The first thing that struck me about the mass-market microwave that connects to the internet is how peculiar the machine's diet is.
The GE Smart Countertop Microwave with Scan-to-Cook Technology is, despite the mouthful of a name, fairly unassuming to look at. It's nearly identical to the slightly tinier, hardworking GE JES1072SHSS that I own. Yet this new, .9 cubic-foot, 900-watt microwave comes packed with high-tech features: You can use an app to scan the bar code on the back of your Hot Pockets to set the cooking time on the microwave. If you've got an Amazon Dot, Echo, or Show, you can do important things like turn it on and off or thaw chicken with your voice.
It’s not just Hot Pockets. A GE rep forwarded an impossibly long list of 7,496 barcodes that it could scan—Healthy Choice Simply Steamers Beef Chimichurri, Guinness Irish Nachos, Jimmy Dean Pancakes & Sausage On A Stick, Totino's Pizza Sticks, DiGiorno Pizza Buns, DiGiorno Pizza & Wyngz. Oddly, frozen vegetables hadn't been prioritized for the first round of scan-ables. I could search the spreadsheet for “pizza” and the word would came up 426 times in the food name column alone. But fresh veggies? Not yet an option.
By chance, at the time I had the microwave in my test kitchen, I was reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars and came across a passage about the role of machines in our lives.
"The machine is not an end. An airplane is not an end: it is a tool," he writes. Tools are created to allow you to reach greater goals, and machines should not distract from this pursuit. In fact, you should barely notice that they're there. With this in mind, I was...