war.
Decades ago I did a job for Raytheon (S/W for an X-ray machine control.) The Raytheon guy that hired us talked about standing in front of one of those huge radar horns to warm up as a young serviceman. I didn't RTFA but I wonder if the history went back that far.
I have one in my kitchen right now. The Advantium bulb and normal bulb broke within the first year of use. I probably used the Advantium function less than five times and wasn't particularly amazed with the results. The control dial is also broken, so all inputs register as a counter-clockwise. If you want to microwave for one minute, turning the knob in any direction starts you off at 99 minutes and you have to rotate it until it decreases to 1 minute. Needless to say I only use the "add 30 seconds" button now.
Great article. I thought it was particularly interesting that there are two approved frequencies for microwaves, and apparently the longer-wavelength 915MHz option provides much deeper heat penetration (~4cm vs. ~1.5cm) that better avoids situations like cooking the outside of something you're defrosting while the middle's still cold.
You can even still buy a few of them, but they all seem to be giant industrial machines.
When it comes to microwave UIs... our cheap Panasonic (turns out Midea, and the insides look just like that photo) was out of commission due to fuse/door switch issues (since fixed). So I grabbed a cheap, clunky, noisy microwave off FBM for a stopgap. While not a nice machine, its UI was great! Pushing a digit button adds that many minutes, and there's a separate "+30s" button that adds half a minute. Most microwaving tasks could be started in 1-2 button presses. Doing an odd number like 45 seconds needed more. That's even better than the commercial dial timer microwaves at work. Whereas the Panasonic, for style reasons, has "dark grey on black" legends on its membrane keypad... sigh.
I was surprised to see an “Alexa-compatible” microwave listed as released in 2010 when Amazon didn’t buy Alexa until 2013. The linked reviews of the oven were both in 2018 so perhaps it came out around then.
Nitpicking, but 0° to 1°C isn’t cryogenic, merely deeply hypothermic.
Therapeutic near-body temp hypothermia is often used post-cardiac arrest, while recovery from hypothermic states as a result of misadventure has often been documented.
Awesome article and glad you pointed towards the YouTube video, where Lovelock was interviewed, which ultimately answered my question: can Cryogenics be used to freeze humans? According to that fascinating and interesting video, answer (for now) is no because "it's partly a matter of how quickly you can get anti-freeze agent to diffuse into the cells ... humans too big."
I remember vividly the first meal I had made with a microwave. Early 70s. Went to someone’s house for dinner. Dinner was meatloaf. Cooked in a microwave. If you like steamed ground beef you would have LOVED this meatloaf.
Any of them not have that stupid spinning plate on the bottom? I'm sick of my food (containers) bumping into the walls because I put it in off center (usually because I put several things in at once). These used to be common and worked well, now everyone is supposed to find watching their food turn entertaining.
If you want some better options for microwave ovens, try checking out you local food service suppliers or websites like Webstaurant
They will be a bit more expensive, but often have better controls and are easier to clean.
Some Panasonic inverter microwaves don't suck. I have Panasonic NN-DS596M and its both featureful (almost a proper oven) and simple to control if you don't try to use every mode.
> 2015: Breville makes a beautiful microwave oven with "a bit more".
It really is better - it has a well designed UI unlike virtually all microwaves (except the cheap 80s ones with a mechanical timer knob).
The Breville has one knob for time and one knob for power and you can vary either while it is running. All the specialty buttons still exist but are just inside the door so not visible unless you want to use them.
The two knobs are digital spinner knobs - with acceleration on the time knob something like mouse acceleration - fairly intuitive. The start button does 30 seconds at full power by default if you just tap it and adds 30 seconds each tap - as a secondary UI.
I do wish they used a slider for the power level. Presumably not used because harder to keep clean and not as cheap as optical rotary encoders.
I gave one of these microwaves to my elderly parents and no complaints.
This has made me passionately hate every other microwave with buttons - it's so commonly a fight to set 100% power for a minute. And had also opened my eyes to spending more when I find well designed UI on appliances. Most manufacturers are horrific.
You totally get it! So many underappreciated little details
I'm giving a talk this week specifically about microwave oven UI:
[1] https://ndcporto.com/agenda/a-history-of-knobs-on-microwaves...
I'm pretty sure Breville UI was the original reason I went down this rabbit hole haha
You may be interested in some of America's Test Kitchen observation in their review:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IRAi6Nzxbk
"Who needs extra buttons labelled things like 'Kids Meals', 'Healthy Cooking', or 'Snack'? What does that even mean?"
