Alright, we have a fun one today. Daniel sent us a prompt that really gets into the weeds of human ingenuity, or perhaps the lack thereof. He wrote, let's talk about ten of the most absurd and unnecessary inventions of all time, especially from the last decade. Starting with number one, the egg cooker. He wants us to look at the engineering failures and the market misreads that lead to these things actually hitting the shelves.
Herman Poppleberry here, and Corn, I have been looking forward to this. There is something deeply revealing about a product that tries to solve a problem that does not exist. It is the ultimate collision of venture capital, boredom, and over-engineering. By the way, quick shout out to our script writer today, Google Gemini three Flash, for helping us organize this graveyard of bad ideas.
It is amazing how much money people will spend to avoid just using a pot of water. I mean, the egg cooker is the gateway drug to useless gadgets. You see it in the aisle, it is shaped like a plastic chicken, and you think, maybe my life is incomplete because my eggs are oval instead of whatever this machine does. Where do we even draw the line between a niche tool and a total absurdity?
That is the technical heart of the conversation. In engineering, we often talk about the utility to complexity ratio. A truly unnecessary invention is one where the added complexity—electronics, sensors, Wi-Fi, moving parts—actually decreases the reliability or increases the friction of a task that was already solved by a simple, low-tech method. We are talking about solutions in search of a problem, usually driven by this Silicon Valley ethos of solutionism. It is the belief that every aspect of human existence can and should be optimized by a digital interface.
Well, let's start with Daniel's first example, the egg cooker, but specifically the one he highlighted in his notes, the Rollie Vertical Eggmaster. Herman, have you seen this thing? It is like a Go-Gurt machine for breakfast. It is a vertical tube where you crack the egg in, and then after a few minutes, a cylindrical, rubbery log of egg slowly rises out of the top. It looks less like cooking and more like an architectural extrusion process.
The engineering there is actually quite primitive, which makes the result even more haunting. It is just a cylindrical heating element. But from a food science perspective, it is a disaster. When you fry an egg in a pan, you have surface area for Maillard reactions, you have texture control. The Rollie creates a uniform, steamed density that most critics described as a rubber popsicle. The market misread here was thinking that people hated the shape of eggs or the act of holding a spatula. In reality, they just created a device that is nearly impossible to clean because you cannot get a scrub brush down into that narrow, cooked-egg-residue-filled heat chamber.
It is the only kitchen appliance that makes you feel like you are watching a slow-motion horror film in your own kitchen. I remember the viral videos of it. People were captivated by the "unsettling" way the egg tube just... emerged. It is the perfect example of taking a three-minute task, making the result worse, and making the cleanup take ten minutes. But if you think the Eggmaster is bad, we have to talk about the heavyweight champion of Silicon Valley hubris, the Juicero.
The Juicero is a masterclass in over-engineering. This was a four hundred dollar Wi-Fi connected cold-press juicer. To give you an idea of the hardware inside, it had a custom-built motor and gear system capable of exerting eight thousand pounds of force. That is four tons of pressure. It was built like a piece of industrial manufacturing equipment. It had a built-in camera to scan QR codes on the proprietary juice packs to make sure the produce inside had not expired according to the company's database.
And the best part? If your Wi-Fi went down, you could not have juice. Your breakfast was held hostage by your router. I love the idea of a guy standing in his kitchen at seven in the morning, yelling at his internet provider because his kale-spinach blend won't authenticate.
That is exactly where the absurdity peaks. The second-order effect of that QR code system was that if the company went out of business—which they did—the hardware became a four hundred dollar paperweight because it could not "verify" the packs. But the real kicker, the moment that destroyed the company, was the Bloomberg report in twenty-seventeen. They showed that you could take those same proprietary packs, squeeze them with your bare hands, and get the juice out just as fast, and with nearly the same yield, as the four-ton-press machine.
It turns out human hands are a pretty good invention. Who knew? They raised a hundred and twenty million dollars. A hundred and twenty million! You could buy a lot of actual fruit for that. It shows this weird disconnect where investors see "hardware as a service" and get stars in their eyes, forgetting that the "service" has to actually be better than just... squeezing a bag.
It is a failure of technical empathy. The engineers were so focused on the precision of the press and the cloud integration that they never asked if the physical resistance of the product actually required that level of force. They built a tank to crack a walnut.
