I'm totally blind. Last year I bought an Instant Pot (multi-function pressure cooker) because it's well past time I start cooking for myself. There are numerous models available on Amazon, and I had no idea which ones would have tactile controls (I think this was before Amazon introduced their LLM thing, and I'm unsure if it would've helped in any case, or just hallucinated and caused me to buy something I couldn't use). Could've waited until I had a sighted person around or available online to look at pictures, but that's beside the point.

So I ended up spending an extra $50 for the "Pro Plus" model, which is WiFi-enabled. Apparently a previous model connected to phones directly via bluetooth (that model is no longer supported) and that's what I was hoping/expecting would be the case here as well. Unfortunately it only uses bluetooth for the initial setup. So, after creating yet another account with my real email address, registering the device, and waiting several minutes for who knows what (firmware download?) it's connected to the internet and seems to be controlled indirectly by the phone app through their API. So yeah, that company probably logs when, where, how, and maybe even what I cook, for how long, because why the hell not?

My point, though, is that for the moment, at least I can use this device. I'm well aware that this may not be the case long-term; the app has already had one update that made accessibility much worse, the company could stop supporting this model as well, or the internet could go down. The app and the device occasionally get out of sync, resulting in quite a bit of wasted time. But if I were using buttons on the device itself, the best I could hope for would be to memorize menus and the temperature dial and whatnot. In practice, that would probably be less tedious than having to pause while cooking, clean my hands and use my phone, but for now, at least theoretically, I can use all the features of the device via the app. Barring that, the logical solution would be to just connect directly via bluetooth, as was done previously, but then I wouldn't need to create an account, and we can't have that. Maybe there are/were better options on the market, but product listings seem to just say things like "WiFi-enabled", "App-Controled", or "IoT" without defining exactly what that means, and "customer support" will either be a chatbot that tells me what I want to hear and then claims to contact a human who will never get back to me, or a human following a script who doesn't understand my requirements even after I state them clearly, and probably doesn't even know what they're actually selling. Wonderful world we live in. Incidentally, I do actually need to get myself a dishwasher one of these days, and it's almost certainly going to be the same deal.