These ConnectIO “Intelligent Ovens” may be old news, but I just realized how they work. It seemed rather useless to me to be able to connect to your oven via your phone or internet to turn it on—pre-heating doesn’t take that long—but it turns out the nicer models in the series actually are refrigerators, too, allowing you to leave food in them all day and then remotely start cooking when you’re on your way home. (There are lower end models without the fridge, too, but that seems silly.)
They’re completely unnecessary, of course, and expensive at $9k, but at least I get what they’re trying to do now, even if I don’t think it’s worth $8k or so to save yourself a few minutes here and there.
Product Page [TMIO.com]
I have seen these at Trade shows – the 7K figure is for a double oven. You can also call the oven on the phone and tell it to switch from fridge mode to oven mode and start cooking your tuna noodle casserole.
At the trade show, the oven was integrated with the home automation system (lifeware) so when it was done baking something, lifeware popped a message in the corner of all the the TV screens/Pcs in the house. You could use the TV remote to set it to warm, tell it to keep baking or shut it off. The washer and dryer did similar thinsg too.