But Herman, why do these companies feel the need to add Wi-Fi to things that clearly don't need it? Is it just a data play?
Frequently, yes. If you can track when, where, and how often someone juices, you have a valuable dataset for targeted advertising or supply chain logistics. But more often, it is about "lock-in." By making the physical hardware dependent on a digital handshake, you force the consumer to stay within your ecosystem. You are not just selling a juicer; you are selling a subscription to the very air you breathe in your kitchen.
Speaking of things that do not need sensors, let's move to number eight on the list, the HAPIfork. This was a hundred-dollar Bluetooth-connected fork that would vibrate in your hand if it thought you were eating too fast. It tracked "fork servings" per minute. Herman, as someone who appreciates data, surely you see the value in a vibrating utensil?
Not in the slightest. The HAPIfork is a classic case of the "quantified self" trend going off a cliff. Technically, it used a capacitive sensor and a basic accelerometer to detect when the fork touched your mouth and how often it was moving. But think about the user psychology. If you are hungry and your fork starts buzzing like a disgruntled beehive every time you take a bite, you are not going to reflect on your satiety levels. You are going to throw the fork across the room. It adds a layer of digital nagging to one of the most basic human joys. Plus, the handle had to be massive to house the battery, the Bluetooth chip, and the vibration motor, making it feel like you were eating with a power tool.
It is the ultimate "first world problem" solution. "I am so successful that I have forgotten how to chew slowly, please make my silverware vibrate." I bet the data was useless, too. Does it know if I am eating a light salad or a heavy pasta? Does it account for the density of the bolus? Probably not. It is just a timer in your hand.
Precisely. It cannot distinguish between a bite of air and a bite of steak. It just measures the interval between contact points. It is a primitive metronome masquerading as a health coach. This is what happens when you try to apply a "one size fits all" algorithm to the highly subjective and biological process of digestion.
And that brings us to number seven, which is a personal favorite in the "why does this exist" category: the Bluetooth Toaster. Specifically, devices like the June Oven or the high-end smart toasters that started appearing around twenty-eighteen. These things have internal cameras and computer vision algorithms designed to identify the type of bread you put in and adjust the heating elements accordingly.
I have a vision for my life, Herman, and it involves my toaster having more computing power than the Apollo eleven moon lander. I want to be able to live-stream my white bread turning into toast from my office.
The latency issues alone are hilarious. There were reports of people waiting for their toaster to "update its firmware" before it would heat up. From an engineering standpoint, toasting is a simple radiant heat process. By adding a CMOS camera sensor inside a high-heat environment, you are just creating a massive point of failure. Heat is the enemy of electronics. So you are spending three hundred dollars on a device that is fundamentally less durable than a twenty-dollar pop-up toaster from a big-box store, all so you can see a "browning percentage" on your phone.
It is the illusion of control. We think that because we can measure it, we are doing it better. But at the end of the day, you just want a piece of toast. You don't need a data log of your crust's crispness. It is like we are trying to turn our kitchens into labs, but the scientists are all toddlers with credit cards.
Think about the thermodynamics involved. A traditional toaster uses nichrome wires. They are robust, they handle thousand-degree cycles daily, and they last decades. Now, introduce a delicate digital image sensor and a Wi-Fi antenna inches away from that heat source. It is an engineering nightmare. You are essentially building a suicide machine for a motherboard.
That leads us perfectly into the mid-point of our list, number six: the Wi-Fi Refrigerator. This has been a recurring joke since the early two-thousands, but Samsung and LG really pushed it in the last decade with things like the Family Hub. These have giant touchscreens on the door and internal cameras so you can "see inside" your fridge while you are at the grocery store.
Which sounds great until you realize the camera is fixed. It is like looking through a keyhole into a dark room full of half-empty mayo jars. If your milk is behind a head of lettuce, the AI is not going to find it.
We actually have data on this. The computer vision models in the twenty-twenty-three models still struggled to distinguish between a carton of orange juice and a carton of milk if the branding was similar. But the real absurdity is the software lifecycle. A good refrigerator should last fifteen to twenty years. A tablet or an integrated touchscreen is obsolete in four. You end up with a perfectly functional cooling appliance that has a laggy, un-patchable, insecure computer glued to the front of it. It is a security nightmare too—there have been documented cases of "smart" fridges being recruited into botnets for DDoS attacks.
