ugh my microwave loses time at the briefest of electric hiccups and demands the date be inputed before the time. YOU DON"T NEED TO KNOW THE FUCKING DATE TO REHEAT MY FOOD! I mean the clocks a bit of a convenience but my toaster oven atleast remembers what the time last was. I eventually will do it but its been living groundhong day on november eleventh 2011.
The clock on the wall and watch, yeah, I actually use those for time. Everything else is more like, lol wtf does my coffee machine need the correct time for anyway
It's more for programming when to brew coffee in the morning than for telling time. Then you can wake up and get coffee without having to think about it. Not that it's hard, but I'm sure removing that one little task makes many people's mornings a lot easier.
With a regular drip coffee maker, a lot of people prep it before bed. Take a couple minutes to put the filter, coffee grounds, and water in the tank and set the timer so it is ready to go when they walk into the kitchen in the morning. Saves a couple minutes in the morning and can get that caffeine addiction hit right out the gate.
The stove I don't get, but the coffee machine needs it so that you can set it to run 5 minutes before your alarm goes off in the morning. Getting a coffee machine with a timer recently has revolutionized my morning TBH.
I get that can help some people if coffee is part of your morning ritual. I never did coffee as a first first thing, setting it up the machine and then going about getting ready was always how I've done it. But I totally get, if you need it first thing a timer is great.
In my life personally, still can't think of any appliance off the top of my head that needs to know what time it is.
All clocks in my home must be perfectly synced with atomic time. I will sit there and wait until the very last moment before hitting the button to confirm the time on the microwave/stove/wall clock/etc., so that it doesn't change over to the next minute until it's supposed to.
The irony is that the rest of my life is in complete chaos due to having untreated ADHD. Keeping accurate time is the one thing I care about having in order. Thankfully DST doesn't exist where I live so I rarely have to re-sync everything more than once every couple of years or so.
I really wish there was like a lil i2c port on the back of every device so you could just plug in a lil clock synchronizer thingy and it would tell the device what time it is. Like it probably wouldn't even cost that much to implement for the manufacturers. Standardizing on the connector and protocol would be a bitch tho
I have an appliance that resets the time to midnight when plugged in. I had an idea to connect a smart plug to it on a schedule to set the time automatically.
But have you considered that the action of changing the time requires you to make a choice, get up, shift context, actually do it, then shift back, tiring you out?
except my grandma's stove which has a broken handle and sensor so it just guesses if you're going forward or backwards and will randomly increment by like 15. I got it within 20 minutes then gave up because using pliers on the mangled remains of a stove knob was really annoying.
I don’t ever change my clocks, I just do mental math because my car clock also tends to drift roughly a minute a month so I’m used to it. Frankly I don’t even set most of them when the power goes out (phone and watch are right either way, bedroom and living room get set after outages).. but when one friend comes over they always set or change all my clocks for me because it drives them crazy..
Appliance clocks can be useful, but I typically don’t use the pre-set or programmed features anyway so meh. I think in 10 years I’ve used the scheduled bake on my oven once, and that’s about as much as I’ve used any of the program features on any appliances..
Luckily the only devices I have that need to be manually set to correct time are my cameras. And I set the time on them fairly frequently anyway because the clocks drift by half a minute every few months.
I mean, every other device with a clock that I have use NTP.
All of the cameras I have do have wifi/bluetooth, but at least as far my Nikon cameras go, last time I tried it using the app reliably on my phone was a bit of a hassle. Ricoh pocket camera was said to have an app but everyone complained how terrible it was so I didn't even bother to try it. Setting the time manually is just easier for all of the cameras.
The only camera that I have that had a reliable and easy app-based time sync was my GoPro. But then GoPro replaced their old app with this current nonsense. It just straight up doesn't pair my camera to my phone any more and pushes a subscription thing and I heard them talk about EOLing the camera ("excuse me, how the f do you 'EOL' a camera", asks this Nikon girl with a lens from the 1980s). So I had to figure out how to set the clock manually.
As long as they're only a minute or two off, I don't mind as much. Especially since I mostly use my desktop/laptop/phone/other Internet connected devices most of the time if I need accurate readings.