It's interesting how cultural that must be. Here in Germany most mainstream cheap microwaves in the last decades still have electromechanical knobs, one for selecting power, one for time. If forced to draw a microwave out of memory that is my canonical mental image – and I didn’t had a microwave the last 15 years.
Basic Example: https://www.bosch-home.com/de/de/product/kochen-backen/mikro...
Until this article I had no idea what US-Americans were (rightfully) bitching about.
(Edit: Oh, I see, the cheaper Bosch Microwave range has capacitive buttons. Erghs.)
>> 2015: Breville makes a beautiful microwave oven with "a bit more".
> It really is better - it has a well designed UI unlike virtually all microwaves (except the cheap 80s ones with a mechanical timer knob).
America's Test Kitchen did some testing and the Breville was their top pick:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IRAi6Nzxbk
They remark on how confusing the UI is on other units ("Who needs extra buttons labelled things like 'Kids Meals', 'Healthy Cooking', or 'Snack'? What does that even mean?")
I also love the Breville UI.
Unfortunately, my mother who is blind has a hard time with it. I gave her my Breville when her old microwave broke. The knobs on the Breville don’t give any feedback about their value as it changes. They also rotate infinitely, making it hard to guess from context clues. The UI is just not accessible.
On a regular microwave, she can either feel the buttons or someone can put adhesive landmarks on the number 5 and the start button and she can figure out the rest. And as each button is pressed, the microwave will beep, confirming the value has actually changed.
The best UI will be accessible and embody universal design, making the experience better for everyone. I think Breville is on the right track, but they should keep working on it.
> The best UI will be accessible and embody universal design, making the experience better for everyone.
That is a beautiful goal but I think that ultimately different disabilities have incompatible goals, and that the engineering costs matter too.
All design forces compromises: what is better for one protected group is often worse for another protected group. Obviously a display is absolutely useless to blind users - so do we decide to have displays or not? There's always more than one approach.
My mum had heaps of usability issues in her home and generally it took plenty of effort on my part to find a solution that was accessible for her limited strength and limited movement. The New Zealand government helped but there were plenty of issues it never helped with. I imagine it would be really hard to attempt to support someone with various levels of mental health degradation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39749581
Yeah, I too dislike jog knobs but they are a design compromise.
In my experience the majority of consumers fail to select designs that have good usability. There seems to be little economic incentive for manufacturers to develop products with better UI design.
I wish we lived in a perfect world with unlimited resources to support our blind, our elderly, and others with complex needs.
>> it has a well designed UI unlike virtually all microwaves (except the cheap 80s ones with a mechanical timer knob).
Growing up we had a Sharp Carousel microwave, a dial for the timer and a slider for power.
Nowadays they're all different. If you hit the number '1', does it automatically start a 1 minute timer, or can you enter 1:30?
Do I have to hit cook, or time before I can enter a time? If I hit start does it automatically add 30 seconds?
The other thing is I can remember those things were $400 in 1982 dollars, bought I recently bought a pretty nice $80 1100 watt Hamilton Beach microwave at the local big box store. I doubt it will last 30+ years, though.
When is 90 greater than 100? On a microwave. 90 means 1.5 minutes while 100 means 1 minute, not 1.6 minutes.
It's the most basic of UI/UX WTFs
Also in JavaScript:
> [90, 100].sort()
I'd love to find an in-wall microwave with that UI. I had an '80s Amana Radarange as a kid, and it too had a knob for time, a knob for power, and buttons for start/stop. Every microwave I've used since then has been a disappointment.
The Electrolux I have today not only has a bad UI, but it has to be periodically rebooted because the display stops working.
> '80s Amana Radarange
That's a bold choice in product naming. Referencing radiation in any manner just seems like something you'd want to avoid
There was a period in history in the US where referencing radiation made it cool and futuristic.
I would have imagined that it mostly had died out by the 80s though. More like 1950s and what not.
I'm sure that fascination with radiation being cool took a nose dive after the Manhattan Project completed
Think you've got that reversed. The Manhattan Project kicked off the Atomic Age, and sentiments were largely positive until the height of the Cold War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Age
https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/the-atomic-bomb-and-the-nu...
It is not referencing ionizing radiation: it's referring to "RADAR" which was common early marketing for microwaves.