Imagine your fridge being part of a global cyber warfare campaign against a mid-sized bank. That is the world we live in. "Sorry I'm late for work, my refrigerator was busy attacking the Pentagon." It is just so unnecessary. My fridge's job is to keep my beer cold, not to be a social media hub. Who is standing in their kitchen, staring at a fridge door to check Twitter?
It is the "hub" fallacy. Companies want to own the "center of the home," so they pick the biggest object in the kitchen and try to turn it into an iPad. It ignores how people actually use their space. If you want to check your calendar, you look at your phone. You don't walk over to the appliance that holds your leftovers to see if you have a meeting at two o'clock.
But wait, Herman, is there any legitimate engineering reason for the fridge to be connected? Like, maybe for power grid optimization or something?
There is a theoretical argument for "smart grid" integration where the fridge delays its compressor cycle during peak energy hours to save money. But you don't need a forty-inch touchscreen and a camera for that. You need a ten-cent micro-controller and a simple Zigbee radio. The rest is just theater. It is "innovation" for the sake of the brochure, not the user.
Now, let's talk about something a bit more intimate. Number five: the self-heating coffee mug, like the Ember. Now, I know people who love these, but when you look at the tech, it is a bit much, isn't it?
This is one where the product is actually quite popular, but the engineering is a struggle against physics. The Ember mug uses a series of sensors and a microprocessor-controlled heating element—a PID controller, basically—to keep your coffee at a precise temperature, say, a hundred and thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit. The problem is the energy density of batteries. To keep a liquid hot, you need a lot of juice. The battery only lasts about eighty minutes to two hours depending on the model.
So it is a mug that you have to charge. I have enough things in my life that need a USB-C cable. I don't want my coffee cup to be one of them. What happened to the thermos? What happened to the vacuum-insulated stainless steel mug that keeps things hot for six hours using nothing but the laws of thermodynamics?
That is the point. A twenty-dollar Yeti or Zojirushi mug uses a vacuum seal to prevent heat transfer. It is passive, it is indestructible, and it works better. The Ember is an active system, which means it is heavy, it has a shorter lifespan because the battery will eventually degrade, and it costs a hundred and fifty dollars. It is a solution for people who want to solve a physics problem with software. It is a prestige item. It says, "I am so busy and important that I cannot be bothered to drink my coffee before it cools down, but I also refuse to use a lid."
It is the "no-lid" tax. You pay a hundred and thirty dollars extra for the privilege of not having a plastic cap on your cup. And if you forget to put it on the charging coaster, you just have a very heavy, lukewarm ceramic cup. It is a gadget for the sake of having a gadget.
And think about the cleaning. You cannot put these in the dishwasher. The heat and the water pressure would destroy the seals and fry the internal circuitry. So, to enjoy your "high-tech" coffee, you have to revert to the low-tech labor of hand-washing a delicate electronic device every single morning. It is a net loss of time.
And if you think a smart mug is over the top, look at number four: the Kérastase Hair Coach. This was a "smart hairbrush" developed with Withings. It had a microphone to listen to the sound of your hair breaking, an accelerometer to track your brushing patterns, and conductivity sensors to tell if your hair was wet or dry.
Wait, a microphone? To listen to your hair? Herman, I am a sloth, I don't have a lot of hair to worry about, but even I know that if my hair is breaking, I can probably see it in the brush. I don't need a digital eavesdropper listening to my split ends.
It is the "Quantified Self" gone mad. The app would give you a "hair quality score." Think about the engineering resources that went into that. You have to train a machine learning model on the acoustic signature of hair snapping versus just the sound of bristles moving through tangles. It is a monumental amount of work for a metric that no one was asking for. It retailed for around two hundred dollars. It is the perfect example of a company having a sensor—in this case, a microphone and an accelerometer—and desperately trying to find a new place to stick it.
"Sir, we have ten thousand surplus microphones." "Stick them in the hairbrushes! Tell them the brush can hear their follicles crying!" It is predatory, really. It plays on people's insecurities about their appearance by wrapping it in "data-driven" pseudoscience.
And the most absurd part is the "conductivity sensor" to tell if your hair is wet. Corn, have you ever needed a smartphone app to tell you if your hair was wet? You just... touch it. Or you remember that you just stepped out of the shower. It is the automation of the obvious. It is an insult to human perception.
