A show on TVB Jade just now showed a bunch of Internet connected household appliances.
A fridge with a LCD computer which lets you surf the net – for those mundane days when you are bored to death, it keeps you from opening the fridge at an interval of 4 times a minute, so you could sit in front of the fridge to surf the net all day instead of being at the desk.
A microwave oven hooked up to the net and let you select the recipe from the net and it would cook for you according to the selected recipe without the need to program it. Except that it wouldn’t pick out the right ingredients for you.
A washer also hooked up to the net for god knows what reason. Maybe so you could select the correct way to wash a particular piece of clothing – one individual piece at a time.
Pretty soon, there would be a bed hooked up to the net and let you do it with all those gorgeous models you so desired.
I can see the logic behind those so-called networked appliances. The condition of a typical Chinese kitchen may be too hash for anything more intelligent than a microwave oven, but I suppose eventually people would want to be able to load up a cookbook or the news on a computer while cooking or eating in the kitchen. Even a laptop takes up too much bench space, and you do not want it anywhere near the fire or water anyway, so building a computer in the fridge door is actually quite sensible.
That microwave oven with a computer is a cheaper version of the networked kitchen, for those who can’t afford the networked fridge, or don’t have the space for it. The designers deliberately handicapped the computer in the microwave (hey building an LCD panel in the door is not entirely out of the question is it, the damn thing looks like a TV anyway) so the gullible will buy the networked microwave oven AND the networked fridge. Something for everybody, and you can have it all if you want to.
As for the networked washing machine, there is always the Internet laundry hookup http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/1999/apr14/laundry.html. A more sophisticated model should be able to tell you that your favourite silk shirt was washed this morning with very hot water and sprun into something resembling seaweed. The maid would not be able to give you the excuse that she didn’t know where your silk shirt went.