It's nice to work in the finely tuned WIRED test kitchen, aka my kitchen. The knives are sharp, the coffee is good, the room-temperature butter is ready to spread. And my induction stove is a marvel, boiling water in a heartbeat, heating sauces incredibly evenly and predictably.
I like to say that its swift electromagnetic burners can turn a grandmother's cast-iron pan into a stovetop Ferrari. While my stove is a joy to cook on, it is also the most annoying appliance in my kitchen, hands down. Why? It has no knobs.
This makes for a beautifully smooth surface that, compared to a gas stove with its grates, nooks, and crannies, is exponentially easier to clean. Designers love those clean lines, and manufacturers like them because it makes the thing cheaper to build. Yet for something so smooth, it is covered with friction points.
A surprising number of interactions are bungled because the touch-sensitive buttons that are used to control it don't work very well. There are also gobs of unintentional interactions when I set a pan or my hand on the surface, or when I clean it, all of which usually make it beep. There is so much beeping.
Turning each burner on is a two-step operation where you hit an on-off button then poke the power-level slider. Both can be surprisingly difficult to make happen. It's never guaranteed that it will work right the first time and the odds go down about 30 percent if it's dirty, wet, has a slick of oil on it, or— pounds countertop —all three, becaus.