Speaking of insults to human perception, we have to look at number three on Daniel's list: the AI-Powered Ice Maker. Now, we have talked about the "quiet ice maker" before in passing, but the new wave of these things is wild. They use acoustic sensors to monitor the "clink" of the ice to determine if the nuggets are the right consistency. They have "smart scheduling" so the machine knows to start making ice two hours before you usually get home from work based on your phone's GPS data.
Because heaven forbid I have to wait ten minutes for ice. Or, you know, use an ice tray. Or just leave the machine on "auto." Why does my ice maker need to know my commute? Is it going to start judging me if I stop at a bar on the way home? "Oh, you're at the pub again? Well, no ice for you then. I'm going into sleep mode."
It is the unnecessary collection of data. There is no mechanical reason for an ice maker to be "smart." It is a refrigeration cycle and a mold. By adding AI and GPS tracking, you are just adding failure points. If the server goes down, does your ice melt? If there is a bug in the app, do you get a flood in your kitchen? We are taking solved mechanical problems and making them dependent on a cloud infrastructure that might not exist in five years.
It is the "brittleness" of modern tech. My grandfather's ice maker lasted thirty years because it was just a motor and a cooling coil. These new ones are basically laptops that make frozen water. It is a bad trade.
And let's talk about that "clink" sensor. In a kitchen, there are dozens of sounds—dishes clattering, people talking, the radio. How does the machine distinguish between a perfect ice cube falling and a spoon hitting a plate? It requires a sophisticated Digital Signal Processor. You are paying for a high-end audio engineer's work just to ensure your ice is "crunchy."
That brings us to number two, which is truly a masterpiece of the bizarre: the Kohler Numi two point zero Smart Toilet. Corn, this thing costs thirteen thousand dollars.
Thirteen thousand dollars? For a place to sit? Does it do my taxes while I am occupied? Does it give me a promotion?
It has built-in surround sound speakers, ambient mood lighting that you can sync to your music, a heated seat, an automatic lid, a built-in bidet with adjustable temperature and pressure, and—this is the best part—integrated Amazon Alexa. You can literally talk to your toilet. You can ask it to "set the mood" with colored lights while you are doing your business.
"Alexa, play 'Ring of Fire' and turn the lights to deep red." I mean, who is the target market here? People who are so afraid of being alone with their thoughts for two minutes that they need a voice-activated light show in the bathroom? It is the peak of luxury absurdity. The idea of "firmware updates" for your toilet is where I check out of society. Imagine getting a notification on your phone: "Your toilet is currently restarting to install security patches. Please do not use the restroom for the next fifteen minutes."
There is a serious point there, though. These high-end "smart" fixtures often use proprietary valves and electronic controllers. If a sensor fails in ten years and Kohler has moved on to the Numi five point zero, you might not be able to fix your thirteen-thousand-dollar toilet. You have turned a piece of permanent home infrastructure into a disposable consumer electronic. It is the opposite of sustainable engineering.
It is a monument to ego. "My waste deserves a light show." But Herman, what about the hygiene aspect? Some people argue that the touchless lid and bidet are actually better for health.
To an extent, yes. But you can get a high-quality bidet attachment for fifty dollars that uses water pressure—no electricity required. You don't need Alexa to help you wash. The Numi isn't about hygiene; it's about the "gamification" of the bathroom. It's about turning a biological necessity into a "user experience."
It is just... it is too much. But we have arrived at number one. And this one is a classic that Daniel pointed out, the one that really encapsulates the "why" of it all: the Eddington Egg Cuber.
Now, this is interesting because it is not high-tech. It is a plastic press from the "as seen on TV" era that has persisted into the modern day. You take a hot, hard-boiled egg, put it in this square plastic box, and screw down a press to force the egg into a cube shape. Then you have to refrigerate it for an hour while it is under pressure.
An hour! To make an egg square. Why? Why would anyone want a square egg? Are people building walls out of them? Are they playing Tetris with their breakfast?
The marketing says it makes them "stackable" and "easier to slice for sandwiches." But think about the physics. An egg is naturally one of the strongest shapes in nature—the arch of the shell, the rounded interior. When you force it into a cube, you are compromising the structural integrity of the whites. It becomes dense and unappealing. It is a solution to a problem—eggs rolling away—that could be solved by just... putting the egg on a plate.
Or cutting it in half! If you cut an egg in half, it has a flat side. It stays put. We have invented a plastic machine to do what a knife does instantly, except our machine takes sixty minutes and makes the food taste worse. It is the perfect microcosm of every invention on this list. It is the triumph of "could we" over "should we."