Now, microwave emissions are "radiation" in the scientific sense, but not colloquially.
He's how my microwave oven works
Rotate knob to select power oven or microwave
Press in knob to select.
Rotate knob to select preheat or not.
press in knob to select
Rotate knob to select temperature.
Press in knob.
Rotate knob to select one tray or two
Press in knob to start.
BONUS: the knob's encoder isn't great so if you spin it too fast is goes backwards.
A few more buttons would've made this thing so much easier to use and the oven itself is actually quite good.
> two knobs are digital spinner knobs
Ahh, nice, talking about inaccessible household items. The number of products I am able to buy is decreasing with every year, being blind and all that...
However, in this special case, I am really not missing out. If there is one thing I will never buy, thats a microwave. Stuff made in it tastes awful, and even water for tea sucks out of the wave thingy.
I tried to make our SaaS accessible to the blind for two of our users.
I spend two months trying to understand the user agents for blind users and the HTML attributes: but ultimately I gave up without achieving anything noticeable. This was for a small business (6 employees and I was one of the 4 co-founders).
How were we to choose the right compromise between the cost in hours to me personally versus the cost in hours to our blind users?
Is a blind user's hour more valuable than an hour of mine?
What about the huge number of other users that missed out on usability improvements because I was trying to support our blind users?
This was for a custom framework because I started building it in 2006 (when jQuery was king and no component framework had much market). Therefore hiring outside help was not going to be simple for such an intersection of highly specialised skills. Moreover a similar compromise needs to be made. How many dollars should it cost us as owners? Resources are not endless.
I still struggle with trying to find the right answer to competing deserving needs.
I have a little appreciation for accessibility because I was constantly trying to find solutions for my elderly mother (she was very clued up, but physically limited).
This comment mentions basic Bosch microwaves in Germany with an interface that could work for the blind (one power knob, one timer knob): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41848689
This is not entirely correct, Raytheon were going for a slightly higher frequency (2.6 IIRC) and the FCC ordered them down (forcing the recall of their trial ovens) because GE wanted to use crystal oscillators (klystrons) in the 1.2GHz range, and they wouldn't need to worry about the awful klystrons harmonics if they could bleed into 2.4.
GE moved to magnetrons shortly afterwards anyway, I expect they hadn't had the radar manufacturing scale that Raytheon did at the end of the war.
(thread drift)
Decades ago I did a job for Raytheon (S/W for an X-ray machine control.) The Raytheon guy that hired us talked about standing in front of one of those huge radar horns to warm up as a young serviceman. I didn't RTFA but I wonder if the history went back that far.
I read many similar instances when I was doing the historical research into this. It's true of any high power radio system.
They did some truly horrendous studies on rabbits.
Thanks for the fact-check! Just added this clarification to the article. Should be live in a few minutes
Nice. I'd also suggest moving the spencer patent further down since it came several years later then the frequency allocation.
Check my early early HN submissions for more info.
Edit https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/why-2-4ghz-chasing-wirele...
Tom Scott has a video on microwaves where he interviews James Lovelock about the frozen hamsters:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y
Lovelock passed away a year later (in 2022):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock
Taylor will be delivering a presentation on this topic at NDC Porto this Thursday. Find out more at https://ndcporto.com/agenda/a-history-of-knobs-on-microwaves...
I'm surprised that this list:
- contains the GE Advantium
- has anything good to say about it
I have one in my kitchen right now. The Advantium bulb and normal bulb broke within the first year of use. I probably used the Advantium function less than five times and wasn't particularly amazed with the results. The control dial is also broken, so all inputs register as a counter-clockwise. If you want to microwave for one minute, turning the knob in any direction starts you off at 99 minutes and you have to rotate it until it decreases to 1 minute. Needless to say I only use the "add 30 seconds" button now.
Great article. I thought it was particularly interesting that there are two approved frequencies for microwaves, and apparently the longer-wavelength 915MHz option provides much deeper heat penetration (~4cm vs. ~1.5cm) that better avoids situations like cooking the outside of something you're defrosting while the middle's still cold.
You can even still buy a few of them, but they all seem to be giant industrial machines.
This unit(1), with dual waveguides, looks crazy!
(1) https://industrialmicrowavesystems.com/microwave-systems/
I love the stats. I wonder what kind of business actually needs something like 1,800lb of cooked bacon per hour.
