Fancy Toasters

     Scrolling through cnet not that long ago, I stumbled upon an article asking how much you could justify paying for a toaster. My first reaction to finding articles like this is usually to laugh at how unnecessary it would be to pay such a high price for whatever the either practical or impractical item is, but procrastination led me to clicking the link  and reading through the article since toast could potentially be more important of an issue than I might have assumed.
     The gist of this article was justifying the price difference in appliances that serve the same purpose. All toasters have a similar mechanics. Bread can be lowered into slots where it can toast as it is exposed to heated wires that line the metal grates holding the bread in place. The click that locks the lever into place triggers electromagnetic waves to run through the wires and start the heating process by completing a circuit. After the wires reach a certain temperature as specified by the user, the lever will release and the toast will pop up, ready to serve.
     The factors that make one toaster 25 times more expensive than another are in the additional mechanics that make the toaster unique. A few of the differences listed in the article include automatic lowering of bread, material of the unit exterior(stainless steel, aluminum, plastic) which indicates durability, aesthetic, number of slots, slot size, number of wires, amount of spacing between wires, power usage, timing cycle, heat sensors, and much more. Each element of the toaster seeks to add to the quality of the user's experience making the toast to improve evenness of toasting, time taken to finish the job, aesthetics, safety, energy consumption, etc.
     After spending a great deal of time talking about the features of these fancy toasters, the verdict of the article was that no toaster over $100 was worth the expense and that the $30 Hamilton Beach toaster is really all you need. That lackluster of a conclusion was what I expected from the article, but what I did not expect was the amount of thought and detail that was put into these mechanisms and features. Coming from a very conservative family, when it came down to making a purchase the general consensus was to buy the cheapest brand of the item available. Never had I actually considered the amount of research and thought put into these items which I had always considered unnecessary. As someone who aspires to create applications and products for consumers, it is vital to possess this kind of attention to detail and concern for user experience. While the importance of this concept might not show itself as well in the form of toasters, it is a way of thinking that is very applicable to engineering and computational development. Understanding the consumers restrictions and knowledge is the first step to creating effective products that will enable the proper utilization of the creation's potential.

http://www.cnet.com/news/should-you-ever-pay-more-for-a-toaster/