2/2
3. The Vibrating Fork (Hapifork)
Price: $99 The Superior Alternative: A stainless steel fork ($2) and basic etiquette.
A fork designed to help you lose weight by eating slower.
The "Smart" Feature: It contains a motion sensor that tracks how many bites you take per minute. If you eat too fast, the fork vibrates in your mouth to tell you to slow down.
The Stupid Reality: It has to be charged. If you run out of battery, you just have a very heavy, thick fork. Also, users reported that if you "scoop" your food (like peas) rather than "stab" it, the fork doesn't register the bite, incentivising you to eat like a shovel to trick the algorithm.
Eating like a peasant? Shovelling the grub in there like a pig at a trough? The Hapifork brings you all the joy of being hit on the head with a guide to table manners by a Victorian mistress, all for the low cost of $99. It is essentially a vibrator for your teeth that rattles your dentures when you enjoy your meal too much.
4. The Egg Tray with an App (Quirky Egg Minder)
Price: $50 The Superior Alternative: The cardboard carton the eggs come in (Free) + Eyes.
Numerate enough to earn currency to purchase useless goods, but too lazy to count to twelve? The Quirky Egg Minder is the kitchen egg accountant you never thought you needed.
The "Smart" Feature: It connects to Wi-Fi to tell you how many eggs you have left while you are at the store. It has LED lights next to each egg to tell you which one is the "oldest."
The Stupid Reality: It turned a glance into a tech support issue. Most people eat eggs in the order they grab them, rendering the LED "aging" system useless. If the battery died or the Wi-Fi disconnected, it often reported you had zero eggs when you had a full tray. It solved the non-existent problem of "egg blindness" by introducing the very real problem of "connectivity failure."
5. The Hairbrush with a Microphone (Kérastase Hair Coach)
Price: $200 The Superior Alternative: A comb (invented approx. 5500 B.C. in Ancient Persia).
The "Smart" Feature: It has a microphone that listens to the sound of your hair breaking. It also has an accelerometer to tell you if you are brushing too hard.
The Stupid Reality: It requires you to sync your hair-brushing data to an app. It "gamifies" brushing your hair, giving you a "hair quality score."
It must be noted that the "hair quality score" has nothing to do with the actual biological state of your keratin; it is simply a game score. It effectively turns your morning routine into a round of Guitar Hero for your scalp, where you must hit the strokes perfectly to avoid a low score, only the prize is anxiety rather than applause.
Archaeologists date the first combs to 5500 B.C. For over 7,000 years, humans—from Cleopatra to the architects of Ayurvedic medicine—managed to maintain their hair without a microphone. We could make a joke about the unruliness of Medusa’s hair here, but a microphone on a hairbrush wouldn’t do much for her split roots; every time a viper struck the bristles, the accelerometer would trigger a "Brushing Force Warning."
The Verdict
We are filling our homes with landfills-in-waiting. We are trading simple mechanics for complex, fragile software.
If a normal kettle breaks, you can still boil water in it on a stove. If a smart kettle breaks, it’s a paperweight that might be DDOS-ing a server. Remember that the next time AWS-East goes down.
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