When it comes to microwave UIs... our cheap Panasonic (turns out Midea, and the insides look just like that photo) was out of commission due to fuse/door switch issues (since fixed). So I grabbed a cheap, clunky, noisy microwave off FBM for a stopgap. While not a nice machine, its UI was great! Pushing a digit button adds that many minutes, and there's a separate "+30s" button that adds half a minute. Most microwaving tasks could be started in 1-2 button presses. Doing an odd number like 45 seconds needed more. That's even better than the commercial dial timer microwaves at work. Whereas the Panasonic, for style reasons, has "dark grey on black" legends on its membrane keypad... sigh.
I was surprised to see an “Alexa-compatible” microwave listed as released in 2010 when Amazon didn’t buy Alexa until 2013. The linked reviews of the oven were both in 2018 so perhaps it came out around then.
Thanks for catching that! Fix should be live in a few minutes
A history of microwave ovens without mention of reanimating cryogenically frozen hamsters?
I definitely didn't forget the hamsters :) Maybe crtl+f didn't work correctly?
Here's Lovelock's original paper if you're curious: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1365902/pdf/jph...
Nitpicking, but 0° to 1°C isn’t cryogenic, merely deeply hypothermic.
Therapeutic near-body temp hypothermia is often used post-cardiac arrest, while recovery from hypothermic states as a result of misadventure has often been documented.
(1) https://acls-algorithms.com/post-cardiac-arrest-care/ (2) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7387271/
Awesome article and glad you pointed towards the YouTube video, where Lovelock was interviewed, which ultimately answered my question: can Cryogenics be used to freeze humans? According to that fascinating and interesting video, answer (for now) is no because "it's partly a matter of how quickly you can get anti-freeze agent to diffuse into the cells ... humans too big."
Oh yes! I missed it, sorry.
> A history of microwave ovens without mention of reanimating cryogenically frozen hamsters?
There is:
> 1954: James Lovelock et al. reanimated cryogenically-frozen hamsters using an ad-hoc microwave oven.
Mentions the Tom Scott video where he interview Lovelock (who passed a year later, in 2022):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y
Ok, my google search is becoming increasingly weird now[1], but apparently that did happen[2]. Now I am compelled to share it with people at work.
[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?journal=J+Physiol&...
[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1363505/
Thank you, mark knopfler /j
That's the way you do it.
The Antique Microwave Oven that's Better than Yours [video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiS27feX8o0
I owned one of these, it was indeed awesome. It really did cook food intelligently.
I remember vividly the first meal I had made with a microwave. Early 70s. Went to someone’s house for dinner. Dinner was meatloaf. Cooked in a microwave. If you like steamed ground beef you would have LOVED this meatloaf.
Fun fact, you cant set your microwave to 100 seconds.
99 is close enough and only 2 button presses, and the same button at that.
What microwave doesn't suck in 2024 that's what I'd like to know
Based on all my recent research:
Best UI: Breville
Best "normal" microwave: Panasonic inverter
Best for people who enjoy cooking: any microwave with convection/broiler (IIRC Miele speed ovens are popular)
Best for early adopters: Miele Dialog
Any of them not have that stupid spinning plate on the bottom? I'm sick of my food (containers) bumping into the walls because I put it in off center (usually because I put several things in at once). These used to be common and worked well, now everyone is supposed to find watching their food turn entertaining.
Look at the commercial microwaves I linked to in an adjacent comment. For easy of cleaning, these typically do not have the spinning plates.
Mine (some 23 year-old Westinghouse model) spins by default but has a button to override it.
> What microwave doesn't suck in 2024 that's what I'd like to know*
America's Test Kitchen did some testing and the Breville was their top pick:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IRAi6Nzxbk
The Wirecutter has Panasonic and Toshiba, with Brevilles as an alternative:
* https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-microwave/
I have the Toshiba and am generally happy with it.
If you want some better options for microwave ovens, try checking out you local food service suppliers or websites like Webstaurant They will be a bit more expensive, but often have better controls and are easier to clean.
https://www.webstaurantstore.com/14351/commercial-microwaves...
Some Panasonic inverter microwaves don't suck. I have Panasonic NN-DS596M and its both featureful (almost a proper oven) and simple to control if you don't try to use every mode.
I got a new one and it doesn't even have a timer for the door light, so it's on until the door is closed.
People leave their microwave doors open long enough for this to matter? Why?
to allow the condensation to evaporate and vapor to get out
[dead]