Wow! It’s hard to know what to recommend as a substitute when you can technically get by with paper towel, a plastic funnel, a pan of water and a mug.
This can’t be something a real human would say. This guy is doing a character, right?
That sounds exactly like the sort of thing somebody from marketing would say.
Yeah, Wirecutter wasn’t perfect at all, but more often than not it gave me at least a good start on a very wide range of products. Also, the writers didn’t sound like they were making the articles all about themselves. The target audience was the average person. So yeah, they would mention the item that was twice the price of the recommended one or two products, but they wouldn’t put a $5000 vacuum cleaner as their recommended choice.
So you’ve never been to the coffee thread at QT3. Like many hobbies, some people derive a lot of enjoyment (and may be willing to go through significantly more effort than you) for certain activities.
https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/any-coffee-dorks
“delight me every morning for years to come” is exactly what I think about my most recent coffee machine.
I’m sincerely envious of people that derive that much joy from basically anything. Much like with sports fans, I look at these things from the outside and it’s just totally alien to me.
I understand enjoying coffee. I was drinking coffee (from a Nespresso machine, like some kind of animal, who might as well just drink from the mud puddle it probably lives in) as I was reading your reply. I can even sorta accept going on a waiting list for a machine, as if you couldn’t get a high quality coffee machine delivered by the end of the week. It was the phrasing I was commenting on, I mean what actual person talks like that? It’s like the product placement bits in The Truman Show.
The spifling brit (complete with monocle)?
Sure, I don’t think I’d phrase it like that exactly, but I’d sympathize with the sentiment.
It’s OK. I now enjoy instant coffee after spending two years doing various recipes for Aeropress.
The biggest thing that write up of his showed is that he has no clue about coffee makers, pour-over, and what it takes to make good coffee. That said, with coffee it’s all about what you like.
Seems an odd thing for a politics blog to complain about though.
It’s more of an Apple blog, but there have been a lot of politics lately. But in general it’s whatever he wants to post about.
Yea, for me, it was specifically “that would most delight me” that stood out as “that’s not a phrase I would expect to hear out loud on average.”
Also, echoing that the blog is kinda weird about the coffee machines anyhow, because pourover is just manual drip with, maybe, some extra technique due to being manual. The Oxo actually does do the blooming step of a manual pourover that a traditional drip machine tends to skip, so all three machines mentioned are actually automatic pourovers anyhow.
I’ve read Gruber for a long time but this latest complaint about coffee makers is too elitist for me.
I know this post is two weeks old but I will suggest not getting a Samsung fridge for the same reasons you describe. My ice maker has been busted three times and now I’ve lost temperature controls to a section of my fridge and freezer thanks to some impressively shitty engineering work on how they ran the wires. I can fix it by taking the fridge apart and splicing some wires or something until it happens again in a year or year and a half.
All these problems and I’ve had the fridge for about three years. Never again!
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard marketing people set a goal as customers reacting with “surprise and delight.” I hate it when words that aren’t used colloquially become marketing terms. When was the last time someone started a console game and in response to a query on whether they liked it, responded “It’s delightful!”
Surprise and impress… Surprise and please… Surprise and satisfy… But surprise and delight? Ugh.
I hear horror stories of pretty much any fridge. It sounds like the best course of action is to buy a fridge with as few frilly features as possible. Even French doors might be ‘too frilly’ for some manufacturers.
Manufacturers seem to know this, and price the bland models nearly as high as the frilly models.
I found the no-frills “works forever” fridges to be reasonably priced. The Side-by-Side I ordered last year (plus ice-maker in freezer, but no indoor dispenser) was only 1200$ (WRS315SNHB), and looking online its still around that price - while almost every other model with the in door water/ice dispenser is $1400+.
When it comes to buying an expensive appliance like a fridge or washer/dryer, I go ahead and subscribe to Consumer Reports and check out the ratings there. Hasn’t steered me wrong so far.
I’m old and crotchety, and think that base model should be $900, not $1200. But I take your point.