I’m watching the Today show, which is running through a selection of “Appliances of the Future.”
First up was a $700 doorbell, which has an intercom built-in. Then there was a $1,200 microwave which could cook entire turkeys. Third up: a $430 water filter that has “five filters” for extra contaminant-removal.
Too expensive? How about a $150 plug socket hooked up to the internet, so that you may turn the appliance thusly attached on or off with a text message?
Welcome to the future.
How can you actually sit through Today? I caught a bit of it a few weeks ago and it was infuriating. They spend 20.8 seconds on each segement, say nothing at all of any value to anyone, and laugh and smile a lot. I guess something about us getting ready for work means we’re stupid. I rarely watch morning TV but when I do I always flip to Today in Washington. You actually learn something and get to giggle at the wacko callers.
The future is expensive!
How is this tech from the future, its hardly innovative. Intercoms have been large things but they have been doorbells, this is just reducing the size to a doorbell, and keeping the same functionality, hello 1970′s technology here today!
Microwave that is large… hello 1980′s technology made by SUV makers!
Water Filters, that filter your water up to five times, despite the fact at least in most places of North America the tap water has been clean enough for casual consumption for oooh 40 or 50 years. This would be useful in places where the local water supply is questionable, but its not really ‘new’ its been around a LONG TIME.
Turning stuff on/off with a text message or email? X10 technology invented 30 years ago, here today!
@3: *WOOOOOOSH*
I’m pretty sure that when microwaves were first developed they were built big enough to cook a turkey but they realized no one actually wanted that big of a microwave so they reduced the size to the convenient popcorn bag size they are today. At least I seem to remember this from an Econ lecture I had a few years ago.
Although that water filter sounds like it would be good for cheap vodka, something else I learned in college.
What you people forget is that in the future, a loaf of bread will cost $50, and a carton of milk $120, so a $450 water filter connected to a $150 socket is just nothing but chump change for people with electricity.
That’s to say that the future consist of two mega tribes, the Elitist Technologists who watches Today and sips coffee brewed by nanotechnological filtration pots, and the Thunderdomians, who slaughters the Technologists with spears and and cross bows for some radioactive-engineered soy milk and a loaf of sour doughe that is people, IT’S PEOPLE!
Because this is boingboing, I naturally assumed you were talking about a Youtube clip from the Today Show in 1978…at least up until I got to the part about the internet connected, text messageable outlet timer doohickey.
bkd