That is the common thread. Whether it is a thirteen-thousand-dollar toilet or a five-dollar egg cuber, they all stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of value. We mistake "novelty" for "utility." In engineering, we call this "feature creep" when it happens in a project, but in the consumer market, it is more like "gadget creep." We are so bored with the things that work that we start breaking them just so we can "fix" them with a new product.
It makes me wonder about the second-order effects. Think about all the plastic and rare earth minerals and energy that went into making a hundred million Juiceros or smart hairbrushes that are now sitting in landfills because the apps don't work anymore. We are literally turning the planet's resources into "smart" trash.
The e-waste aspect is the most depressing part of the absurdity. A mechanical egg cuber is just a piece of plastic. A Juicero is a complex assembly of lithium-ion batteries, circuit boards, and high-grade aluminum. When that company folded, all of that embodied energy became waste. We are sacrificing long-term sustainability for the short-term dopamine hit of a "connected" lifestyle.
So what is the takeaway for our listeners? How do we avoid being the people who buy the thirteen-thousand-dollar Alexa toilet?
I think it comes down to a simple heuristic: the "Failure Mode Test." Before you buy a "smart" version of a "dumb" object, ask yourself: if the Wi-Fi goes out, if the battery dies, or if the company's servers disappear tomorrow, does this object still perform its primary function as well as the non-smart version? If the answer is no—if your juicer won't juice or your fork won't... fork—then you are looking at an absurd invention.
I like that. The "Does it still work as a rock?" test. If a product can't survive without a cloud connection, it is not a tool, it is a subscription you can't cancel. And for the engineers out there, maybe the goal shouldn't be to make things "smart," but to make them "invisible." The best technology is the stuff you don't have to think about. My favorite invention is the door hinge. It works every time, it doesn't need an app, and it doesn't listen to my hair snapping.
There is actually a growing movement called "Dumb Tech" or "Low-Tech" where designers are focusing on high-quality, repairable, non-connected items. It is a reaction to this last decade of absurdity. People are realizing that having a "smart home" often just means having a home where you have to spend your Saturday morning troubleshooting your lightbulbs.
I am leading that movement by accident just by being lazy. My house is very "dumb," and it is great. I don't have to talk to my toilet, and my eggs are oval, just as nature intended.
It is about reclaiming your cognitive load. Every "smart" device you add to your life is another thing you have to manage, update, and worry about. There is a profound freedom in a device that just does its job and then gets out of the way. Think about the humble pencil. It has a built-in "undo" button in the form of an eraser, it never needs a software patch, and it works in a vacuum. That is peak engineering.
Well, this has been a journey through the hall of shame. From egg tubes to bone-conduction lollipops—which, by the way, we didn't even get to spend enough time on. A lollipop that plays music in your head when you bite it. Who asked for that? "I want to eat a snack, but I also want a low-quality audio experience vibrating through my jawbone." It is madness.
It is the ultimate unitasker. A nine-dollar, one-time-use piece of trash. It is the perfect end-point for a society that has run out of real problems to solve. We have moved from "how do we get to the moon" to "how do we make a lollipop play a jingle." It’s actually called the "Amusemints" line, and they use the same tech as high-end hearing aids, but for the purpose of selling sugar to children.
It's the "Black Mirror" version of a candy store. "Eat this candy and hear the corporate anthem in your skull!" It’s a fun fact that actually makes me want to go live in a cave.
On that note, I think we have sufficiently roasted the inventors of the last decade. Thanks to Daniel for the prompt—he really knows how to pick the weird stuff. It is always a pleasure to dive into the "why" behind the "what."
It really is. And thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, for keeping the show running. Also, a big thanks to Modal for providing the GPU credits that power our AI collaboration. We couldn't do this without that serverless horsepower.
We should also mention that if anyone listening actually owns an Egg Cuber, please send us a photo of the resulting egg. We need to know if it’s as depressing in person as it is in the brochures.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you enjoyed our look at the world's most useless gadgets, consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It actually helps us more than you'd think in reaching new people who also appreciate a good technical deep dive into absurdity.
You can find all our episodes and the RSS feed at myweirdprompts dot com. We will be back next time with whatever strange topic Daniel throws our way.
Until then, keep your tech dumb and your eggs oval. See ya.
Bye.
